Some markings and indentations upthread ascribe comments to me that I did not make.
There's no doubt that IBM is some way down the road with an emulation product - there are far too many rumours coming out of the wainscotting for it not to be true. Those rumours, however, have very little substance. What has most interested me is the speed with which this beast has appeared. If we are looking at the end of a long project, then the first part of it was done under much more effective security that ever before seen. I'm sceptical. I think we're looking at the results of a relatively short-term project. This might make a great deal of sense if we postulate zArchitecture on the iSeries. Crucially, both iSeries and zSeries are EBCDIC. So we might imagine an application running on an iSeries emulating a zSeries instruction flow including the IPL and execution of z/OS, but the native facilities of the underlying iSeries OS being used for I/O. This is significantly different to, e.g., FLEX-ES where a separate application in the same system performs I/O management tasks. We're in for some changes over the next few months. I don't doubt that Platform Solutions' backers had another milestone defined before the end of 2005, and we haven't yet heard whether that was successful. Several people have opened up ideas on positioning for software charges - some have said that IBM has opened the floodgates with its technology premium. So if IBM offers a 10% improvement in the MSU/MIPS ratio with each generation, based on its technological improvements, what's to stop someone else offering a 90% improvement if they can base that claim on a greater price/performance improvement in their hardware? Another idea being bounded about is basing the performance of a "declared" system on an Amdahl comparator rather than an IBM one? An Omniprise, for example. What happens if Hewlet-Packard - with comprehensive patent license exchange agreements with IBM - purchases Platform Solutions? -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
