1. I missed this one last week, but it's interesting. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), including mainframe Linux, is now available for ordering through IBM:
http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/2/897/ENUS206-172/ENUS206-172.PDF Linux itself is free software, remember. (It's perfectly legal for you to install and run Linux on your mainframe without asking anyone for permission.) You're buying Novell support using an IBM part number, and that might be helpful to some procurement departments. 2. On July 25, 2006, IBM announced Value Unit-based pricing for nearly its entire Passport Advantage (distributed) software portfolio. Details here: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/4/897/ENUS206-154/ENUS206-154.PDF This one is quite interesting. IBM now assigns a number (Value Units) to each distributed server processor core. Then software is priced based on the proxy number, not on the number of cores or chips. None of the software pricing changed with this announcement, but in the future it effectively could. Here's how the numbers are assigned today (per core) as the starting baseline: All single core processors: 100 AMD Opteron dual core: 50 Intel Xenon dual core: 50 IBM POWER5 dual core: 100 HP PA-RISC dual core: 100 Sun UltraSPARC IV dual core: 100 IBM PowerPC dual core: 50 IBM POWER5 QCM dual core: 50 Sun UltraSPARC T1 quad/hexa/octi core: 30 Intel Itanium dual core: 100 IBM System z IFL or engine: 100 Everything else: 100 As you can see, with 100 Value Units = 1 old "processor" license, i.e. each Value Unit = 1% of the processor license price, none of the pricing changed today. That's very good news for System z IFLs, I'd say. (Some people have expressed fear that IBM would "come to its senses" with IFL software pricing. It has. No change. Keep enjoying.) One possible side effect is that, at least in the future, software pricing should tend to reward code efficiency and virtualization and make even more costly huge numbers of non-virtualized distributed servers. Unlike some other software vendors there's no cap on the number of virtualized servers that you can run -- virtualization is moot in terms of IBM software licensing costs. Considering that IBM has really, really good virtualization technologies (IFLs being the pinnacle in the non-z/OS world), this makes perfect sense. I suppose this is also good for the planet, (more electricity for your servers and you'll probably pay more for software, too). This is actually a simpler pricing schedule than before because it eliminates some wacky fractional licenses, especially for Sun, that were painful to track for everyone involved. I guess you could say that even Intel processors now get MSU ratings, more or less. We live in interesting times. As a reminder, I don't speak for IBM. Which should be obvious by now. :-) - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries Tokyo (Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific) E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
