-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Craddock, Chris Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 12:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Just another example of mainframe costs.
> > I bought an external 500GB USB2 backup disk for a home system > > yesterday for a couple of hundred bucks. > You are not doing an apples-to-apples comparison. Yes I do know the difference and I know it's not an apples to apples comparison. The point is that the drives for these cheap and cheerful PC wing-dings are the same and you can actually buy out of the box RAID solutions for not a lot of dough. There is some uniqueness in the mf solution, but the raw hardware cost doesn't go close to explaining the price customers pay. Can you say gouging boys and girls? <SNIP> Perhaps it is gouging, perhaps not. The RVA in question must meet the FICON/ESCON protocols. It must also do error correction/detection. It must also support multi-pathing, controller behavior, etc. All of those things have some costs. That's why SCSI devices cost more than [E]IDE (or so the disk vendors tell me). And going back to the squatty box boys/girls ROFLMAO routine, the next time you do a D/R test, who actually recovers? And if they do recover, do they recover at a known point in time (synchronized with the other platforms so that you don't have a secondary disaster)? Or did they say something about how they run 24x7 while the mainframe has to have a batch window? [Which happens to be a design choice, not specifically a mainframe forced behavior.] Don't forget to remind management when a squatty box fails in the middle of the day that the mainframe is STILL running. And if you ever have to have a power supply replaced on the mainframe (concurrent maint), don't forget to remind management of that fact -- NO Down Time (what the "Z" is supposed to refer to is Zero down time if I remember correctly). And like I used to say when I was still doing systems programming for a living -- The mainframe's biggest attraction is BOREDOM. It is a tool that does what it needs to do, all day with very little maintenance. The biggest attraction for the squatty boxes is their ability to generate excitement with NO WARNING. Right now, even as I type this, one of my co-workers is experiencing that excitement. Not only did a boot drive fail, but the power supply burned up right after swapping drives! And no, the problem child machine did not have RAID. So what's worth more to a business, a cheap box that fails with no warning, or a more expensive box that runs for 3-5 years with PLANNED down time? Later, Steve Thompson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
