Gary Green said > SIAC is migrating 1600 MIPS from the mainframe to save money. > > http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid80_gc > i1254860,00.html
And Bob Richards asked > > I wonder if they will reveal the costs of extra hw/sw for > high-availability and business continuance associated with this > migration. Probably not. Well that's a fine question. Here's what I think, based on just a little bit of experience :0) with z customers... There are a small number of customers at the high end for whom the System z and parallel sysplex is the only alternative. Those are the customers who spend the time and effort to configure coupling facilities, data sharing and all of the other dozens of failure avoidance/failure mitigation features of the platform. Those (high-end) customers are NOT migrating away from the platform, but even they are being very judicious about new work that goes on the box(es). It has become a pure cost containment exercise for most - see my last paragraph below. The rest of the customers, by-and-large, have not bought into the parallel sysplex story and they still run their systems like its 1985. The only reasonable conclusion you can draw is that their availability requirements really aren't all that demanding. In effect, they don't think its worth spending the extra money and resources to get true high availability and disaster survivability. Now we could all argue over whether that's really wise, but the fact remains that those customers have made a business judgement. And those are the same customers who are, little by little, deserting the platform. For customers with less demanding requirements, there are plenty of alternatives and the fact that so many have switched and NOT gone back ought to be sobering to this community. On a slightly off-topic note, there is a large body of evidence that MOST of the IT budget (75-85%!!) is consumed in just keeping the lights on. There is almost nothing left over for either new development, or for exploitation of feature function, even if that would ultimately save money. That has become the dominant issue for most customers and probably drives the behaviors we are all seeing. They may be nuts, but they're not stupid :-) CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
