Sorry - no zSeries content. The idea of an IBM platform acting as a consolidation target for n x 100 Windows servers is not new, nor is it IBM's.
Perhaps a little more than a decade ago, Microsoft (and perhaps involving billg in person) realized that a very small but not ignorable fraction of their user base had scalability requirements that vastly exceeded what Intel and the server builders could cope with. We're talking about a fraction of 1% of the Windows NT server installed base at that time. Every now and then some new business gets it right and goes gangbusters. There were some very fundamental discussions, one problem being the disconnect between Microsoft and Intel. Yes, the large enterprise market is valuable, but most of that value is in software revenue - invisible to Intel. But graphics performance was - at the time - a lucrative market. This was at a time when Hercules graphics cards were going into Intel-based systems at twice the price of the Intel chip. If you were Intel, where would you spend the money - MP efficiency or graphics acceleration? So there was a discussion (fact, not hypothesis) between IBM and Microsoft about the idea of hosting a massively scalable Windows NT environment on IBM hardware. My information is that the discussions ended amicably after best efforts on both sides when it proved that IBM's hardware development lead times could not be reconciled with the volatilty of Microsoft's APIs. At the time. Microsoft was exploiting API volatility as a competitive tool - IBM would have found it relatively easy to implement any given state of the NT API set, but staying up to date would have placed impossible loads on IBM's support structure. Enterprises have different support requirements to mom-and-pop. C'est la vie. But it wasn't zSeries - it was iSeries. Actually (heresy - I shall be beaten up) much more scalable. (Heading for the hills.) P.S. (before this ships out) To pick up on Tom Moulder: I'm not aware of _ANY_ involvement of FLEX or Fundamental Software in the _IBM_ versus _PSI_ lawsuit. Indeed, I've commented several times on the deafening silence from Fremont (and Ann Arbor). Hercules references are a bad joke in this context and I just wish people would GROW UP and stop making them. A lot more care is needed, guys. -- 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
