----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Rowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:50 AM Subject: Re: PSI MIPS (was: Links to decent 'why the mainframe thrives' article)
> Well of course, Dean, Timothy makes perfect sense. You should believe everything your vendors say, without any verification, right? ;-) > > At the last shop I worked at (a government shop), they had a study done to evaluate what platform they should be running on, and the study proposed Oracle running on Sun servers. I later found out (to my utter lack of surprise), that the study had been done free of charge. I will give you exactly one guess who it was that did the study gratis. Of course, the conclusion was the one that was desired by those that asked for the study (upper management), who are convinced that the mainframe is obsolete and expensive. The "study" is being used as a justification to spend 10's of millions of dollars to replace the mainframe. > > Of course, the complete lack of public benchmarks for the mainframe make it impossible to refute the performance conclusions of the so called study, so I think it actually hurts IBM, even if the benchmarks would not be in favor of the mainframe. IBM's refusal to submit (or allow others to do so) mainframe benchmark scores allows others to make wild claims about how slow mainframes are, without any way to refute such claims, leaving us (the mainframe proponents) completely unarmed. > This is actually sort of how I view it. Even though stating that the lack of performance numbers means it must be slower is a fallacy, many people *do* fall victim to such fallacies, even otherwise intelligent people. Marketing people are obviously very good at pointing at the positives of their own product, while highlighting the negatives of the competition - and why they make the 'big bucks' (or at least, get the big budget). For example, let us consider the concept that performance does not matter on the mainframe to be absolutely true and valid. So what does it matter then? I can think of one reason - and it has to do with business. What customers generally want is a good price/performance ratio. Benchmarks like TPC-C provide such a figure. Once you get into that type of competitive environment, your profits run the risk of being squeezed as the competitors start pointing to your price/performance and ignore the other factors. So, from a marketing perspective, I would not expect IBM (nor any IBM employee) to support the idea of having a benchmark comparing the performance of mainframe processors to others (including their own POWER). OTOH, people *do* have a perception that the mainframe is slower. Therefore, not addressing it allows the marketing people from the competition to take advantage of that perception. So, while your profits remain high your installed base shrinks. The way that is being addressed is to offer specialty engines, which have successfully increased the installed base - but as you can see, those offerings have to be at a low price to compete with those they are directly compared against. So, I understand IBM's situation, but as a 'techie' I just want to be able to make the comparisons, as do other techies when discussing issues with their decision makers. Regards, Dean ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
