On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:17:24 -0700, Ed Gould wrote: >Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/neon_zprime_mainframe/ >Neon revs cost-cutting mainframewarezPrime risks Big Blue ire >By Timothy Prickett MorganPosted in Servers, 8th July 2009 22:25 GMT > >With around 10,000 footprints worldwide, maybe somewhere around $4bn >in mainframe sales a year, and heaven only knows how many billions per >year in monthly rentals for mainframe operating systems, databases, >and middleware, IBM is very protective of its mainframe franchise >monopoly. > My understanding is that some of the earliest antitrust legslation was targeted at railroads, natural monopolies, forbidding practices such as charging higher freight rates on routes where the railroad had a monopoly, and lower rates where the railroad had competition. The railroads were required to set uniform rates based on mileage.
>And products like zPrime - while technically doable and presumably >legally defensible - strike fear into the hearts of IBM's mainframers. >We've seen this before. IBM put governors on the performance of green- >screen RPG and COBOL workloads on its AS/400 proprietary minicomputers >in the late 1990s, and a few different clever software developers >figured out ways around the governors. This resulted in much >consternation at IBM, legal battles with the governor buster, and >eventually a settlement in the courts where the terms of the settlement >were not divulged. It's widely believed that IBM gained all rights to >the tool in exchange for cash. (You can see the whole saga here > http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh112105-story01.html ). > >Because mainframe >shops pay the highest prices in the world for hardware and software - >think 2000 prices for hardware and something like 1990 prices for >software, and I am only half-joking - Big Blue has been tweaking things >here and there over the years to try to make the mainframe more >competitive. Different classes of machines have been given different >pricing, such as lower software fees for entry mainframes a few years >back. Then customers were given metered pricing options for monthly >software rentals, based on a metric that IBM calls Metered Software >Units, or MSUs, which allowed them to pay for software on a >capacity-over-time basis instead of on a per-machine or per-engine >basis.In 2000, just after Big Blue caught the Linux bug, IBM decided >to designate some of the mainframe engines in a processor complex as >specialty engines, including the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), >which turns a standard mainframe engine into one that can only run >Linux and workloads that have been ported to the mainframe variants >of Linux. (And, as of last November ( > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/24/ibm_authorizes_mainframe_opensolaris/ > ), >OpenSolaris and its "Sirius" mainframe port can go on the > IFLs). >The IFL has been very popular at IBM mainframe shops, and has been >instrumental in the stabilization of mainframe revenues and MIPS shipments. ... Sounds familiar. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
