Just an additional comment to the past discussions.
I agree that a big MF installation (e.g. running a number of sysplexes
of z10 EC CECs or z196 with a number of say 10 to 50 LPARs) has in fact
no reason to migrate to Intel based machines.
I was working for a Bavarian manufacturing company as a contractor since
1995+ and this company had the serious plan to get rid of their
mainframe zoo (several 3090s 600J at that time).
Ten years later they cancelled this plan after having learned that the
migration would become too costly. Now the MF is in its ancestral place
there with a slightly changed role as an application server for legacy
programs and a DB2 machine.
In my opinion this was an example how clever IBM handles its customers:
Big installations operate plenty of application programs that represent
an asset of billions of € (or $). In the case of the Bavarian
manufacturer the number was about 100,000 homegrown programs.
The customer’s method of decision, if only taken into account the TOCs
(mainly license fees on the MF site and migration effort to switch to
the other architecture), is known by IBM, of course.
So, since IBM wants its customers to stay with the MF, they calculate
that part of the costs they can influence – the license fees - according
to the simple rule to make it a bit more costly to migrate than to stay
– quite simple.
OTOH, if you look at the global big new companies (e.g. Google, Amazon,
Facebook), nobody of them is running MF systems because these companies
are not captivated by legacy systems.
Instead, Google (as known to the public) is running a cluster version of
Linux based on commodity machines, Amazon is a pioneer in cloud
computing (see:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/08/15/amazon-direct-connect-comes-to-new-york/)
, and Facebook’s architecture is described here:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/27/facebook-server-storage-designs/
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