Long, Long time ago in a valley far, far away - Sun Microsystems was using an Amdahl processor running MVS for all virtually everything to run the business. One of the C-level people decided that it was ridiculous to be on an Amdahl instead of their own product. After many months of development/testing/etc and millions of dollars, they converted to their own product and immediately took well over 30 day outage trying to get stable, in the process of loosing order and order and order...
The part that NO ONE considers is that a small handful of support, operations, applications people can run a large mainframe. Whereas, a commodity computer environment exponentially costs in human resources to support the same given work load. SSA is a good example. Virtually everything you see on the SSA website and their offices reside on TWO ... TWO ... z/Arch machines that back each other up ... about 50K MSUs worth. And there are only two SYSTEMS PROGRAMMERS to manage the OS. BTW When the FAA switch from IBMs to commodity PCs ... remember that protracted outage that messed up the US airspace ... Primary source of data in the world ( 40%+ ) is on an IBM machine .... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
