Robert Richards wrote: >In reality, I finished that ELA (valued at over $8M with a >1.5M breather) and spent all but $27K of that $1.5M and did >not go over the cap.
That's about 1.8% on the under side according to my math, and that's very, very good. I have no idea what Robert's organization's contract was, but I have to assume they would have done very nicely with the sort of numbers Robert describes. However, even if you're not as good as Robert -- even if you deviate under or over by a rather considerable amount -- you're still very likely to do well. In my view if you can reasonably predict a somewhat conservative (but not too conservative!) utilization forecast which includes growth -- most organizations can do that -- "talk with your IBM representative." And, in my view, be sure to aim at least some of those benefits back onto your zEnterprise, and be sure to handle any internal cost accounting correctly and without fostering perverse incentives. Note that the "without...perverse incentives" comment also means not resorting to unnatural acts to fit within a particular capacity, because that usually only squeezes the balloon in perverse ways. Sure, optimize and tune everywhere, starting with the most financially impactful stuff which may not be your mainframe. I hope we all understand by now that marginal total costs on mainframes are comparatively much lower than the initial ones -- the IBM-related costs, anyway, and usually the others as well. The cost curves are truly very curvy. That's not as true elsewhere, typically. Adding a couple more non-mainframe cores to save a couple MIPS is generally a very bad financial proposition and increasingly so over time it seems, and it may not even accomplish that minus couple MIPS anyway. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
