> For mission critical workloads there is a move back to private
datacenters.
Good to hear.
For several years, I worked for a data protection company (subsidiary of
several "parent" companies). Great stuff. Phil Smith's z/OS product is
the top of the line in that portfolio.
It always made me nervous when customers put too much of their stuff
into the cloud. (Or anyplace off-site from systems THEY CONTROL.)
The product was/is a STRONG cryptographic solution, so if the data was
protected before hitting the cloud, NO PROBLEM.
It was when they put the encryption/decryption services into the cloud
that I wanted to tell them "STOP! DON'T!".
But ... the customer is always right ... or so they tell me.
-- R; <><
On 10/31/25 10:33 AM, Matt Hogstrom wrote:
One final thought from me.
Major companies that went to the cloud have many other companies that get
hit when an issue impacts them from a Cloud provider; plausible
deniability or shared blame or whatever terms you like. For mission
critical workloads there is a move back to private datacenters. That said,
z/OS has to support seamlessly new runtimes at a reasonable cost or what is
there is what is there.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 10:10 AM Gary Eheman <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:15:41 -0500, Enzo Damato <
[email protected]> wrote:
(snip)
While previously, any company of decent size that wanted reliability and
performance over a certain threshold would have to hit up their local
IBM sales representative, this changed with the PC revolution around
1995ish, when Linux or Windows NT combined with high speed networking
made it possible to achieve decent reliability and
decent performance for a fraction of the cost. Critically, they also
allowed you to start small! This
(
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg
)
was google's first server rack! The discussion about weather or not
google would run better on a mainframe is pointless. Google's first
servers were a bunch of home brew computers attached to a surplus rack.
In no universe would they ever have been able to afford a mainframe, and
the IBM sales rep would have likely laughed them out of the room.
(snip)
Enzo Damato
When I saw the 1995 time frame mentioned, I decided to offer up some
relevant history that occurred before Enzo's birth. I moved over to IBM's
PC Server division from the mainframe technical marketing support side in
1994 to work as part of a team on bringing a hybrid server solution that
included the P/390 emulator card (still in development) to market so that
more PC Server hardware could be sold (since that was the primary goal of
the PC Server division). A simplified summary of how things went down...
"Stay in your lane PC Servers! We own the mainframe market," said S/390
hardware division.
"Show us your less than 10 MIP strategy," said my PC Server bosses to them.
"We don't have one."
"Ok. Then kindly step out of the way so we can sell more PC Servers."
"But we control all the mainframe software you need," said the software
division.
"Would you like to protect software revenue from software that you already
own?"
"Yes," said the software division.
"Then how about we work together on a solution?"
And the result in 1995 was the PC Server 500 S/390 and the introduction of
Entry Support Level (ESL) pricing for most S/390 software. It was a good
thing to help slow some low-end erosion, but did nothing to help growth.
IBM was already allowing the AS/400 division to eat the small mainframe
customer market, and it did far more damage to the low-end mainframe market
than PC Servers ever did to it in my opinion.
--
Gary Eheman
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-- R; <><
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