On Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:56:57 -0500, John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com> wrote: >http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/ibm-unveils-new-mainframe-for-the-rest-of-us/ >Not a lot in it, but some $ figures. ><quote> >The zBC12 includes a number of performance enhancements over IBM's previous >"midrange" offering, the z114. It uses a faster, 4.2GHz 64-bit >z/Architecture processor (an improvement over the z114's 3.8GHz CPUs), and >has twice the maximum memory of the z114 at 498GB. And as far as mainframes >go, the zBC12 is priced to move, starting at $75,000 - or for lease starting >at $1,965 a month. That's roughly half the cost of buying the equivalent >computing power in commodity x86 hardware. ></quote>
Roughly half the cost of equivalent x86? Who do they think they're trying to kid? The $75,000 model is going to be the absolute rock-bottom low-end model -- when the z114 was announced they were very coy about exactly what were the specs of the entry level model, but it's probably going to be 1 IFL core, 8GB RAM, and no disk storage. Possibly not even a network adapter. You can get the equivalent x86-64 computing power for well under $5000, and that includes 8-core Xeon processor, 16GB memory, 4TB disk storage, dual hotswap power supply, and dual Gigabit ethernet http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=becte4&model_id=poweredge-r420&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04 Oh, and the x64 fits in a standard rack and has less than half the power and cooling requirements of the zBC12 (ref: IBM zEnterprise BC12 Technical Guide) http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg248138.html Roger Bowler Hercules "the people's mainframe" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
