[email protected] (AbsKerneels) writes: > You are assuming the following : > > a) You are talking and responding to an educated question/crowd > b) That the mainframe can compete price wise with what > DROPBOX's/Google Drive/YOUTUBE etc. etc. can do.. and I have not seen > that any where yet.. or THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE based on the current IBM > BUSINESS MODEL.
lots of cloud computing is related to on-demand and significant provisioning datacenter for resources sitting available to instantaneously come online on-demand. typical cloud mega-datacenters have hundreds of thousands of systems and millions of processors ... large percentage sitting idle waiting for demand (any one of these mega-datacenters possibly have more processing power than the aggregate of all mainframes in the world today). max. configured z196 has 80 processors, a 50BIPS processing rating and goes for $28M ... or $560,000/BIPS. IBM financials has it getting a total of $6.25 from mainframe customers for every mainframe processor dollar ... or IBM collects an avg. of $175M for $28M z196 ... which works out to $3.5M/BIPS. i86 server chip makers are now saying that they are shipping more chips directly to the big mega-datacenters (that assemble their own systems and these volumes don't show in the server market numbers) than they ship to the brand name server makers. IBM has base list price of $1810 for a e5-2600 blade ... which have 527BIPS processor rating ... or $3.44/BIPS (a million times less than z196). however, major cloud operators claim they assemble their own systems for 1/3rd the price of brand name vendors ... which possibly brings it down close to $1/BIPS. There are rumors that major brand name server vendors now outsourcing assemblies for major cloud operations at close to those numbers ... significantly increasing downward pressure on server margins and commoditizing the market (possibly contributing to news earlier this year about IBM trying to sell-off its server business). the enormous drop in system costs have increased the relative percentage of other costs for operating a cloud megadatacenters ... which is major motivation for cloud megadatacenters being at the forefront of green technologies, power consumption, cooling technologies, manual administration, etc. the i86 server chip makers have been pushed by these megadatacenters for major optimization in power&cooling per computation ... as well as dropping to near zero when idle ... but being able to instantaneously come up to full operation on-demand. an old long-winded discussion in (linkedin) "Old Geeks" http://lnkd.in/mGd4j5 regarding this article The cloud is killing traditional hardware and software http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/the-cloud-killing-traditional-hardware-and-software-216963 more recent "Old Geeks" discussion http://lnkd.in/MbiakK regarding this article A Brief History of Cloud Computing http://blog.softlayer.com/2013/virtual-magic-the-cloud/ -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
