[email protected] (Aled Hughes) writes: > I've spent several hours reading news reports from far and wide about > this much anticipated development. What I would like to know is, what > does this now mean to IBM's core business. More importantly, what is > IBM's core business? Do I detect that System z is becoming more > important? Mrs Rometty has said some promising' words about 'cloud' > business (referring to new data centers), which, to me, was about as > clear as a... cloud. > I also hear wise words about IBM the 'services' company. Personally, > and I think so would IBM-MAINers (is that a word?), I would like to > see some real positive emphasis on System z in the next few weeks to > coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the S/360. So far, the silence > is deafening. > Sorry if I offend anyone here on the List or more likely at IBM, and > perhaps my cynicism is showing in my advanced years. Perhaps it is > the cold weather here in Florida - my old school friend back in Wales > tells me it is warmer there than here!
note that ibm was in talks with levono a year ago on the same subject and it never came to fruition ... somebody over in linkedin ibm group just mentioned that they are trying to figure out how much of the sale is cash and how much is levono stock. part of this is lots of x86 in clouds ... x86 server chip manufactures claiming more x86 server chips shipping to cloud operators (that assemble their own servers) than to brand name server vendors. for decade or more, large cloud operators claim that they assemble servers for 1/3rd of price from brand name vendors. also there are various rumors of some of the brand name vendors doing complete clouds for smaller businesses (both public and private clouds) that can't justify doing their own assemblies) ... and per system price is close to the 1/3rd quoted by large cloud operators. In aggregate it has been putting significant downward pressure on x86 server system profit margins. as i've periodically mentioned, a single large cloud megadatacenter has more processing power than the aggregate of all mainframes in the world today at possibly a millionth of the price/BIPS IBM also announces it is aggresively moving into cloud operation and services ... IBM Plans Big Spending for the Cloud ($1.2B) http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/ibm-plans-big-spending-for-the-cloud/ for comparison, this article claims google is spending over $2B per quarter on cloud megadatacenters (say $9B-$10B annually) http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/12/02/in-iowa-a-field-becomes-a-huge-google-server-farm/ and other large cloud operators are doing something similar. For the large cloud operations ... hardware & systems are expense/cost ... not profit. there are predictions that large cloud operators may move off x86 server chips to ARM chips ... while not as powerful processing per chip ... are characterized as may having lower costs per unit of processing. This possibly contributes to news that Intel will fabricate/manufacture ARM chips. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/169853-hell-freezes-over-intel-announces-plan-to-fab-arm-processors -- 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
