[email protected] (Art Gutowski) writes: > If my notes are accurate from Ross' Keynote address to SHARE attendees > in Seattle, mainframes account for 68% of production workloads, but > only 6% of IT spend (exclusive of aggregate labor costs across > platforms). Given the armies of sysadmins to support *nix and windoze > platforms, I gotta believe labor costs on these platforms eclipse > those of the mainframe.
at industry level ... one of the industries that didn't migrate off mainframe was financial ... which tends to have much higher profit margin than others. in the 90s, there was big effort in the financial industry to migrate to "killer micros" as lots of other industries were doing ... that failed. those failures had much higher consequences in financial ... and so they've tended to retrench and minimize their risks for some period. at datacenter level ... a large cloud megadatacenter will have hundreds of thousands of systems (more processoring than the aggregate of all mainframes in the world today), massively automated with staff of 80-120 people. large cloud operators have claimed for a decade or more that they assemble their own systems for 1/3rd the cost of brand name vendors ... along with news about server chip vendors starting to ship more chips to cloud operations than to brand name vendors (possibly motivation for IBM to sell off their server chip business). there have been rumors that some of the brand name server vendors have been doing side cloud business ... for large volume order they will price close to that of the costs that the large cloud operators claim (where the massive automation is migrating out into corporations running their own clouds). -- 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
