On Wed, 7 Sep 2016 07:58:23 -0500, John McKown wrote: >On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 7:27 AM, Scott Ford <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Gil, >> >> I agree, why was zxxP engines developed? I assume for Java like code or ? >> > >From what I remember, the "specialty" engines are a marketing gimmick.
Yes. A marketing gimmick to try to compensate the way that they and others charge for software. The bigger the processor, the more you pay for software. This goes back to the early days of software pricing. I wish I still had a copy of that yellow book that had the software prices. Remember when Model group 40 was the highest charge? IIRC, the maximum monthly charge for MVS was a few thousand dollars per month per machine. As processors get faster, software costs go up. Today, people look at software costs and think that z/OS is too expensive. Never mind TCO. Still, the perception makes the reality. Lots of former mainframe shops have left the platform, and it continues. With every new processor, IBM offers a technology dividend by understating pricing MSUs by a few percent. I contend that if IBM had kept software pricing from rising so rapidly for the last 30 years, such that the prices today were only 10% of what they are, the exodus from the mainframe would not have occurred, and there would be at least 10 times as many MVS shops as we have today, and the biggest MVS shops today would have a few times more processing power than they do now. That is because they would not be avoiding increasing their mainframe capacity by putting new workloads on Unix and Windows boxes. One site where I worked in the early 80's had 9 of the biggest processors that IBM and Amdahl had to offer. Today they have two, and part of the reason for that is the proliferation of toy servers. Are they saving money? Probably not. Have they increased complexity? Certainly. -- Tom Marchant >In >particular, the zAAP was created to allow people to run Java on z/OS >without incurring the software costs that they would have if they have if >they had to increase their MSUs on GP engines to do so. This was to sell >WebSphere Application Server (a Tomcat like environment) when IBM was >strongly pushing the "you can run your Java Enterprise software on z/OS >instead of on Intel" idea. That gave rise to the other specialty engines. >IMO, the best specialty engine is the IFL to run zLinux without increasing >your z/OS software costs. Linux on z would have died if it were tied to >normal GPs. Mainly due to the "CEC MSU" pricing that some software vendors >use. Imagine the cost if you dedicate 3 CPs to Linux, but had to pay your >z/OS vendors as if you were using them for z/OS because "well, you _could_ >do so, so we will charge you because we are assuming that you are doing >so." I hate the current software pricing. And, no, I don't have a genius >idea for something better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
