Yes, mainframes ARE more expensive than racked servers. And slower than most current Intel or Sun solutions - for single applications. There are no TCO studies published showing otherwise that I know of AFTER an implementation is complete - I'm only guessing at the reasons.... Is Meta group right?
It's pretty hard to fault their recommendation: >We recommend that organizations match the type of work being done and >the service-level goals, such as availability and scalability, to the >appropriate computing platform. A key consideration should also be >existing operations process maturity and staff skill levels. However, >workloads that easily scale out across multiple commodity servers >should not be centralized onto more expensive platforms simply because >of skill and process issues. In this case, the right answer is to >improve the skills and processes associated with running scale-out >environments. But to sell Linux on s/390, we have our ways. "Racked servers" very often have very low utilization, either because the platform can not handle high utilization, or the application just doesn't utilize the hardware. On the s/390 side, we expect the processor to reach 80% (plus) utilization as the article indicated. Thus moving 20 servers that have 3-5% utilization to s/390 may be less expensive and probably doable. The mistakes in moving applications to Linux on s/390 are to take high utilization applications and move them to s/390. Those fail from a TCO Perspective just because with the rather slow z/900 processor, the resource requirement of the application is just too high. For this reason, I believe any Linux TCO analysis of LPAR or dedicated s/390 will ALWAYS fail - just because what makes the s/390 successful is a high level of multiprogramming with z/VM - on a highly available system. Comparing mip to mip, storage cost to storage cost, s/390 will ALWAYS cost significantly more. But utilized mip to mip is different animal. To do a successful TCO showing s/390 to be less expensive means you have to measure an application (some of you saw this coming) on the racked server, port it to z/VM, and measure it there. With these numbers, you now have an important part of a valid methodology to choose servers to move to the s/390 that have a cost benefit. If you already have z/VM in house, this is much easier. If you don't, it's pretty hard to make this analysis in your own environment. If you need the tools to help you with this study, I can help... At SHARE, I hope to have 1 or 2 of these comparisons ready to present. Watch this space. And I'm always looking for more installations interested in the performance comparisons and analysis.... > >We are in the eternal struggle - trying to get Management to try >LINUX on the zSeries. However, we are continually faced with the >costs of Mainframe against Unix and Windows Servers. > >Does the note below make sense or is there a counter argument. > >Look forward to help form the team. > >Paul Tormey >LAN Services >Standard Bank of South Africa. > >011 636 4103 >083 252 5292 >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > "If you can't measure it, I'm Just NOT interested!"(tm) /************************************************************/ Barton Robinson - CBW Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Velocity Software, Inc Mailing Address: 196-D Castro Street P.O. Box 390640 Mountain View, CA 94041 Mountain View, CA 94039-0640 VM Performance Hotline: 650-964-8867 Fax: 650-964-9012 Web Page: WWW.VELOCITY-SOFTWARE.COM /************************************************************/
