> 3) Hardware investment avoidance. Most shops have *some* spare zSeries > capacity that can be pressed into use, and intelligent use of > IFL cycles > to augment existing applications can allow you to significantly delay > increases in z/OS or other IBM OS investment, or even actively reduce > the size of your standard engine committment by moving workload to the > IFL side of the machine at about a 75% decrease in the cost of > additional capacity (eg a IFL costs about 25% of a standard engine).
Some other related points that just occurred to me: 3.5) ISV software cost reduction. If you use the workload migration to IFL strategy discussed in #3, you may actually be able to *decrease* the effective size of your machine that is used to calculate ISV charges. This is likely to be *serious* money -- in one case, transmuting one standard engine to an IFL and moving some DB2 workload to a z/VM and Linux LPAR not only paid for z/VM and Linux, but bought the customer and additional $876,000 back from CA and other ISVs by reducing the machine model group size (remember, IFLs don't count for MIPS-based pricing). 3.7) Capacity sharing. While acquisition cost for zSeries hardware supporting Linux is higher than for discrete hardware, it is less than the cost for supporting similar workloads on USS (or on discrete systems, if you examine the cost of incremental upgrade across all the systems consuming the resources of the system). IFLs are relatively inexpensive. USS requires investment in standard engines, which are 75% more expensive than IFLs and also increase the ISV capacity measurement, leading to higher ISV software costs. In the comparison against discrete systems, the cost increment to upgrade a single system is smaller, but it benefits only one system at a time, whereas capacity upgrades to Linux on Z systems benefit the ENTIRE complex at once -- *everything* gets faster, rather than favoring a select few, and unused capacity in one system can be applied dynamically to a lack of capacity in another system without human intervention or interruption of service. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
