>>> On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at  3:36 PM, in message
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Anatol Zolotusky
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
-snip-
> The reason is that this is not an in-house product, and we can't enforce zVM 
> on our customers' production servers.

I don't understand what this means, since I don't know anything about your 
business or your customers.

>  Besides, I understand that running zVM 
> incurs substantial human costs for system administration.  Is that your 
> experience too?

No, I would have to say it's not.  The amount of time and money you spend on 
having someone manage your z/VM system is likely going to be far less than the 
amount of time you waste on managing multiple LPARs of Linux systems.  (You 
don't really think you're going to have just _one_ Linux system do you?  What 
about dev, test, model office, QA?)  While there is some value in running a 
very small number of Linux systems in LPARs, you're cutting yourself off from 
far more value down the road.  Once you have Linux running on z/VM, a lot of 
things become very easy to do, and therefore you find yourself doing more, 
faster.  It gives you tremendous flexibility to try new things with little or 
no cost, then ditch the ones that don't work to pursue the ones that do.

I've been an advocate of running Linux on the mainframe from the first I heard 
it existed back in early 2000.  One of the most interesting things I've heard 
from someone running it in production was along the lines of this:
Once it becomes quick and easy to create and destroy Linux systems, and your 
application developers (and their managers) really understand this, it unlocks 
innovation to a degree not seen previously.  Things that are too speculative to 
try with real hardware, because of capital budgets, amortization and 
depreciation, are almost no-brainers in a virtual environment.


Mark Post

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