Academic in the fact that it wouldn't make sense from a business perspective.
Simple arithmetic: Emulation normally takes an order of magnitude more cycles.
Thus a
workload that consumes 10% of a 2Ghz intel processor would consume 1/2 of a z10
IFL. Even
with the new low price for z10 IFL, making a business case would be difficult.
The
Mantissa website seems to focus on education - one class can have their "intel"
servers,
then when the class is over, the next class can have their "intel" servers -
that could
make business sense if academia looks for business sense - but VMWare is likely
going to
be a better business case. If Mantissa is very good at miracles and they get
only 2 times
the cycle requirement, with servers that are 10% busy, assuming 2ghz
processors, one z10
IFL will max out replacing 10 intel servers. I will be eagerly waiting to see
some real
performance data. (And of course when someone asked to put up open solaris on
our z9, i
quickly said yes as performance will be "interesting" i am sure).
Florian Bilek wrote:
Hello Alan,
I would like to come back on your statement:
<snip>
It's certainly
interesting from an academic perspective, but it doesn't meet the needs of
business.
</snip>
I would really like to understand IBM's view on this issue. Is it from a
business point of view that Windows or Intel (x86) is not considered as a
serious environment for running mission critical applications??
Unfortunately there are hundred thousands of applications out there that
exist only on Windows and unfortunately not on Linux. And even when they
would exist on Linux it does not mean that they would run on z/Series. So
since long time I wonder myself what is the reason to simply ignore the fact
that in a lot of organisations consider the costs of z/Series compared to
WinTel Servers as terrible high and then this platform does not run Windows
applications. (I do not want to discuss if this is true or not but this is
what I hear from my management). I have all the time problems with my
management to justify the costs. If x86 programs would run naively also on
z/Series I would never had such problems any more. So I would see indeed a
urgent need in solving this issue.
Best Regards,
Florian
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Alan Altmark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
On Tuesday, 11/11/2008 at 11:24 EST, jose raul baron
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Certainly I agree the proper thing would be to migrate the workload
instead
of keeping the same philosophy but... the customer is always right.
(cough)
As many customers who have talked to me can attest, no, they are not
always right. :-) They can have good intentions and excellent ideas, but
the technology is sometimes simply not there to support those ideas. And,
occasionally, it's just a Bad Idea.
In this case, it is technically possible to run Windows servers on System
z today using Bochs, the Linux open source IA-32 emulator, but it
qualifies as a Bad Idea due to the performance. It's certainly
interesting from an academic perspective, but it doesn't meet the needs of
business.
So we await Mantissa's offering with bated breath - to see if we can get
the utility of x86 with the management characteristics and scalability of
System z, at a cost people can afford.
Even the Xen solutions do not do cross-architecture virtualization. If
you run Xen on x86, you get x86. If you run it on Power, you get Power.
If it were to run on System z, you would get z/Architecture. I keep
waiting for an operating system written in Java with a
byte-code-interpreting CPU!
Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott
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