On 2/27/09 3:02 PM, "Ivan Warren" <[email protected]> wrote:
> And they support the whole line of z hardware already. So it does not > seem to be an IBM decision ! There's direct influence decisions, and there are indirect influence on decisions. Consider: when IBM releases a new hardware platform, the price of maintenance on the older systems generally goes up. Novell has bills to pay, too, and paying a continually increasing maintenance price (and finding space/power/parts, etc) for a bunch of older systems just so you can stay on older tech a little bit longer (especially if IBM has incentive programs on z10s) doesn't work in the numbers game. You start factoring in how long it takes to test a distribution on multiple platforms (and you have to run the test suites completely on both models of each generation), and that starts to add up to real money. Cutting down to two generations (z9 and z10) cuts that cost by more than half. I'm not saying I like it, but it's pretty clear if you do the math what a real z800 (and it has to be the real thing to satisfy the LPAR/bare metal requirement) costs to maintain vs a shiny new z10. People do enough bitching about licensing prices -- do you really want to pay more? > Restricting to z/Arch (no 31 bit) was already, IMHO, a bad enough > restriction.. But cutting itself from its z800/z900/z890/z990 customer > base ? We made the same decision for OpenSolaris. I don't like it, but I can't afford to keep that many machines running just so some folks can stay in the past. > And personally, in those trouble days where a lot of businesses have > indefinitely postponed hardware upgrades, I find imposing such arbitrary > restriction to be very counter-productive. It's a realistic business decision. Do the math. The result is pretty clear. I'd bet you start seeing some similar testing platform pressure in the Intel space as well, for similar reasons. You can't test everything, and you can't support everything forever. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
