>>> On 10/31/2012 at 06:10 AM, Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote: -snip- > The question is when does an extra 1U PC box become cheaper. I can put > 128GB into a pair of cheap x86 boards. Thats a lot of memcached space and > I wouldn't like to imagine the price of that on a z/VM box.
And again, that is the mindset that leads to server sprawl. The cost of any individual workload pales in comparison to the whole, and the hardware costs are a minority of the total. > You can certainly plot ownership cost curves including licensing, power, > etc for your workload set and I don't doubt some of it looks better on > each - especially if you are required to have the big box for another > workload so it's a sunk cost anyway. And it's not just those items that need to be considered. There are literally nearly a hundred things that _should_ be included, but most people only look at one or two. If you're a tiny shop that's not growing, that's one thing. If the shop is growing and likely to continue growing, far more thought needs to be put into what the overall direction should be. It took me less than 30 Intel servers to cost-justify a z9 EC (not a BC) back in 2007, with 600K per year savings on top of that. Things have gotten better since then for System z TCO. But as I've said before, my point is not that System z should be the platform for every workload. That needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. My point is that every case absolutely should be examined and decisions made based on a long term strategy for not running the data center out of floor space, power, cooling, networking gear, and on and on. From my perspective, that strategy needs to have virtualization included on every architecture in the shop, and only workloads that can't meet business goals exempted from being placed there. For a large or growing shop, simply saying "ah, we can just buy a cheap system with lots of memory" is irresponsible. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
