G.W. Haywood writes:
> On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Malcolm Beattie wrote:
>
> > > you can run *thousands* of separate Linux images on a S/390
>
> How much, to the nearest order of magnitude, does a S/390 cost?
How long is a piece of string? An S/390 can be anything from about
$100 on ebay for an extremely old one which would cost more in power,
space and cooling and do less in performance than any reasonable
person would want unless they're *really* hooked on history and
blinkenlights. At the top end you can pay $5 million or more for a
top of the range z900 fully kitted out.
More usefully, I'll say that I'm after a system which costs around
1000 GBP per virtual server (that would be $1000 at computing prices
of $1 = 1GBP). The question is how large a system I have to get to
bring down the per-virtual-server price that far. I'm hoping that
150-200 would do the trick but I'm (a) hoping to pay extremely low
academic prices and (b) probably being over-optimistic. If you look at
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/linuxconfig/
you'll see that IBM reckons you can get down to $500 per server
(disk not included) by putting 2500 instances on a brand new fancy
$1.2 million z900. On one hand, I'd guess you may need to pay for
some upgrading if they aren't very lightly used servers but on the
other hand, no one ever pays list price (I'm reliably informed).
On the gripping hand, it's very difficult getting hold of pricing
information at all on these things (as mentioned in my last slide,
I think) which is one of the big problems.
--Malcolm
--
Malcolm Beattie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Unix Systems Programmer
Oxford University Computing Services
