I have no relation whatsoever to the seller, but I happened to spot a used IBM System z9 BC mainframe available for sale on eBay for those interested:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-zSeries-z9-BC-2096-O04-Business-Class-Mainframe-/280857960849 It's a 4-way with an IBM LSPR PCI rating of 473 (or about 118 PCI per engine). It also has an ICF engine and Server Time Protocol, so it would support a "Sysplex in a box" (e.g. DB2 data sharing). There's 16 GB of memory, although I think you have to subtract HSA from that to determine the usable memory. There are several ESCON, FICON (4 Gb/s), ISC-3, and Ethernet ports. Also an HMC, power cable set (U.S. presumably), and the CP Assist (CPACF) feature is enabled. There do not appear to be any IFLs, zAAPs, or zIIPs. Asking price is $29,995 or best offer, and the buyer must pay shipping from Norcross, Georgia, USA. There's a 30 day money back offer from the seller. The seller will only pay for return shipping (not shipping both ways) if you have to return the machine. The seller has received 3 bids so far, and the auction expires on or about December 29, 2012. EWLC z/OS licensing should be possible for this machine starting at 3 MSUs (sub-capacity) -- full capacity is 67 MSUs. If this machine has a sufficient driver level installed it would be capable of group capacity limits ("softcapping" across a group of LPARs). As far as I know all current IBM mainframe software releases are compatible with this machine except z/VM V6.1 or higher. There is no disk or tape listed with the machine, but you may be able to IPL the machine from the HMC -- to start Jan Jaeger's ZZSA, for example: http://www.cbttape.org/~jjaeger/zzsa.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Consulting Enterprise IT Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
