On 8/05/2012 1:25 PM, Timothy Sipples wrote:
One point I'd like to highlight is that a zBX is *not* simply another blade server chassis. One of the key reasons it's not the same is the zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager (URM). For example, URM is able to coordinate resource allocations and provisioning dynamically across multiple operating systems, in effect extending some of z/OS's Workload Manager (WLM) capabilities out into the blades. That's unique. More information available here:
Unfortunately, the automated load balancing doesn't seem applicable to the x86 blades.
http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/zenterprise/unifiedresourcemanager.html Another point... Yes, you *could* replicate some of the functions of a zBX by building something else out of various parts. In practice, that's hard. (George highlighted a common problem among many: networking run amok.) In principle you could also write and maintain your own operating systems, relational databases, transaction managers, service management tools, etc., but in practice you'd probably do it rather badly, and it would necessarily require more labor than buying something complete and ready-to-go.
Lots of big companies out there quite happy to put together their own infrastructure. In fact maybe that's an advantage, being able to choose a HS23 bladecenter as opposed to a HX5 for example. As for operating systems and other software. Well there are some very clever (and lucky) chaps out there forming start-ups and then selling them for $1B dollars without owning
any hardware and running a completely open source software stack.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
