On 21/05/2017 7:55 AM, Clark Morris wrote:
Large cloud operations claim they assemble their own blades for 1/3rd
the price of brand named blades ... around $1/BIPS ... possibly
contributing to IBM selling off its server business.
Given these figures, why haven't emulation and various mainframe
replacement technologies completely decimated the market for z series?
What will really start the stampede?
They pretty much have in city I live in. When I first moved here 20
years ago there were about 20 mainframe shops, now there are 2. The
small to medium size shops
like government have all either replaced their applications or migrated
using MicroFocus COBOL/Unikix etc. One of our old customers moved from a
z9 to a single blade
server and the word is they only run at about 15% of it's capacity
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/wa-insurance-commission-decommissions-mainframe-322780.
A few years ago HP released some benchmarks that rated one of their
blade servers at around 1,000MIPS. Going by those figures and the fact
that in 2017 those blades are twice
as fast you could spec up a 10,000 MIP system and barely half fill the
chassis. Storage vendors are flogging 32TB flash arrays and claiming 5M
IOPS, easily a match for any mainframe.
It's a risky business migrating large systems and many have failed. I
know of one bank that spent $350M trying and they failed miserably.
There are just so many complexities and it's just too hard for most.
I heard an amusing analogy that it's like trying to replace an engine on
a jumbo jet mid-flight. And the quality of service and RAS on mainframes
is still unmatched. HP are marketing converged
systems and claiming 99.999 availability which for many enterprise is
more then enough.
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