OK, so what do we mean by "cloud"? What *customers* seem to mean is "a compute platform where I can run my stuff but not have to deal with buying hardware and racking and cabling it and in general all the work of running a data center". By which definition, of course, traditional timesharing fits.
For x86, this is currently AWS and Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure (and not HPE Helion). For z, it's more like the IBM Dallas developer systems, where you can rent a virtual machine that runs z/OS or z/VM or Linux, and then do whatever you want with that OS. My conclusion is that the vendors (and IBM) who are saying "IBM Z and cloud" are not being honest with themselves. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one, and saying "We like IBM Z and it *can* do cloud-ish stuff, therefore we will say it's good for cloud" is not a rational (much less convincing) argument. Again, I'd love to be proven wrong. But the relative silence on this thread tends to suggest that nobody else buys it either. Well, nobody besides Ginny & Co. .phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
