Re: {Spam?} RE: oracle has customers over a barrel

Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > > Get a bean counter in your 'thought' exercise. ;-) > Since we haven't seen any form of 'benchmarking' from IDS, we can assume > that its on par ( read: within the same order of magnitude.) with other > databases. > > Mainframe MIPS are horrendously expensive, not to mention that the odds > are that the customer hasn't upgraded his mainframe hardware in years. > (Also expensive.) So Moore's law works against you on the z as well.... I'm not talking about existing MF customers. I'm talking about people who have loads of Intel racks who want to consolidate. > IBM has recognized this and reduced the price of some of their MIPS but > not all of them. Not to mention they are in a lawsuit with a company > which allows one to run things like DB2 (read expensive MIPS) in a less > expensive partition on the mainframe. (Thus protecting their revenue > structure...) Linux is one of the cheaper MIPS. > Also, you have to consider the fact that with Linux boxes you can > distribute your application servers, web servers and database servers in > to multiple safe silos. You really can't do that with your mainframe. > This would allow for better fault tolerance and load balancing. If you > cut the dark fiber running in to your machine room, you lose your > mainframe. If your system is distributed, you might get bogged down by > the loss of a node, but your other servers can pick up the slack. > (Assuming that you built in the redundancy using ER and setting up > 'live-live' peering. (Of course you could duplicate your mainframe for > disaster recovery, however you better not use IBMers (IGS) to do this > because I do know of one customer where they never tested for a > catastrophic failure... ;-) Also be prepared to fight IBM on costs. The > secondary system would have to be in a stand by configuration only. If > you went live for load balancing... the costs get doubled. The costs get doubled? If you have two machines, each doing half the work, the costs get doubled? I think you're a bit confused. And who gives a fuck about your one customer? I can show you fucking hundreds who made the exact same mistake with Intel tin. Does that invalidate your argument? > The truth is... you first have to figure out how much do you *have* to > spend on a build out and what your performance metrics are before doing > this and yes... ymmv so that in some cases a z box may win out. My gut > instinct tells me that for most legacy apps still on the big iron, you > can port them to Linux boxes and get better performance for much less money. Your gut may be wrong. The more boxes you have to consolidate, the better the picture is for Linux on z. > And there's another factor... Suppose you can replace your mainframe > with hardware that will fill one rack, maybe two... > Is it cheaper to lease/rent space in a data center than to build your own? Suppose you can, well, then you should. But how about if you could replace 250 rack servers with a single mainframe? I work in plenty of IDS sites where they don't have a lot of database servers, but they do have a gazillion app servers and web servers and other servers ... all running Linux. Then the picture looks a bit different. > The point is otc... you have a lot of factors to have to consider as > part of your thought exercise. The difference in the cost of the > physical plant can mean a *lot* of money. Yeah. The cost of running the leccy and aircon for a single server or for 250 servers. It *can* mean a lot of money. > Of course there is one other thing... switch your database from DB2 on > the mainframe to GreenPlum since IDS doesn't come in a MP flavor > anymore.... Is XPS still being enhanced? ;-) (Note GP isn't *free* but > its based on Open Source and their licensing costs are lower than > alternatives.) WHAT? > But hey! What do I know? I've only had one cup of coffee and I haven't > put a lot of thought in to this. ;-) No change there. -- Cheers, Obnoxio The Clown http://obotheclown.blogspot.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean.