When it must be so expensive its not even "call us", but "Schedule a Consultation".
You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?
You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?
It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it.
I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective.
PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.
AIUI, Oxide Computer is targeting the "private cloud" space which is sort of adjacent to this stuff and could easily intrude on it. Of course they're based on AMD EPYC hardware, but the rest of the system is custom designed for ease of management and reliability.
The thing that recent grads(weather engineering or business) tend to miss here is that for a lot of those organisation the central mainframe system and the organization's policies and culture is pretty entangled to the point where you cannot just replace either.
[1] on time, on budget and without leaving some aspects of the old system running under some sort of virtualization.
That's interesting; any chance you could give the background on that or point me to more information?
Nah, there are a ton of businesses of all sizes across the world with many man-years of effort put into writing software that runs on various layers of the IBM stack from Cobol on up.
For one regional grocery store I know of they started in the 70s. Let's average 10 developers on staff churning out 4GL, Cobol, and whatever else since 1979. I hear it runs webservices now to serve the desktop and mobile client apps.
10 engineers * 43 years = 430 man-years put into a pile of software highly customized to exactly how they do business, from corporate & accounting to the warehouses to the ice cream factory to the industrial-scale bakery to the retail stores. Every single process at the company driven by mountains of custom software. The thing that knows more people buy Texas Toast at Store #473 so it prompts the manager to order extra and the bakery to put an extra Texas Toast run into the already tight schedule? Yeah that runs on the IBM mainframe... because that's where the cash register sales data goes and where the managers handle orders and where warehouse tickets are printed and where the bakery solves the traveling salesman problem to create schedules around quickly expiring products (did I mention the delivery truck schedules also run on the mainframe?).
If we assume it would "only" take 10% of the effort to replace, mythical man-month is not a problem, and you can handle dual-running the integrated systems for the decade it will take to perform the swap... you saved a year of your on-staff developer's salaries while putting every part of your business at risk of exploding (and ceasing all improvements to the existing stack lest you chase a moving target)... and you end up with something more or less equivalent except on commodity hardware.
$1m for IBM hardware? $5m? $10m? Pfffffffttttt... Chump change. Where do I sign the check? Sold and sold. Don't even bother sending a rep out.
But!! No shutdown needed.
(A fancy insult, now that I think of it. Nice.)
They have zeolite in the rack (like in the ISS). The food is also non methane producing.
Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, they'll fail over and someone will show up to replace what failed. Enterprise tech is sometimes cool.
Gosh you are right i always forget him.
>Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure,
HP's EVA Device did that too, so sometimes a Engineer calls you and ask's if "we" have time to update the firmware, not even HP engineers are allowed to do EVA updates...just specialized EVA ones.
Indeed, even when they have publicly listed prices, it's usually possible to negotiate a substantial discount by dealing directly with the sales team. Like 50% is often possible.
It is a shame though. IBM has no idea how to sell to anyone other that gigantic megacorps - which, fair enough, but they could probably pick up a lot of sales to medium-sized businesses if they weren't so old-fashioned about everything
It's much more like placing an order for an container full of severs based on an reference design from an OEM then going to HPE or Dell for a commodity x64 system.