[geeks] Interesting read

[Julius Sridhar]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> > http://www.sun.com/executives/realitycheck/reality-022002.html
> >
> > Mainframe people care to comment?
>
> This paper appears to me to be quite illogical, even without having had
> hands on experience with IBMs.
>
> They appear to try to say that z/VM isn't as good as z/OS, but I rarely hear
> of people who aren't using z/VM (or the older equivs) with z/OS.

Not only that, I don't think that the person who wrote that knew that
z/VM, z/OS, and z/Linux run *concurrently*.

> Also, they claim that linux wasn't designed for VMs.  Well, that is true, but
> linux still gets respectable performance in VMWare and on top of the mach
> kernel, so why should it also be respectable on z/VM?

That, and you don't actually *need* z/VM to run z/Linux.  z/Linux will run
fine without VM.

> Also on a political note, Sun bashs the openness of linux on an IBM, but
> linux on the zSeries seems more open than anything Sun does.
>
> Further, they talk about the fault recovery.  This also doesn't make sense.
> So, we would all be shocked if linux was as reliable as z/OS.  But recent
> experience has shown us that Solaris is also not as bullet proof as z/OS
> (remebering the ebay problems, etc.  For such high profile systems, 2 years
> seem too short to be able to say that reliability is definately fixed).

I'd like to see someone walk up to a Sun, open the cabinet, pull out a
faulty memory board, put a working one in, have the system recompute the
contents without rebooting, and have it continue.  z/OS does that out of
the box.  Support for that kind of stuff in Linux is forthcoming
eventually.

> Finally, when IBM talks about consolidating 20 linux machines to one IBM, I
> highly doubt that they sincerely mean 20 1U bottom of the line units.  I'm sure
> that they would be meaning something like 20 fairly highend server
> configurations (lots of ram, raid storage, etc).

A z800 can consolidate a lot more than 20 PC's.  20 is just about where it
starts to get profitable for TCO.

> I like Sun hardware quite a lot.  Heck, Suns domintate my group of machines.
> But, I particularly dislike their whitepapers.  Talk about suit speak.

Did you notice they didn't mention anything about I/O bandwidth?  8;-)

Peace...  Sridhar