Folks,



I think when we discuss older releases, we look at it from a technical
point of view. I believe that IBM looks at it from its "Fear Uncertainty and
Doubt" campaign that it uses to sell Z boxes. IBM market these as being
superior to PC and UNIX hardware in both performance and reliability. To get
this reliability, of course you have to run the latest and greatest versions
of the OS. This classical cycle drives Hardware and Software sales.



So for example where I work we are on VM/ESA4.2 which is unsupported. To get
supported we would have to move to zVM 5.1, but that's no longer available
for new sale, so we would need to move to 5.2. Now we couldn't do that on
the box we have at present, so we would need to upgrade the box. As the
entry level boxes now have twice the MIPS rating of our box we would end up
either setting up LPARS for performance slugging, or pay large sums of cash
to providers of third part software providers for the MIPS uplift.



Of course what we are doing is getting off the mainframe. We aren't rushing,
we expect it to take another 12 months (we started the process 8 years ago),
but we aren't putting any new work on the box. Of course a nice Intel server
running Hercules would happily do all the work we currently do on the
Mainframe, and if we could license zVM on such a box, we might try it. Just
to save migrating the historical data to another platform.



IBM would see this as a "lost" mainframe sale, just as folks who count
pirate DVDs sold , and count tracks downloaded over BitTorrent as lost
sales, in truth it isn't. of course in truth it's a sale that would never
have been made in the first place. IBM already seems to have taken this
approach with fundamental systems. They can not sell 64 bit systems, so
their product is effectively dead.



But if IBM were to licenses for older version, for "Hobbyist use" this would
dent their strategy. They would be under pressure from customers like
ourselves to license them for commercial use as well. The very fact that you
could run ESA/4.2 on a PC would also dent the image of the "z" boxes as
being "special"



Do I don't expect them to do it, unfortunately. In the mean time, with then
entry level being so high, and the cost of an IBM developer license also
being expensive, I expect the number of mainframes running traditional work
loads to decrease. One or two folks may run Linux, but we are getting to the
stage on PC hardware where the latest version of VM/Wares product allows
virtualization levels that are competitive with zVM.



Dave







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