14 Mar
2017
14 Mar
'17
10:20 p.m.
On 14 Mar 2017, at 14:43, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors that
were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes. I'll guess, IBM was one of them. Maybe NCR.
What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle?
I didn't mean 9-figure sums on single machines: I meant that much for an estate.
Typically companies would have machines from more than one vendor: where I was we had IBM,
HP, Sun in the Unix estate at least. Then based on a fully-stuffed high-end machine
costing ~$1M (which is about right), you need 100 to be 9 figures. Where I was we had 25
top-end machines from the vendor I knew best I think, and probably as many again from each
the two others, as well as a bunch (low thousands I think) of lesser machines.
I believe that the point you are making is that
"white box" PC's running a UNIX-like system - aka Linux could comes pretty
close to doing what the highly touted AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good
enough" to get the job done.
No, not really: what I'm saying is that the deployments of big expensive Unix systems
were *not* blazingly successful (for reasons which may or may not have had to do with
Unix, and which I believe mostly but not entirely did not in fact), and the people who
sign off that kind of purchase then have the 'Unix bad' bit set, and so anything
which is being pushed as *not* Unix smells like good to them.
There is no particular reason to think that what they are doing now will work any better,
other than that I think it's obvious by now that the huge-gold-plated-machine idea
doesn't work very well (with the possible exception of z series, which is not Unix of
course), and much smaller silver-plated systems are just better and also offer stupidly
more bang per buck. Also they have probably learned some lessons from the first iteration
so less dumb mistakes will be made.
--tim