[geeks] Interesting read

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 08:22:10PM -0500, Big Endian 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.

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?

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).  

On another note, Sun complains about distribution dependencies.  Yeah, this
sucks, but at least on an IBM you can run all distributions at once.  Plus,
server software just doesn't seem to suffer from such dependencies much from
my experience.

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).

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

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd