back to article HP missionaries paddled over mainframe convert claims

Sometimes, the server business reminds me of driving in a car on a long trip with a lot of kids in the backseat. You just want to reach back and start slapping and tell everyone to shut up and stop talking nonsense. But fathers today are more civilized (at least outwardly) and don't do the things their fathers did (judge for …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    They're not called...

    They're not called coin-op consultants for nothing you know.

    Incidentally, I have heard that really persistent customers who know the right secret codewords and remember the days "when computers just worked" (tm) can still get VMS on their Integrity servers - a mainframe-quality software setup with hardware and software and people costs not a million miles off x86-64 costs (shame it isn't quite actually on x86-64 hardware yet). Please ask the nice Mr Pickett at HP to bear that in mind if he provides you any more Integrity bumf before VMS finally retires.

    www.hp.com/go/openvms

    Gates, because WNT never was and never will be VMS++.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    IBM Shark scares the bejesus out of me.

    I worked in a DC that used Shark, as IBM practically gave it to them to get the server deal (from Sun if I remember right). The Shark lost a ton of data, and when we asked what the root cause was they said it was a "feature". To get around this "feature" IBM had to provide another Shark so that we could mirror between the two frames. This replaced an EMC... I'm sure they're including this replacement in their numbers...

  3. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    All good fun!

    "Sometimes, the server business reminds me of driving in a car on a long trip with a lot of kids in the backseat. You just want to reach back and start slapping and tell everyone to shut up and stop talking nonsense....." Oh, come on! Without the fun of all the fanboi rants, flamewars and FUD, fed by such sponsored research, computing would be a lot less fun. A long time ago a teacher told me a story about his first job in toilet tissue factory. All day he had to sit and watch the endless stream of toilet paper roll past. If it wandered too far to the left and was in danger of coming off the rollers, he pulled one lever to correct it, and if it went too far to the right he had to pull another lever to bring back inline. Of course, after several days of boredom, he let it run off one side "just to see what would happen", and the whole factory ground to a halt for the day. Without the fun of a little inter-platform rivalry to liven up the day I'm sure there are several businesses that would see admins letting stuff "go off the roller, just to see what happens".

  4. Steven Knox
    Pirate

    Spot The Tell

    See if you can find the clause which shows the report was obviously sponsored by Microsoft. Here, I'll narrow it down for you:

    "... open systems, based on ... Microsoft software ..."

    Hah!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    why would anyone move to Itanium from IBM's mainframe?

    Any half intelligent block would move to IBM Power if they had to move, but why should you move? but then again HP tries to fudge a customers TCO number.with only a subset.

    Matt.....you are a HP wannabe.

    Tom Broussard

  6. James Anderson
    Coat

    Weasel words form the marketing team.

    There relatively few mainframe installations, the specialist skills involved, and a penchent for meeting up at IBM, BMC, CA etc sponsered jollys mean its a tight knit gossipy world.

    150 sites lost to HP would cause quite a stir, but I for one have not heard any news of sites lost to migration to HP-UX. Mainframe sites die because of mergers and aquisitions not because of migrations to vms, unix, windows or any other "mainframe killer" OS.

    What this probably boils down to is the migrations of a single application out of the many hosted on a typical zOS mainframe to HP hardware. The awful SAP R2 on zOS to the awful SAP R3 on HP would be typical and the zOS techies would rejoice at unloading such a resource hog on to the some niave kids who thinks HP-UX is best.

    Mines the one with the green 370 assembler mnemonics card sticking out of the pocket.

  7. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: Tom Broussard

    And you, sir, are just an Toliet Roll Factory Worker! Maybe the IBM mainframe customers switched to Itanium becasue it just costs half as much as running the same app on a mainframe? or maybe they just liked the dark grey HP paints the boxes, who knows. The fact is, IBM's golden goose is laying smaller and smaller egss every year, as more and more customers wise up to the fact that IBM has been treating them like suckers and charging a rediculous premium on mainframe products and support.

    Supporting Linux on mainframes was a smart move, but it only slowed the decline, not prevented it. This is obvious from IBM's viloent reaction to technologies such as PSI's work on z/OS on Itanium (on Superdomes, much cheaper than IBM mainframes). After throwing law suits at PSI, IBM eventually tried to hide the problem by buying them up. But it hasn't stopped customers going through expensive migrations to get off mainframes, becuase Integirty (and Power) are just so much cheaper.

    So why would a customer move off mainframe to Itanium rather than Power? Well, for a start, HP have better options - Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NonStop or hp-ux on Integrity, as opposed to just AIX and Linux on Power. NonStop has particular appeal as it looks and sounds like a mainframe, just much cheaper. And, of course, they can mix OSs in a Superdome frame with hardware isolation, which Power can't do. And then there's the not so little issue that Power6 may not be able to host the app in question, which means IBM has to go to the table with older Power5, and then the customer has to worry about whether he has to retread his app again to eventually go up to Power6, and maybe again to got to Power7, whereas with hp-ux (and Linux, and OpenVMS, and Windows, and NonStop) there is a large level of binary compatibility between releases. And then we can look at the superior HP storage offering, better management tools, and the fact you don't have to worry about IBM Global Services doubling the cost over time.

    As for being an HP wannabe - believe me, I'm too well-paid for HP!

  8. Bill
    Thumb Up

    Matt's a HP wannabe but...

    Matt may be a HP wannabe and he may be a hypocrite by calling everyone else a fanboi, when he is the biggest fanboi I've ever seen. The only difference is that Matt is a HP fanboi, which is quite different indeed. At least he's original. You don't see too many HP fanboi's really... Anyway, he's kinda right in this regard. The IBM Mainframe is good, but dieing. There are many reasons to get off of it, least of all to get away from IBM GS constantly increasing the cost over the life of every project.

  9. Jesper Frimann

    HP wannabe

    You don't get it do you ?

    Power6 is backwards binary compatible with power5 which is binary compatible with power4...

    Hardware isolation my butt, HP is desperately trying to catch up in the virtualization layer

    with IVM, and sorry they are years behind. IVM reminds me more of Containers and

    Wpars than powervm.

    A hypervisor virtualization layer that catches hardware faults and isolates them,

    so that they do not affect the virtual machines that run on top of it is far superior

    to a hardware isolation, where you 'only' loose one partition.

    It's like "Sorry you lost your head but we managed to save the rest of you limps".

    As for management tools, both HP and IBM IMHO have strong offerings there,

    but I do think that some of the integration between platforms on the IBM side

    haven't been good enough. But it has become much better with the new director,

    even the v7 HMC interface is now easy to use.

    And your comment about IBM Global services is just FUD.

    I mean I don't know where we would

    be if we hadn't had access to skilled AIX people to fill in when our skilled people quit/got sick or we just got another customer in, and couldn't hire and train new ones quickly enough.

    And the same goes to a lesser degree for HP, but they seem to be more interested in

    pushing x86 blades, than Integrity. SUN is mostly a sales office here.

    Sure they all would like to sell you a Project manager also and a... and a.... but hey that no

    different than any other bodyshop.

    // Jesper

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