Bang for the Buck: Big Iron Boxes, Even Bigger Bucks
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

By their very nature, the big iron class of servers created by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Unisys are more expensive to develop, to manufacture, and to sell than entry and midrange machines. The development of machines that have the fastest processors, low-latency backplanes, and cache coherent memory architectures is by itself very expensive. Equally importantly, the level of engineering tolerances goes down in these machines. Everything is tested to another level of satisfaction, since the largest companies in the world use these big iron boxes. If a marquee customer loses its computer systems, it doesn't just hurt the server vendor at that one site; it hurts that vendor at all the sites that might be using or thinking of using a particular server and operating system combination. READ MORE >

Top Mainframe Stories and Vendor Announcements

(InfoWorld) Now that you're splitting your time between the two worlds of physical and virtual servers, you might be thinking, "Hey, I sure could use a tool that manages both." Well, wouldn't you just know it, those clever folks at IBM have already trotted out a product that can do just that. It operates in a Web-based user interface, and across multiple virtualization platforms. You'll find it supports z/VM, VMware, Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Power-based virtualization products. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) You don't need to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing in the market for virtual tape libraries (VTLs). Data archiving on tape is giving way to VTL like fall giving way to winter. IDC market researchers are predicting VTL products will surpass the mainframe-based products this year and sales will double by 2001. READ MORE >

(SearchStorage) The Storage Networking World conference brought a boatload of product announcements, including HyperPAV (Parallel Access Volume) for z/OS environments running VM or Linux on a mainframe. READ MORE >

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

November 28-December 1 -- Las Vegas, Nevada - Business continuity, disaster recovery, virtualization directions and technologies, server and storage consolidation trends, and how to run an effective 24x7 operation are in the spotlight at - these are the big four data concerns identified in Gartner's annual data center survey and will be headlining the agenda at the 25th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference. LEARN MORE >

December 3-8 -- Reno, Nevada - Performance and capacity management for enterprise computing systems is the focus for CMG2006 hosted by the Association of Systems Management Professionals. Session topics include software performance engineering, stress/load testing, benchmarking, BPM, BAM, and new technologies such as service-oriented architecture, and Web services. Specialized content is also provided for operating systems that include z/OS, Linux, Unix, and Windows. LEARN MORE >