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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (80218)	4/28/1999 4:16:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

Mary, What the Fortune 500 companies should do is to freeze any new developments on the mainframe. Keep those dinosaurs running and trim excess fat. Any new development is done on a more modern and more cost effective platform. Looks like John has been able to do what I couldn't, and that's to convince you that S390s (dinosaurs) aren't going to stop grazing the landscape anytime soon. Freeze new development? Not now, sorry. Some of these companies have to spend several hundred million dollars a year just to keep these computers running and functionally standing still. Not really on the yearly spending part. S390s are now CMOS inside and take no more power than an ordinary server. What they do have that nothing else has yet is: - 10 - 20 years or so MTBF. Now there's a goal for IA-64 based servers to shoot for. I hope IA-64 makes it. Nothing like having no-down machines behind you. - Scalability...only 20 - 25% "lost" MIPS per engine up to 12 way. - Security - Of course, MVS (dinosaur food) compatibility. But I've been all through this before. Congrats to John for getting through. Tony

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (80218)	4/28/1999 5:48:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 186894

So, needless to say, it would be unwise, if not impossible to unplug these s/390 complexes. My guess, though, is that very few of these companies are very happy with their IT expenditures. Some of these companies have to spend several hundred million dollars a year just to keep these computers running and functionally standing still. What we are seeing is the S/390's becoming data storage and process engines for those applications. But the data is being exported to relational engines for access by client/server networks and web servers. Also, we are seeing client/server apps being written to collect input the the S/390 engines.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (80218)	4/28/1999 6:13:00 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mary, you sure seem to have a chip on your shoulder about those mainframes!!!! I am in agreement with you on the 'cost effective' part of your argument. However, as Tony and I have said many times, Intel and Microsoft are not in the same ballpark when it comes to RAS, I/O capability, on the fly upgradeability, etc. Mainframe MIPS have also been getting quite a bit cheaper since the dawn of the CMOS era. Sometime between 2000 and 2010 <ggg> when they get closer, we can certainly revisit the argument. Best regards, John

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (80218)	4/28/1999 10:49:00 PM
From: Fred Fahmy	Respond to of 186894

Mary, <So, needless to say, it would be unwise, if not impossible to unplug these s/390 complexes.> But this is exactly what the Fortune 500 I work for did about 5 years ago. And very, very successfully I might add. Everything from payroll, mail, programing languages, records, databases, etc. was migrated from big iron to a distributed server/client environment. This was done worldwide and we don't have a single mainframe in our corporation. We do have several AS400's sprinkled about for the bigger jobs (sales, distribution)....but hey I see future Intel products taking market share away from mini's like AS400's. FF