Wow. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This topic
resurfaces every couple of years, for probably the last two decades or more.
Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 409-267-4027
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Justin Dearing
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:12 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Free/Cheap Midrange access?
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Mitchell, Dana <dmitche@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Through the magic of TIMI, in theory IBM i and its programs could be made
to run on x86 or ARM hardware. What would that do to the popularity of
the
OS? Do you think IBM would ever do such a thing?
When pigs fly indeed
I thought the same thing about open source .NET in a Balmer lead
Microsoft. The idea of IBM selling conulting services around non IBM
hardware pre Gerstner was probably equally ludicrous to those a decade or
do older than me. The pig will fly when a new executive decides he wants it
to.
Although, I'd argue that making smaller more containerized LPARS, and
getting them hosted Amazon or Azure would be the real ticket today. That
might mean porting OS/400 to X86 so it will run on the hardware in that
data centers, or it might mean IBM making their own racks of POWER8 systems
designed to be stacked tight in a data center and submitting that design to
the Open Compute project so they will fit in the big cloud data centers.
Business wise the big thing to swallow is the multi year support contracts
that currently get sold with the IBMi versus the metered month to month
pricing that the low end slices get sold by. No room for commission on the
low end, but at the same time its a total self service endeavor,
Justin
midrange.com
