To VMware: (If you're reading this.) Not everyone lives on the West Coast, and I for one have no desire to go back to San Fran for next year's VMorld. Last year San Fran SUCKED. The venue was too small, the food horible, the party lame. The sessions (the ones that I could get into) were good, but the lines to get in were really frustrating. Vegas this year was 1,000,000 percent better. (Well, the Vegas party was also pretty lame but everything else was great.)
Even though Vegas was a lot of fun (and much better overal than the year before,) it's still a long trip for us East coasters. Why not switch between Orlando and Vegas every year?
You're missing the point. No matter how you slice it the x86 stuff (even the high end x86 stuff) is WAY cheaper than an IBM mainframe, and if I need some memory or a CPU or something I can find it practically anywhere. That was my only point, and IMHO it's one that really can't be argued.
As for the point that I think you were trying to make - of course architecting for redundancy is important. VMware makes that easy too. Even if one of the cheap nodes in my VMware cluster unexpectedly melts down the VMs will automatically restart on another node. I can take my time to repair the broken node and add it back into the cluster when I'm done - at that point DRS automatically rebalances load across the cluster. Same deal with adding capacity.
BTW, with ESXi you don't even need any local disks (which as you said are the most likely component to break down.) You run the hypervisor from flash memory and store the VMs on some sort of shared disk like SAN, iSCSI, or even NFS. (Using proper RAID technology and backup proccedures of course.)
Of course you'll also want to address disaster recovery and business continuity. Those are also something that VMware can help you accomplish with their SRM and VCB products.
Anyway, VMware is the ONLY company right now that has products to address EVERY aspect of virtualization. They can do it all and they do it all very well. Sure, mainframes still have a place in some datacenters but VMware is natural fit for almost every datacenter. That's my last post on the subject - I don't want to be accused of being a marketing drone or something. (I'm not - I'm just a happy customer.)
Yep - the "cutover" happens faster that the TCP timeout window. The connection stays alive, and even if a packet is lost it simply gets resent when the ACK goes missing.
Well, you can run whatever runs on Linux on top of a mainframe.
Only if you recompile those apps to run on the special versions of Linux that run on mainframes. Let's see: I can recompile my app to run on some weird offshoot of Linux on expensive, proprietary hardware or I can take it and "P2V" it onto VMware running which ever flavor of mainstream Linux I prefer? Oh, and I can P2V my Windows apps onto that same VMware cluster? And all that for a fraction of the price? Sold.
Just to be clear I'm not saying that the mainframe has no place in the modern datacenter, I'm just saying that VMware is a better fit in many situations. (And it's certainly an order of magnitude cheaper.)
And if you're a Fortune 500 corporation, chances are your existing billing and accounting applications are *already* running on a mainframe. That is, after all, what the old girl is built for.
Not sure where the F500 argument came from, but since 486 out of those 500 already use VMware I think they're already sold. (All 100 of the F100, BTW.) http://www.vmware.com/customers/
In any case, my original point remains. Mainframes are expensive and proprietary whereas VMware is cheap and offers the flexibility to run whatever app on whatever OS you choose. This new VDC-OS stuff just builds on an already good thing. We'll be happy to renew our ELA when it comes up next year.
Maybe, but IBM mainframes don't use cheap off the shelf components that you can pick up at the local Fry's. You can build a small VMware cluster with HA, DRS, etc for a few thousand bucks. How much is an IBM mainframe these days?
Once you have that VMware cluster you can run your choice of 70+ operating systems and millions of apps on it. Can you run Exchange on a mainframe? Sieble? Your existing billing and accounting app?
Wrong. It's an umbrella concept that that builds on existing products. VMware has been around for over a decade and has been shipping products that whole time.
A true conservative would say that it's the people, not the states or any other entity, that hold the power. In fact in this case that's exactly what the true conservative justices did say. Unfortunately they were out-voted by the lesser justices.
Try reading a basic macroeconomics book some time.
Seems personal to me....
That was covered by your MIS / BSBA double major right?
Oops, there's another one.
Demonstrate some intelligence and I'll treat you accordingly.
Three for three. Nice.
If MS releases it as a standalone product, if they don't give it away, price it at $50, bundle it with Office, or basically give it away by bundling with OEM contracts then I'd agree.
Read it. Still seems that I got the gist of it....
You brought up non-profit projects that are the only ones left in a different market that MS has already decimated using the aforementioned illegal tactics and one non-profit project that exists in the space we were discussing.
Really? Microsoft has "decimated" Adobe with a product that was just released as a beta today? Are they really that "evil?"
You don't see any hypocrisy in claiming I prejudged you based upon a few lines in a forum and then you making a prejudiced statement about my supposed political affiliations.....
Nope. I brought forth a question based on observations. If I'm incorrect, I stand corrected. Maybe you just abstained from the process because all of them are "so evil?"
There you go with the insults again. Typical Slashdot poster - insult the other guy, then flame them on spelling.
Your original premise was the it would be OK for MS to release a Photoshop competitor as long as it wasn't too cheap. I brought up other potential competitors that were also cheap (free, actually,) any you responded with insults and some lame "Microsoft bribes governments" line.
I tried to be rational and open to your viewpoint. I didn't flame you personally. Yet, somehow I get branded unintelligent when all that you know about me comes from about four paragraphs that I wrote on some internet forum. Let me guess you were a Dean, then Kerry supporter?
Try reading a basic macroeconomics book some time.
Try keeping cheap insults out of your arguments. I took micro and macro as part of my MIS / BSBA double major. I know what a monopoly is. I also know what socialism is.
It's ammusing to me that people seem to belive that using the gov to punish MS by forcing them to sell products a certain way is somehow OK, but when the shoe was on the other foot people scream "Microsoft is bribing the gov."
So fair competition == ignoring your own market advantage? And to enforce this "fair" competition, we should have the govenment force MS to charge a specific price for the software?
Should the govt also force a price on Gimp, OpenOffice, etc, so as not to allow "unfair" competition to MS?
Or maybe it will bring the over-inflated prices down to a reasonable level. Photoshop is $600. Illustrator is $500. Why? Because for a intents and purposes, Adobe has a monopoly on high-end digital image manipulation software.
If MS releases a new product that does most of what both Photoshop and Illustrator can do, and prices it at $550, is that realy unreasonable? Is that "below cost?" I doubt that very much.
Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled - raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently.
The fact that several mods decided that you post was insightful makes me very uncomfortable with the quality of mods lately. If you read ANY of the TFAs linked, you would see that in this case the gun in question has nothing to do with "maim and kill." In this case, the "rail gun" (it's not really even a rail gun, but that's a whole different issue,) has more in common with a staple gun than my trusty.45 ACP.
I use mine to download movie previews and listen to streaming audio all the time (assuming that I'm in an EVDO area.) I've never had a problem with Verizon shutting me down.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I will say one more thing.
To VMware: (If you're reading this.) Not everyone lives on the West Coast, and I for one have no desire to go back to San Fran for next year's VMorld. Last year San Fran SUCKED. The venue was too small, the food horible, the party lame. The sessions (the ones that I could get into) were good, but the lines to get in were really frustrating. Vegas this year was 1,000,000 percent better. (Well, the Vegas party was also pretty lame but everything else was great.)
Even though Vegas was a lot of fun (and much better overal than the year before,) it's still a long trip for us East coasters. Why not switch between Orlando and Vegas every year?
Please - no more San Fran!
You're missing the point. No matter how you slice it the x86 stuff (even the high end x86 stuff) is WAY cheaper than an IBM mainframe, and if I need some memory or a CPU or something I can find it practically anywhere. That was my only point, and IMHO it's one that really can't be argued.
As for the point that I think you were trying to make - of course architecting for redundancy is important. VMware makes that easy too. Even if one of the cheap nodes in my VMware cluster unexpectedly melts down the VMs will automatically restart on another node. I can take my time to repair the broken node and add it back into the cluster when I'm done - at that point DRS automatically rebalances load across the cluster. Same deal with adding capacity.
BTW, with ESXi you don't even need any local disks (which as you said are the most likely component to break down.) You run the hypervisor from flash memory and store the VMs on some sort of shared disk like SAN, iSCSI, or even NFS. (Using proper RAID technology and backup proccedures of course.)
Of course you'll also want to address disaster recovery and business continuity. Those are also something that VMware can help you accomplish with their SRM and VCB products.
Anyway, VMware is the ONLY company right now that has products to address EVERY aspect of virtualization. They can do it all and they do it all very well. Sure, mainframes still have a place in some datacenters but VMware is natural fit for almost every datacenter. That's my last post on the subject - I don't want to be accused of being a marketing drone or something. (I'm not - I'm just a happy customer.)
Yep - the "cutover" happens faster that the TCP timeout window. The connection stays alive, and even if a packet is lost it simply gets resent when the ACK goes missing.
Well, you can run whatever runs on Linux on top of a mainframe.
Only if you recompile those apps to run on the special versions of Linux that run on mainframes. Let's see: I can recompile my app to run on some weird offshoot of Linux on expensive, proprietary hardware or I can take it and "P2V" it onto VMware running which ever flavor of mainstream Linux I prefer? Oh, and I can P2V my Windows apps onto that same VMware cluster? And all that for a fraction of the price? Sold.
Just to be clear I'm not saying that the mainframe has no place in the modern datacenter, I'm just saying that VMware is a better fit in many situations. (And it's certainly an order of magnitude cheaper.)
And if you're a Fortune 500 corporation, chances are your existing billing and accounting applications are *already* running on a mainframe. That is, after all, what the old girl is built for.
Not sure where the F500 argument came from, but since 486 out of those 500 already use VMware I think they're already sold. (All 100 of the F100, BTW.) http://www.vmware.com/customers/
In any case, my original point remains. Mainframes are expensive and proprietary whereas VMware is cheap and offers the flexibility to run whatever app on whatever OS you choose. This new VDC-OS stuff just builds on an already good thing. We'll be happy to renew our ELA when it comes up next year.
Maybe, but IBM mainframes don't use cheap off the shelf components that you can pick up at the local Fry's. You can build a small VMware cluster with HA, DRS, etc for a few thousand bucks. How much is an IBM mainframe these days?
Once you have that VMware cluster you can run your choice of 70+ operating systems and millions of apps on it. Can you run Exchange on a mainframe? Sieble? Your existing billing and accounting app?
Wrong. It's an umbrella concept that that builds on existing products. VMware has been around for over a decade and has been shipping products that whole time.
dude - he said BUD, as in "BIG" ugly dish.... We're not talking about DirectTV here....
Did you really expect 50 Cent's game to be good? I mean, his GAME isn't even all that good....
"Don't you know that you are a shooting star? Don't you know?"
Did you try to run this one under Windows using a non-admin account? It works just fine....
Linux may be superior to Windows for lots of reasons, but "because you can run it with reduced privileges" isn't one of them.
This hits all three....
Attraction vs. waist size would be more representative
I want to see Los Angeles maps of the action in James Ellroy's novels, and a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.
It's not in LA, but Pedro's South of the Border (in South Carolina) would have to be on the list.
Unless you can afford to backup to off site spindles (and few small businesses can,) off site tape is still the way to go.
Older DLT Drives seem to be the best value right now, but if you need more capacity you could always go with Super DLT or LTO.
A true conservative would say that it's the people, not the states or any other entity, that hold the power. In fact in this case that's exactly what the true conservative justices did say. Unfortunately they were out-voted by the lesser justices.
Try reading a basic macroeconomics book some time.
Seems personal to me....
That was covered by your MIS / BSBA double major right?
Oops, there's another one.
Demonstrate some intelligence and I'll treat you accordingly.
Three for three. Nice.
If MS releases it as a standalone product, if they don't give it away, price it at $50, bundle it with Office, or basically give it away by bundling with OEM contracts then I'd agree.
Read it. Still seems that I got the gist of it....
You brought up non-profit projects that are the only ones left in a different market that MS has already decimated using the aforementioned illegal tactics and one non-profit project that exists in the space we were discussing.
Really? Microsoft has "decimated" Adobe with a product that was just released as a beta today? Are they really that "evil?"
You don't see any hypocrisy in claiming I prejudged you based upon a few lines in a forum and then you making a prejudiced statement about my supposed political affiliations.....
Nope. I brought forth a question based on observations. If I'm incorrect, I stand corrected. Maybe you just abstained from the process because all of them are "so evil?"
There you go with the insults again. Typical Slashdot poster - insult the other guy, then flame them on spelling.
Your original premise was the it would be OK for MS to release a Photoshop competitor as long as it wasn't too cheap. I brought up other potential competitors that were also cheap (free, actually,) any you responded with insults and some lame "Microsoft bribes governments" line.
I tried to be rational and open to your viewpoint. I didn't flame you personally. Yet, somehow I get branded unintelligent when all that you know about me comes from about four paragraphs that I wrote on some internet forum. Let me guess you were a Dean, then Kerry supporter?
Try reading a basic macroeconomics book some time.
Try keeping cheap insults out of your arguments. I took micro and macro as part of my MIS / BSBA double major. I know what a monopoly is. I also know what socialism is.
It's ammusing to me that people seem to belive that using the gov to punish MS by forcing them to sell products a certain way is somehow OK, but when the shoe was on the other foot people scream "Microsoft is bribing the gov."
Schemas will be open, fully documented and carry a "perpetual" royalty free license.
By the way, TechEd is this week, which is probably why we're seeing so much MS news. (No, I'm not there - I have real work to do.)
So fair competition == ignoring your own market advantage? And to enforce this "fair" competition, we should have the govenment force MS to charge a specific price for the software?
Should the govt also force a price on Gimp, OpenOffice, etc, so as not to allow "unfair" competition to MS?
It saves to XPR by default, but you can export to most of the common formats. If I'm not mistaken, this is similar to the way Photoshop works.
That and the recent TechEd announcement about MS moving to XML based formats for Office (submitted, rejected,) weakens your argument severely.
Being able to save as PDF is great and all, but it looks like this thing still has a ways to go before being useful.
Umm, it's a BETA. Isn't that the point?
Or maybe it will bring the over-inflated prices down to a reasonable level. Photoshop is $600. Illustrator is $500. Why? Because for a intents and purposes, Adobe has a monopoly on high-end digital image manipulation software.
If MS releases a new product that does most of what both Photoshop and Illustrator can do, and prices it at $550, is that realy unreasonable? Is that "below cost?" I doubt that very much.
Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled - raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently.
.45 ACP.
The fact that several mods decided that you post was insightful makes me very uncomfortable with the quality of mods lately. If you read ANY of the TFAs linked, you would see that in this case the gun in question has nothing to do with "maim and kill." In this case, the "rail gun" (it's not really even a rail gun, but that's a whole different issue,) has more in common with a staple gun than my trusty
This gets modded as "Insightful?" Slashdot needs a new mod category - "Political," so that comments like this can be filtered out....
I use mine to download movie previews and listen to streaming audio all the time (assuming that I'm in an EVDO area.) I've never had a problem with Verizon shutting me down.