Friday, May 25, 2007

Microsoft Host Integration Server?

Over on the Mainframe Blog, there's been an amusing chain of posts here, here, and here, on the topic of "What's the point of Microsoft Host Integration Server?". Just to pique people's interest, here is what Microsoft had to say about it:

I am most amused at the idea of mainframe guys arguing cost. In the interest of transparency, Timothy might also do the math on what the customer would save if they ripped the mainframe out altogether. Not only do they not need to buy HIS, but they can save a lot more on the recurring costs of the mainframe.

...

Last time I checked (and I haven’t been paying attention for a while), the mainframe was three orders of magnitude more expensive per MIP than x86 and was falling further and further behind. You’re crazy to put any new workload on the mainframe. This is why IBM is always peddling the fad of the moment on the mainframe to see if they can hoodwink people to maintaining or even increasing the workloads on their mainframe. Run Linux and Java on the mainframe, they say, never mind the fact that these cross platform approaches should drive people to the lowest cost hardware, not the highest cost.

...

To put this in perspective, we’ve just been through the biggest computing buildout ever in the last decade with the Web, and the mainframe is nowhere to be seen. Even when IBM has tried to pay customers to run portions of their web sites on a mainframe, they have failed.

Obviously it will be news to our z/OS WAS customers that running portions of their websites on a mainframe has "failed".

More evidence that when it comes to the mainframe, Microsoft just doesn't get it.



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