7 ms·

When it must be so expensive its not even "call us", but "Schedule a Consultation". You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?

by Andys 4y ago

nix23 4y ago
Pff it's IBM you buy the Consultant with it, he sits in the lower rack and has spacefood rations for 5 years, then you have to do maintenance and the consultant get exchanged and retired. But!! No shutdown needed.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  Can they be put on a generator bike? I’m concerned about their carbon footprint.
  - hyperdimension 4y ago
    What carbon footprint? The consultants are not much more than sequestered carbon! (A fancy insult, now that I think of it. Nice.)
  - nix23 4y ago
    >carbon footprint. They have zeolite in the rack (like in the ISS). The food is also non methane producing.
- broodbucket 4y ago
  Nonsense, there would be at least one more redundant consultant if not two. Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, they'll fail over and someone will show up to replace what failed. Enterprise tech is sometimes cool.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >Nonsense, there would be at least one more redundant consultant if not two. Gosh you are right i always forget him. >Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, HP's EVA Device did that too, so sometimes a Engineer calls you and ask's if "we" have time to update the firmware, not even HP engineers are allowed to do EVA updates...just specialized EVA ones.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
This is pretty standard across much of the enterprise world. The sales team just has to earn their commission. Indeed, even when they have publicly listed prices, it's usually possible to negotiate a substantial discount by dealing directly with the sales team. Like 50% is often possible.
- Andys 4y ago
  Yeah, I know. Just poking fun of their level of hype being such that they make it sound like you are one of a privileged few if they even take your call and allow you to buy this apparent masterpiece.
  - broodbucket 4y ago
    The general rule of thumb is if the product page says "contact us" instead of a price, you can't afford it. It is a shame though. IBM has no idea how to sell to anyone other that gigantic megacorps - which, fair enough, but they could probably pick up a lot of sales to medium-sized businesses if they weren't so old-fashioned about everything
    - wmf 4y ago
      Medium-sized businesses can easily buy IBM stuff through VARs. (If your VAR does not recommend any IBM products, that's a different situation.) If you're smart enough to buy IT directly then you're probably also smart enough to realize that very few IBM products are good.
      - artificialLimbs 4y ago
        Our IBM was the ONLY thing that didn't get vaporized when we got ransomwared. Tens of linux boxes, MS servers, 3rd party who knows what the f they are, all gone. Poof.
  - Stranger43 4y ago
    To be honest you should not be buying this level of equipment "off the peg" without a serious pre-sales process of evaluation and sizing unless you have significant prior experience, and the people with that experience will already have some kind partner agreement in place. It's much more like placing an order for an container full of severs based on an reference design from an OEM then going to HPE or Dell for a commodity x64 system.
wmf 4y ago
If you buy an IBM mainframe you'll have a very attentive full-time account manager for life. I did a ride-along with such an account manager once when I was working at IBM and it was eye-opening.
- christophilus 4y ago
  When the cloud was first really taking off, I had a friend who swore by his mainframes, touting high reliability, great performance, excellent customer service. It would be interesting to do a cost comparison.
  - wmf 4y ago
    I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Mainframes can still be "cost effective" for, well, the type of companies that buy mainframes heh. It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
    - hestefisk 4y ago
      Lots and lots of banks (and non banks) rely on IBM mainframe still and will for years to come. They have done this calculation on whether to replatform and migrate several times. It’s very hard to stand up a positive npv for such an idea unfortunately. I guess greenfield is very different.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - dillab2 4y ago
        The thing is, there aren't really any successful greenfield developments in these types of business spaces. So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into (which I think is at least partially true), or the type of computing they do actually benefits from being done on a mainframe (which is also true given that there is a lot of record processing for these industries, and not too much serving lots of web requests to users). Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

When it must be so expensive its not even "call us", but "Schedule a Consultation". You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?

by Andys 4y ago

When it must be so expensive its not even "call us", but "Schedule a Consultation". You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?

nix23 4y ago

Pff it's IBM you buy the Consultant with it, he sits in the lower rack and has spacefood rations for 5 years, then you have to do maintenance and the consultant get exchanged and retired. But!! No shutdown needed.

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
Can they be put on a generator bike? I’m concerned about their carbon footprint.
- hyperdimension 4y ago
  What carbon footprint? The consultants are not much more than sequestered carbon! (A fancy insult, now that I think of it. Nice.)
- nix23 4y ago
  >carbon footprint. They have zeolite in the rack (like in the ISS). The food is also non methane producing.
broodbucket 4y ago
Nonsense, there would be at least one more redundant consultant if not two. Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, they'll fail over and someone will show up to replace what failed. Enterprise tech is sometimes cool.
- nix23 4y ago
  >Nonsense, there would be at least one more redundant consultant if not two. Gosh you are right i always forget him. >Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, HP's EVA Device did that too, so sometimes a Engineer calls you and ask's if "we" have time to update the firmware, not even HP engineers are allowed to do EVA updates...just specialized EVA ones.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

This is pretty standard across much of the enterprise world. The sales team just has to earn their commission. Indeed, even when they have publicly listed prices, it's usually possible to negotiate a substantial discount by dealing directly with the sales team. Like 50% is often possible.

Andys 4y ago
Yeah, I know. Just poking fun of their level of hype being such that they make it sound like you are one of a privileged few if they even take your call and allow you to buy this apparent masterpiece.
- broodbucket 4y ago
  The general rule of thumb is if the product page says "contact us" instead of a price, you can't afford it. It is a shame though. IBM has no idea how to sell to anyone other that gigantic megacorps - which, fair enough, but they could probably pick up a lot of sales to medium-sized businesses if they weren't so old-fashioned about everything
  - wmf 4y ago
    Medium-sized businesses can easily buy IBM stuff through VARs. (If your VAR does not recommend any IBM products, that's a different situation.) If you're smart enough to buy IT directly then you're probably also smart enough to realize that very few IBM products are good.
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      Our IBM was the ONLY thing that didn't get vaporized when we got ransomwared. Tens of linux boxes, MS servers, 3rd party who knows what the f they are, all gone. Poof.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  To be honest you should not be buying this level of equipment "off the peg" without a serious pre-sales process of evaluation and sizing unless you have significant prior experience, and the people with that experience will already have some kind partner agreement in place. It's much more like placing an order for an container full of severs based on an reference design from an OEM then going to HPE or Dell for a commodity x64 system.

wmf 4y ago

If you buy an IBM mainframe you'll have a very attentive full-time account manager for life. I did a ride-along with such an account manager once when I was working at IBM and it was eye-opening.

christophilus 4y ago
When the cloud was first really taking off, I had a friend who swore by his mainframes, touting high reliability, great performance, excellent customer service. It would be interesting to do a cost comparison.
- wmf 4y ago
  I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Mainframes can still be "cost effective" for, well, the type of companies that buy mainframes heh. It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    Lots and lots of banks (and non banks) rely on IBM mainframe still and will for years to come. They have done this calculation on whether to replatform and migrate several times. It’s very hard to stand up a positive npv for such an idea unfortunately. I guess greenfield is very different.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dillab2 4y ago
      The thing is, there aren't really any successful greenfield developments in these types of business spaces. So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into (which I think is at least partially true), or the type of computing they do actually benefits from being done on a mainframe (which is also true given that there is a lot of record processing for these industries, and not too much serving lots of web requests to users). Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]