[KLUG Advocacy] AIX's Funeral March

[Robert G. Brown]

>....IBM is playing so nice it is almost unbelievable. ... Thousands of
>developer hours down the drain, and not so much as a whimper.  Everyone
>on those lists was VERY impressed.
There are also mitigating factors. IBM had return for all the man-hours it 
had spent already, since it had been deployed in a number of places. IBM is 
used to redploying stuff, so they were not worried about it for that point of 
view. The other aspect of this is that IBM management understands some of the
risks in this technical environment and culture, and they understand that they
are not going to win every duel. Actually, they understand the MERIT of not 
winning every dual.

Internally, the IBM technical culture has always been somewhat more foregiving 
than many people realize. This is one reason that it has been so resilient over
the years.

>....you still don't see Linux on 100,000+ user file servers.  So
>we are a bit from the summit.  I think there are actually multiple
>summits.  Single-uber-compute and number-cruncher-clusters Linux seems
>higher up the mountain range than in the gotta-move-lotsa-blocks
>category.  The I/O seems to be the stickler.

That's true, mltiple summits. Remember, Mainframesstill have it over a lot of 
scaled UNIX servers in this category, but they're not where the action is, or 
the glitz. THey're humble backbone systems now... When Linux can run the MP
UNIX servers as well as the vendors own does (or close enough), the Suits will
have a simple turnover point that they understand.

....

>>Those of us who have been forecasting the start of the march...
>Thats me!  But it wasn't really that hard to call.
No, it wasn't hard to call, even with fewer friends in the right places, so to 
speak...
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---