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Look Twice, Maybe Three Times, at IBM's Claims for its z10 Mainframe Sun Blogger Jeff Savit Thinks Some 'Benchmarketing" Might Be Going On April 7, 2008, Volume 122, Issue 2 There's a good more than meets the eye in the claims IBM is making for its new z10 mainframe for which Big Blue claims a 30 to 1 ability to consolidate software licenses, among other things. Sun blogger Jeff Savit asserts further that this claim is based on 760 X2100 cores to 26 z10. The 760 to 26 is based on 3845 RPEs at 10% = 384.5 RPEs, which is approximately equivalent to the number of z10 RPEs at 90% when you use 20 RPEs equal to 1 MIP where MIPS are based on the LSPR curve for the z10. Got that? Well, read on, in the Sun blog, which points out that these measures were not taken under load, the only true measure of system performance. Savit contends that IBM used benchmarks recommended by its consultant, IDEAS, rather than an open benchmark such as SPEC or TPC and then specify that the competition's machines be evaluated at 10 percent CPU busy while the z10 is evaluated at 90 percent busy. Whose hardware would not look better under these circumstances, Savit asks. When Savit does the math and prices out the z10, he comes up with a figure that gives Sun a 7 to 1 price/performance advantage over the Big Blue mainframe. He points out that database servers are just as likely to be 90 percent CPU busy on one platform as on another. That assumption yields a 63 to 1 price/performance advantage for a set of Sun X2100 servers against the IBM z10. Savit pronounces this finding "pretty consistent" in his experience of mainframe-to-SPARC and mainframe-to-x64 conversions. If you throw in the cost of disk drives (which IBM did not) and add the CPU licenses ($20,000/CPU -- $520,000 in itself), then add maintenance and Linux licenses of $15,000 per CPU, you need to add another $390,000 per year. The Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) with its free "right to use" license gives a considerable nod to Sun, as does the start price of $51,000 for its servers. Now, if you're interested in the moral of the story, Savit posits several:
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Look Twice, Maybe Three Times, at IBM's Claims for its z10 Mainframe
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