[hk.com]

Given that Solid State Disks are taking over and they deliver the throughputs IO transactions per second to even laptops, that these big companies provide with their multimillion dollar products, why aren't people shorting these stocks?

Comoditization of throughputs and IO ops/s are here they should be stocks to ditch.

[jgl]

Because EMC and Netapp don't sell hard drives? They sell systems that connect storage building blocks (hard drives) into conveniently managed, centralised lumps that sometimes provide remote mirroring. Whether the building blocks are spinning platters or solid state isn't so important.

Even if the stocks to decline, shorting with a horizon of, say, 5 years is going to be very expensive.

I'll be interesting to see how the big hard drive companies handle the shift though.

[hk.com]

Ok you have answered WHY they stock doesn't drop, it is an incorrect perception.

The reality as to why companies have to select their products are being removed because of solid state disks.

Their super features, their turbo IO's are now being delivered by commodity drives. Others that such as the management like snapshotting, etc and features are many now done at OS like Solaris ZFS and even lesser filesystems with tools can do a great deal. In fact those have been around for a while but what we didn't have have are these crazy 10's of thosaands IO transactioins on packaged on standard interfaces like SATA.

A structural change is happening in the storage market right under our noses.

[KnowItAll]

Given that Solid State Disks are taking over and they deliver the throughputs IO transactions per second to even laptops, that these big companies provide with their multimillion dollar products, why aren't people shorting these stocks?

Are you running out to replace your U320s with SSDs?

You also ignore that these guys have a lot of rocket science and scientists working for them. Sales people, consulting etc etc ...

Same old reason why the "PC" has not yet replaced the mainframe.

[jgl]

I agree that there's a big change occurring in storage- it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Having been a storage consumer in a big ibank, I never really thought products by EMC or Netapp were ever about throughput. It was always about enterprise-level reliability and management. Some of this could probably have been handled at an OS level, but it made more sense to let dedicated storage admins handle it. And compared to some other industries, ibanks are pretty light users of storage- the pharmaceutical guys had storage concerns that completely eclipsed our petty requirements.

[hk.com]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

Are you running out to replace your U320s with SSDs?

You also ignore that these guys have a lot of rocket science and scientists working for them. Sales people, consulting etc etc ...

Same old reason why the "PC" has not yet replaced the mainframe.

Replace SCSI? Yes, I am. I will have to manage far less drives to get the far more IO throughputs. What I will be doing is putting SSD drives iin SCSI craddles and then use RAID controllers just in case the flash is not as reliable.

Compare it with the fax. lots of scientists making Fax machines, sales people, paper supplies and then email came along. It does the same thing just faster cheaper.

Mainframes? Errr... other than in scrap yards, I've not seen one for years. The PC has taken over.

Originally Posted by jgl

I agree that there's a big change occurring in storage- it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Having been a storage consumer in a big ibank, I never really thought products by EMC or Netapp were ever about throughput. It was always about enterprise-level reliability and management. Some of this could probably have been handled at an OS level, but it made more sense to let dedicated storage admins handle it. And compared to some other industries, ibanks are pretty light users of storage- the pharmaceutical guys had storage concerns that completely eclipsed our petty requirements.

In terms of management, it is all being commoditized. Even sun has open sourced their Hierarchical storage management system. Open source, rsync, rdiff, rsnapshot work like magic and those are free. Drive failures and raid are now getting done at software level. All that was needed was blazing speed disk throughputs and IO ops/s and that is here. Their revenues and market shares, customer counts have to decrease.

The changes will get to the banking industry.

[PDLM]

Originally Posted by hk.com

Mainframes? Errr... other than in scrap yards, I've not seen one for years. The PC has taken over.

Then you're not looking in the right places. IBM has over 10,000 system z mainframes installed worldwide. It spends over US$1bn each year on mainframe R&D, and its mainframe business continues to grow revenue by about 5% per year on average. There are well over three times as many MIPS of IBM mainframe computing power out there now as there were in 2000.

But the overlap with the marketplace for second hand routers is minimal so your ignorance is understandable.

[hk.com]

Originally Posted by PDLM

Then you're not looking in the right places. IBM has over 10,000 system z mainframes installed worldwide. It spends over US$1bn each year on mainframe R&D, and its mainframe business continues to grow revenue by about 5% per year on average. There are well over three times as many MIPS of IBM mainframe computing power out there now as there were in 2000.

But the overlap with the marketplace for second hand routers is minimal so your ignorance is understandable.

I have sold a new sealed IBM mainframe in the past. Very hard to sell normally have to sell them back to the US.

I think I am looking in the right places and I mostly seem them being dismantled and loaded on trucks to be scrapped. How many of these do we get to see in Hong Kong. How many are there in Hong Kong? Even AS/400's HP9000's and Sun is all being tossed out and replaced for Intel boxes. How many does your company have?


Revenue growth of 5%.
So what? That is inline with most hardware vendors it is not some amazing proof.

10,000 machines?
Big deal! What ever way you want to measure it is irrelevant. In No# of units? Computer power maybe? Peanuts. How many Mainframes do you guys use?

The number PC's and servers in companies is still increasing.

3 times the growth of MIPS in 8 years?
That statistic is just so irrelevant. Want to compare the MIPS growth on an Intel based PC? Want to compare it in terms of total MIPS of all PC's in use vs these 10000 mainframes?

Whilst we can't talk MIPS when comparing with Intel in terms of performance from using Spec benchmarks is more reasonable. Intel CPU's performance did that growth in 4 years if we go by single core CPUs.

Spec changed their benchmarks in 2006 so we can't do fair comparision between the 2000 and 2006. I guess the computer power Intel per cpu has gone up at least 10 times. in the past 8 years.

Going by the top 500 supercomputers where these mainframes should be leading, they are overshadowed by Intel which accounts for 84% of cpus.
Processor Family share for 11/2007 | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites

The main place that mainframes are beating PC's based servers are on power consumption, people can save 30-40% of their operating costs.

I think in the future it is likely that we switch back to centralized servers. I am seeing companies moving to thin clients, Sun Ray, Wise etc due to the on going costs of administering and managing workstations.

Give me a call if you want any IBM Z machines, they run Linux!

Back to topic.
It is looking like Netapp is still on the rise whilst EMC is not doing that well.

[KnowItAll]

>> How many Mainframes do you guys use?

Not me personally, but I could name about 50 companies IN HK that rely on mainframes for their core business.

HSBC, Standard Chartered, BoC, Cathay, CLP, Hong Kong Electric, Housing Authority, Immigration, Cosco.. etc etc ..

I recall my first meeting with one of these companies in '93 .. "we're migrating from the mainframe in a few years". Not yet ...

Point being, reliablity, security, scalability... terms and concepts that are also associated with the EMC / NetApp type gear, which frequently connect to the big iron boxes .. more frequent than you'd think.

>> we switch back to centralized servers + thin clients

i.e Big IBM boxes with TN3270?

Lets not dig a grave we cant crawl out of, just for the sake of arguing.

No clue why, but this whole thread is starting to sound like the email that Larry from Oracle got to you about a decade too late ..

[jgl]

EMC's take on SSD:

EMC: the age of high-end flash has begun | The Register