VM Penetration

You're not alone out there

Why?

Let's remember that, even though it's not mentioned much (nor ever was mentioned much), there's a lot of VM out there. Maybe fewer licenses than before, but that is not surprising considering that that there is increased competition for VM, and also, that there is a trend towards system consolidation to exploit economies of scale.

For example, at my company, we used to have nine New York area VM systems, counting subsidiaries. We now have one, but the reason is that workloads have been merged onto larger images with greater aggregate capacity, instead of multiple 4300s or 9370s. In the past 3 years, we upgraded this system from a 6-way multiprocessor to a 10-way, and this year (1999) to a 12 way with 2GB central storage, and 6GB of expanded. We also added a second image to support our Internet trading initiatives.

The above figures don't include the thousands of licenses discovered in the former Soviet block nations. The bootlegged copies of VM reveal the truth to the saying when price is no object, steal the very best!, and of course, they took VM.

Sad to say, some of the installations I list below have plans to "get off VM", often for ill-defined and poorly conceived reasons. What is interesting is how difficult these efforts seem to be and how rarely they succeed. I know of several attempts to get off VM systems that were multi-year, multi-million dollar failures, because the replacement systems simply couldn't do the job VM did so well. I understand, from contacts at other companies and at IBM, that this is not an uncommon result.

VM in Science and Education

This is a *very* partial list

VM in financial industry

That we have any systems (of any type), is remarkable considering how deeply this business sector bought into "get off mainframes".

VM in other industries

VM in Europe

Most of my examples describe VM use in the United States, since that's what I'm most familiar with. VM is stronger in IBM' European and Asia/Pacific markets than in the U.S., a fact I attributed to frugality or less money to waste on expensive computing environments.

VM at IBM

  1. IBM sells us MVS, but uses VM
  2. Key IBM applications reside on VM, including HONE, IBMLINK, and many others
  3. Key IBM sites (T.J. Watson Research, Almaden, Santa Theresa, San Jose)
  4. Many product developments emerge from VM. MVS DB2, TCP/IP, ADSM, LANRES based on VM products
  5. Esoteric environments, like 3745 microcode testing, on VM
  6. IBM CEO on PROFS on headquarters VM (presumably on Lotus notes now, but he paid $3 billion for the privilege)

These numbers are obsolete - the number of systems is smaller, while the aggregate MIPS is much higher, as IBM has both increased capacity and consolidated system images, just like its customers.

IBM is probably the largest VM customer in the world - they intensively exploit the productivity and low cost of VM. If you look at the service processor of your 3090 or ES/9000 system, you'll see a tiny VM system there as well!

I'm well aware that there's a move in IBM to convert their office workload from OfficeVision to Lotus Notes, presumably to have a better marketing story for Notes. As I mentioned earlier, I think this is an awful blunder.

No knowledgable IBMer I've spoken believes this conversion can succeed or be more effective, because IBM's OfficeVision/VM environment is so large and functionally rich, with many vital services that don't exist in Notes. As I mentioned earlier, Notes is substantially more expensive than VM even when you exclude the costs of upgrading the networks and PCs!

Just as many of its customers have done, IBM may be embarking on a conversion to get off a system whose value they don't fully understand, to get on a less functional and scalable system with much higher costs. When this effort implodes, as I expect, I think it would provide a wonderful marketing story for VM. Unfortunately, I expect that a failure here would be covered up instead. I certainly don't expect IBM's abandonment of one of their best known products to slow down the rush to Microsoft Exchange or mail read via a Netscape browser.

[ Prior page | Next page | Top page ]