Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The zPrime discussion - Violation vs. Exploitation ?

Here's an interesting blog entry at Data Direct which was brought to my attention by Mike Nelson : 'Violation vs. Exploitation: IBM Clarifies Authorized Use of IBM Specialty Engines/Processors' by Gregg Willhoit, Chief Architect at Progress DataDirect.

There was already a letter form Mark Anzani (IBM) circulating regarding IBMs position towards zPrime, which you can also find on the DataDirect blog. Apparantly Gregg Willhoit asked for more information and he now reproduces a new letter by Mark Anzani on his blog. You can read it over here.

I think the message remains the same : "non-Eligible Workload running on the Specialty Engine will cause the software running on the Specialty Engine to be chargeable" (first letter) allthough perhaps a little bit more explicitely stated in the second letter : "To be clear, if customers use Specialty Processors/Engines to process workloads beyond the IBM authorizations, then customers must pay the hardware, software and maintenance pricing associated with full CP capacity". In addition Mark Anzani says "In particular, IBM sells (...) MES upgrades for customers who wish to convert Specialty Engines/Processors to CP capacity in order to execute general purpose workloads".

Still, I'm curious how this will turn out in the long run. Aren't you ?

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