zPrime : the saga continues

Once in a while the zPrime saga pops up again. Today I read a story about it on the DancingDinosaur blog of Alan Radding : 'Save through zPrime on System z'. It's an interesting post because for the first time (to my knowledge) it tells the story of a client who's actually using zPrime on its production site. It's about a European customer who has installed three zIIPs and is redirecting lots of workload to these zIIPs instead of running it on the traditional engines. A pity it doesn't tell us how many traditional engines they still use nor on what machine they are running (z10 EC or z10 BC). I'm assuming it's a z10 EC.

Alan Radding draws the parallel with the IBM Solution Editions which are the IBM alternative for making the mainframe cost competitive. But, to him, this is just not enough. IBM has to choose between losing mainframe clients (even with the Solution Editions) or cutting down its software costs as losing clients will even cost more to IBM. I must say it remains an interesting issue on how to keep people on the mainframe with or without zPrime.

One side note : I'm intrigued by the savings of "nearly $1 billion Euros each year" they are making with these three zIIPs. As they are redirecting workload from traditional engines to zIIP, I gather they save the MSUs of three engines. On a z10 EC that would be about 450 MSUs. As I reckon this is not a small shop, these are the upper, low(er) cost MSUs. This means they save about 80 million euro on software cost each month ? What kind of software do you have to run for this kind of bill. I don't know. I'd love to see some more information about this.

Still, an interesting story. As I always say, just check it out !

NOTE : As remarked in a comment, the article I refer to no longer seems to be there ?!