#mainframedebate, twitter, mainframe blog and Enterprise Virtualization with z/VM

Some three years ago I had my little say about Twitter over here and back then (ages ago) I referred to an article on 'The four stages of the average Twitter user' and I think the article is still relevant. The four stages are : Confusion and Indignation, The first "Aha!" Moment, Remembering to Tweet and Thinking in 140 characters. Three years ago I was definitely a stage one person. But things - and people - evolve. I've discovered that lots of information and links to interesting blogs comes a lot faster via Twitter. So, I'm tweeting a reference to my blog posts myself, I'm checking the tweets of people I follow at least twice a day, I'm re-tweeting interesting stuff and this all mostly via Tweetdeck. Am I hooked to it, not really : I'm only using it for professional purposes and I haven't gone mobile ... yet.

And so my post starts with the hashtag #mainframedebate. For those not familiar with the term, a hashtag is a kind of search argument you can add to a tweet. If people search on it, they get all tweets around this topic. And, if all people start using that hashtag at the same moment, you can start a debate. Well, yesterday I received an invite from Steven Dickens (@StevenDickens3) which went like this :

@mwambeke planning to join us? #mainframedebate 5th Dec | 4pm GMT | 11am EST

So tomorrow at 4pm GMT you can join this debate on twitter posing as many questions as you like about the mainframe. You need a twitter account to participate but you can follow the discussion over here as well.
If you want some more information, you can have a look at the Mainframe and Hybrid Computing blog from Steven who also organized the first debate and wrote about it in a couple of posts last September.

It's free association today, so this topic also brings me to Stevens blog. I didn't know it before but Steven writes quite some interesting stuff on mainframe and cloud computing. His latest post is about Cloud Computing and the Cult of x86. He refers to a white paper 'Comparing Virtualization Alternatives - What's best for your business?' which you can find via this link. "The purpose of this analysis was to examine the real-world  impact on businesses that deploy IBM’s z/VM virtualization product, compared to those using UNIX or x86 products". If you want to make a stand for z/VM as virtualization platform this is a very useful document with lots of arguments and graphs illustrating every aspect of the comparison.

And . . . don't forget to join the #mainframedebate tomorrow !