

Amazon EC2 Running IBM Now Available - agotterer
http://aws.amazon.com/ibm/

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ShabbyDoo
This is a great signal to Amazon AWS customers that EC2 is endorsed for large
enterprise use. I'm not saying that it is ready or that it's actually
endorsed. However, that's what Blue shops will think.

I wonder if existing Websphere/DB2 users will see value in switching over
given that they've already paid for their licenses. Will IBM cut a three-way
deal with Amazon to reduce per-hour costs?

It's not likely that organizations considering EC2 for new development will
choose IBM on EC2 -- forward thinking folk aren't too keen on $20K/server
licenses when the Open Source stuff is better.

So, I'm left to conclude that Amazon is the winner here. They get credibility
with organizations that value what Big Blue says, and those organizations
might choose to deploy non-Blue systems on EC2.

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nradov
The entry-level editions of DB2 and WebSphere Application Server are both
free. They aren't open source, but you certainly don't have to pay $20K. DB2
has far superior XML support than any open source database, so forward
thinking developers can get a lot of value there for certain applications.
<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/community/>
<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/>

~~~
ShabbyDoo
I agree on the merits of DB2 -- I've used it before, and it seems pretty nice.

The free versions are great until you want to scale vertically:

    
    
        * Processor: 2 cores
        * Memory: 2 GB
    

That's the limits unless you pay for support. It goes up from there.

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andr
A quick way to increase your cloud expenditure by 64x - run WebSphere Portal
on your EC2 instances :)

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utnick
ahh no AIX on the cloud??

got my hopes or fears up

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andr
I'm sure mainframes by the hour are in the pipeline.

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ShabbyDoo
It's my understanding that they've been there for years. IBM will install a
mainframe with N cores even if a company only wants to pay for N/2 cores
initially. Then, the company can ask IBM to turn on the switch (or just turn
it on themselves and be honest?) and increase its capacity. No idea if they
can throttle back, say after Christmas, though. Of course, it's not a perfect
parallel as IBM parks the whole thing in the customer's own datacenter. I
think there may also be some pay-for-mips options as well.

~~~
phoxix2
IBM still charges big banks CPU time on the bank's own hardware.

Big bank backend apps are written to sleep as much as possible, and then do
everything all at once in order to save on CPU costs.

