> Carl did some GREAT research on pricing on an S/390.
> 
> Carl, can you share the results with the LUG?

talked to a salesdroid from MSI (?), about pricing for a Multiprise
3000. (Multiprises are smaller S/390s).

a single-processor Multiprise 3000 (probably a brand-new Generation 6
model), with 144GB of data disk (in addition to the OS disk space), is
$237,000. (list price).
an additional processor costs $280,000
monthly maintenance is $1866 (free for first year)

VIF (simplified VM, which will only run Linux) is a one-time fee of $20,000
VM for Linux is a one-time fee of $45,000. this is a new thing to me...
apparently it's VM; but will only run Linux. this way they can sell it at
the different pricing scheme without annoying the traditional VM shops, who
pay $9,000/mo for VM (which can also run VM, VSE, and OS/390).

maintenance for the OS'es comes to about 15-20% of original cost, per year.

mind you; it sounds like these prices are very negotiable.

so here's the sums for a minimal model, capable of running a theoretically
unlimited amount of Linux images (probably in the thousands in actual
practice; tho you might not get much work out of them):
$237,000 base system
+$20,000 VIF
--------------------
$257,000

plus recurring costs of:
$1866 monthly hardware maintenance
+$416 (software maintenance: 20% of $20,000/12)
-------------------------
$2282 /mo

Used machines are also an option. I didn't remember to ask about those.
those might be a notable savings; especially if we aren't insisting on the
latest & greatest hardware.

leasing is also an option; tho I didn't get prices on that. (probably not
cheap either).

keep in mind that buying one of these things is like buying a car... it
sounds like you can wheedle and cajole quite a bit for better prices.

> You can track everything from context switches to memory utilization on a 390.
> So, there would probably have to some sort of caps on things.

	if you want to do this kind of monitoring; you'll need to get a copy
of VM, I think. ($40,000-$45,000 list price; I think the salesdroid said two
different numbers in two different sentences). this offers you much more
power & flexibility ("hey, let's mess with Yaron's head and flip live bits
in his virtual processor; see if we can make his OS do wacky things to
him!"); but at the cost of a *lot* longer learning curve. (from what little
I know; it's about as far removed from UNIX and Windows as OS/400 is, if
you've ever touched that.)

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700