Your company's choice for virtualization : z/VM of course

If you're looking into virtualization and you still think the mainframe is too expensive or if you're eager to virtualize or continue to virtualize with z/VM, then take a look at this study from Solitaire Interglobal. It makes a comparison between z/VM and virtualization solutions on Unix and x86. it's based upon the input of almost 80,000 (mostly larger) customer sites. It takes two angles for looking into it : the business perspective on the one hand and the technical perspective on the other hand. If you want to build a case for z/VM, you might use this as a basis for structuring your arguments.

Let me walk you quickly through some of the topics that are covered. First of all there's the business perspective.

• Customer satisfaction : "The more complex or volatile the environment, the more all
  aspects of customers reported high satisfaction with z/VM".
• Total Cost of Ownership : this reminds me of this other document that unfortuately enough has not been updated since 2004, the Dinosaur Myth, that also proves that when you look at TCO instead of TCA you get a completely different picture.
• Staffing : "Staffing is far more effective with z/VM, the same number of people can support up to 3 times more VM images"
• Availability : "The more virtualized the environment, the more critical the availability becomes. z/VM requires fewer platform and VM reboots than competitive platforms with very little downtime, either planned or unplanned".
• Agility : "z/VM users are reporting faster deployment times by as much as 5 times".

The second part covers the comparison from a technical perspective.

• System Efficiency : "The z/VM platform allows more IT workload to be done with fewer overall resources".
• Security : "z/VM supports all forms of security control and isolation, including those required for highly secure implementations, separating resources for memory, network, I/O and access".

I didn't cover all topics but it gives you a pretty good idea where this study is heading at. If you follow the link, there's a 9-page management summary and of course also the 36-page full report.

As I always say, just check it out !