From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 9/16/2025 5:49 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:47:08 +0100, David Wade wrote:   
   >>> Especially given that z/OS is actually several years older than VMS   
   >>> and is still going very strongly indeed.   
   >>>   
   >> I don't believe its as strong as you believe. Perhaps the Z platform   
   >> is, but z/OS is pretty much limited to traditional big banks and   
   >> airline reservation systems. These systems are all much larger that   
   >> most VMS systems so migration away is harder and riskier. The   
   >> hundreds of SMEs that once had a small IBM/370 like the 43xx or 9370   
   >> have gone.   
   >   
   > IBM as a whole has been losing money for years,   
      
   No.   
      
   IBM has made a profit every year for many many years.   
      
   It is possible they make their money on consulting and the z, i and p   
   businesses are loosing money, but the overall result is in black.   
      
   >                                            and laying off staff   
   > left and right. That’s not exactly the sign of a platform “going   
   > strongly”, is it.   
      
   It has become quite common for companies to make layoffs   
   even though they are profitable.   
      
   >                   The only recent bright spot in the company, that I   
   > know of, is its Red Hat acquisition.   
      
   RedHat was making a ton of money for many years. But they have problems   
   today.   
      
   RHEL was *the* Linux distro for enterprise on-prem. But the enterprises   
   are moving to cloud and Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Oracle do not want to   
   pay RedHat (they make their own RHEL clones).   
      
   And JBoss EAP has been mostly replaced by SpringBoot, Quarkus etc..   
      
   >> Another notable feature of Z hardware is the virtualisation   
   >> technology inherent in the "hardware". So it all comes with multiple   
   >> Logical PARtitions or LPARs which despite their name are more like   
   >> physical partitioning of the hardware, and zVM which uses the "Start   
   >> Interpretive Execution" (SIE) instruction to create Virtual   
   >> Machines.   
   >   
   > Does that sound like there are a limited number of slots for   
   > instantiating virtual machines? Modern virtualization architectures   
   > aren’t limited like that.   
      
   Hardware partitioning is different from virtualization.   
      
   But yes less flexible.   
      
   Arne   
      
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