[Info-vax] IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/25/2018 1:52 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 11/25/2018 8:28 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>> There are many such gotchas under the covers. Most with experience
>> are choosing "private clouds" which is essentially the same as internal
>> shared services (one IT group for all company depts) with a
>> "provisioning on demand" product added on to their existing VMware farms.
> 
> Uh, please help a dumb old polock here, just a bit.  Isn't this the way 
> it was, back in the day, the company IT department provided services and 
> such for the company?
> 
> Tell ya what I think, not that anybody gives a damn, I think nothing has 
> changed, just a bunch of marketing types constantly coming up with new 
> names for the same old things, just to get weak minds to spend some 
> money with them.
> 
> The tech has improved, but, we're still doing the same basic things.

[sorry for replying to very old post, but topic is still relevant]

I guess it depends on the abstraction level you are looking at.

If the abstraction level is very high aka "Providing computing resources
for the company" then you are right. Same thing.

If you dig deeper into the specifics then it becomes very different.

40 years ago: you contacted the IT department and told them that you
needed 2 new VAX'es. They charged you a fortune and it took months
to get the systems ordered, delivered and configured. It was a project
with participation from both business unit and IT department.

Today: you start your browser and go to the self service page,
you request 200 VM's and upload standard images. After an hour
everything is running. End of day you remove instances as they
were only needed for the day. End of month your department
get charged for 200 x 7 = 1400 VM hours. No one from the
IT department does anything as everything is fully automated.

Arne