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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-27 13:38:15 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> While the technology is improving, the concepts of what you are talking 
> about has not changed - its only the improved GUI's and level of 
> automation that has improved.
> What you are talking about is capacity on demand (COD) i.e. pay as 
> required when additional resources are required.
> Outsourcers, vendors and many platforms, including OpenVMS and Alpha's, 
> have had an early version of COD or iCOD (instant capacity on demand) 
> decades ago.

The capacity-on-demand scheme in OpenVMS (iCAP, etc) was as much about 
mitigating the software licensing costs than about adding hardware 
capacity.

iCAP throttled the existing and usually-over-provisioned hardware 
capacity, allowing the customer to choose when to pay for that capacity 
and for how long.

The whole scheme exists solely because of OpenVMS licensing costs.

A modern form of filling the backplane with epoxy.

It's a form of arbitrage, built upon a pricing-related product differentiation.

For iCAP to even work, the folks must have already installed hardware 
with the necessary capacity.

Hopefully with the necessary peak capacity.

Purchasing excess hardware capacity and never using it gets expensive, too.

Pooling that excess hardware capacity across users and app environments 
is far more interesting, and OpenVMS itself has little (no) concept of 
what's involved with that.

How to shed load too, for those cases when priority processing needs 
more capacity than is available in the pool.

And this capacity-acquisition and load-balancing and load-shedding is 
all part of higher-end distributed process scheduling and as is being 
discussed else-thread, too.

Profiles, a complete replacement for the installer, app bundles, 
isolation, self-configuration, etc.

iCAP or otherwise don't even approach what's necessary to make this 
work well for an end-user.

iCAP is about as relevant as is LMF to what's involved with easily and 
quickly booting as a guest in a private or in public shared data center.

This whole mess is right in the Stark Gaming wheelhouse and as I keep 
coming back to, too.



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