IBM: Be careful what you say

IBM is once again demonstrating that it can be its own worst enemy. This time it involves their new mainframe system, the z13. IBM has a lot of things to be proud about with the z13, but their marketing messaging is definitely not one of them.

IBM is rightfully very interested in promoting their mainframes as being a good choice for running private clouds. They've spent a lot of money contributing to things like OpenStack as well as internal software development efforts to make the mainframe a real contender. IBM has also been investing a significant amount of effort in KVM for the mainframe. The thought there is that new-to-the mainframe customers might not want to install z/VM immediately for their virtualization needs, but they might already be familiar with KVM on Intel/AMD. With a lower barrier to entry in terms of skills, they hope to find it easier to finalize sales with these customers.

Unfortunately IBM has conflated the two topics in their marketing materials, resulting in a very misleading picture of the z13's capabilities when running KVM. There have been a good number of media and blog references to IBM's claim that up to "8,000 virtual machines" can be run on the z13. Usually, the same slide or advertisement also talks about KVM.  (At the time of the z13 announcement, IBM also released a Statement of Direction that they intend to provide their own KVM offering for the z13.)

What IBM has not made clear at all is that the claim of 8,000 virtual machines is based on running z/VM, and not KVM. People outside of the z/VM community are not aware of this and are assuming that they can get those same results with KVM.  With today's state of the art in KVM, that's just not possible on a z13.

Various market analysts/reporters repeated this mistake at the time of the announcement (see a couple of examples below). And now IBM's business partners are starting to propagate the same incorrect information.

For whatever reason, IBM seems extremely reluctant to even mention the z/VM product by name in public. This, despite it being a significant factor in the great success Linux has had on the mainframe.  Apparently IBM has been called on this multiple times, the most recent at the SHARE conference in Seattle, but haven't changed their marketing materials. This is really sad, since z/VM is overall probably the best hypervisor in the industry in many different ways. It's something IBM should be shouting about instead of seemingly trying to hide from the market.



http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/01/16/ibm-says-mainframe-not-dead.aspx
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=4688