Talk:FICON

It might be useful to define what a channel port and a control unit port are. Martin Packer (talk) 12:18, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Support of FCP
I question the claim that most mainframe operating systems support FCP. Certainly z/OS does not. Even if you count Linux as a mainframe operating system I don't see how you justify most. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 01:58, 11 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, there are basically five mainframe OS's: zOS and zTPF don't support FCP, zVM, zVSE and Linux do. Rwessel (talk) 19:28, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I think it's pretty clear from the discussion that "most" mainframe OS's indeed do support it, but this should be about making the statement meaningful, rather than just accurate. Most instances of mainframes running those OS's don't support it (citation needed) and realistically, zOS is largely deployed enough for the statement to be misleading. Why not just mention the operating systems that do support it?

Perhaps John Major has been to the US more times than George W Bush (or more than anybody who has lived there for 50 years and never left) but "more times" or "most operating systems" has a certain connotation that's being missed here. Hagrinas (talk) 01:23, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree this should be clarified, but I'm not sure to what. IBM is notoriously tightlipped about zWhatever deployments.  Certainly by numbers of MIPS burned, zOS wins (and likely by an order of magnitude).  But in terms of number of images running, zOS might well be in fourth place, after zLinux, zVSE and zVM (probably in that order), although I would not be particularly surprised if zOS had more running images than zVM I(and so was in thrid place).  Of course many zLinux and zVSE images are *tiny*, but the number of running images that *support* FCP, is probably a considerable bit larger than the number of running images that do not.  A fair number of zLinux and zVSE images *do* run FCP (given that FCP storage is about 1/2-2/3rds the price of 3390/CKD storage, even on the very small number of controllers/storage-arrays supported by zVSE).  It's plausible that the number of running images actively using FCP is larger than the number of running images not using FCP, although I've no hard numbers to back it up, and frankly, I'd guestimate it a bit lower than that - but not too much lower (if someone told me that 40% of OS images on z were running FCP disk, I would have no issues believing it).  Rwessel (talk) 09:14, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Is zOS really the largest consumer of MIPS on z? My impression is that zlinux as been the MIPS growth darling for a decade. Especially since IBM sales guys seem to throw in IFL's for nearly free if your buying a machine with a lot of unlicensed spare capacity and you act receptive to migrating x86 linux workloads. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.117.120.24 (talk) 18:34, 30 July 2014 (UTC)