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Sun Bashes Linux on (IBM) Mainframes
dagbrown writes: "An article linked from Sun's front page, entitled
"Linux on the mainframe: Not a good idea" by Shahin Khan, Sun's chief competitive officer, has the interesting theory that Linux on mainframes makes no sense because, among other things, the VM/Linux combo isn't a very good match. What do the folks on Slashdot think?"
Like Solaris on pc
But free software on a mainframe isn't bad. Remeber, we also have such things as "FreeBSD", "OpenBSD"; also "NetBSD." Yes, they're new to me too.
Got friends?
Actually, I thought Sun would be saying lots of nice things about their arch-rival, and complimenting them on their excellent choice of operating system.
Besides, Sun will attack IBM at any chance it gets.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing open standards like Linux.
Running Linux on an IBM mainframe doesn't defeat the entire purpose of using open standards like Linux. You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed. Or rather, IBM gets them. And by tying software you can't charge for to hardware you can, IBM will have come up with a business model for selling Linux systems for incredible sums of money. Quite an ingenious plan - selling Free Software.
Sun's just pissed they didn't think of it first.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
And it was a serious pain in the ass. There were problems with the virtual machine suddenly giving up the ghost from underneath us, and we'd see Samba processes go wild for no reason whatsoever. We had load averages spike well into the hundreds, and it was like we were always scrambling to keep it running, as opposed to setting it up and just having it work. We used to tell the students that the machine had caught on fire and had (literally) fallen over. We were even thinking of doing up artwork.
All those impressive demos where they have 32 hojillion instances of linux running on a mainframe are meaningless. Sure, you can do it, but it doesn't do anything. If you try actually working with the setup, you'll be rebooting your machine 10 times a day, and those mothers take forever to freakin' reboot.
Like the man said, this sounds like the normal responce from sun, I'm sure Microsoft should have simular arguments for why MS is better. Unless we get a complete third party to analysis with no aligence to any OS. And maybe on that day pigs will fly.
http://www.funwithpenguins.com
This may sound a bit odd, but it could be that the mud throwing that Sun is doing could end up being A Good Thing(tm) for all Un*xes just because it bring s more media attention to our community. Sun isn't directly saying that Linux sucks or that it's worse than NT or whatever, they are drawling attention to the use of Linux on mainframes of all things. So the drawn out fact that Linux is being used on Mainframes and being acknowledged by two major companies could result in good juju.
Chief Competitive Officer? I have never heard this title before. Is it new?
For a company that is planning on dropping all support for x86 in the first place, does this really surprise you? as a sun tech myself i totally see there point. Especially when the mainframes they refer to require another proprietary OS to run on top Linux. The article makes some good points, but this is also standard sun marketing.
Sun: A solution looking for a problem
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
Microsoft says the same thing. Does this make it true? No
If anything, this is a really good sign for the ever maturing linux operating system. Of Course sun would want to move people away from an open source, free operating system, over to their 'paid for' one. And if they can't do that by simply saing "don't use linux, use solaris", it makes a lot of sense for their marketers to simply say "don't use linux, its bad... and scary". It still cuts out a potential threat to them.
I figure if IBM says that IBM is ready for linux, i will trust that a lot more than solaris saying IMB isn't ready for linux.
Not that i have anything agasint sun, or solaris.. i respect sun and what its doen, and been through.. i just question the reasoning for this 'article'.
Why do /. posters insist that everything they don't agree with MUST be a troll? You know, maybe he really believes what he's saying, and isn't just writing it in order to get a response from you personally.
There is actually a difference, apparently. You see, trolling involves making up facts to support an argument, whereas marketing involves, erm...
You know, like this.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Just a little FYI:
With Amdahl checking out of the mainframe business it seems IBM has decided to raise mainframe prices significantly - it's actually charged more for the same performance in 2001 than in 2000! This is why IBM's mainframe revenues increased by a fair bit between 2000 and 2001 (while it's PC and Unix revenue dropped). Mainframe revenue accounts for about half of IBM's total server revenue...
I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Sun has a "Chief Competitive Officer." Please tell me that there's more to the guy's job than spreading FUD about the competition.
This article is misrepresented as bashing Linux. It doesn't say that Linux isn't up to the job of running on a mainframe as much as it says that many of the benefits Linux offers are lost when running it on such a system -- basically bashing IBM's solution, not Linux.
Finding mainframe staffing is an obstacle in many organizations(6); combining mainframe and Linux staffing further complicates the matter. Running multiple Linux images still requires administration that needs to grow with the number of images being run.
This statement applies no matter what operating system you choose, you still have to find people who know the hardware. And as with all VM systems, you have to actively administrate each image. This statement is Linux agnostic.
Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand. As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would; high utilization is a myth.
Again.. Linux isn't repsonsible for the machine not being able to dynamically allocate resources to over-utilized images, it's a hardware/underlying OS issue.
Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small
Duh. It's a different architecture.
So, SUN isn't really bashing Linux, they're bashing their competitor, IBM. No real news here. SUN is very careful not to say "Linux sucks", because they have Linux offerings, they're just saying that customers should buy the SUN/Solaris solution for their high-end systems, not the IBM/Linux solution. I'm sure we'll see something from IBM soon.
--XaXXon
Yeah I love their talk about utilization. Oh no i f you buy one of these IBM boxes you have to plan out what your peak utilization is!!!
.... ummmm ... plan out what your peak utilization is!!
And if you buy some sun machines to do the same thing you have to
The add that the server can't dynamically create more utilization capacity (extra hardware) dynamically. If anyone out there were selling a box that could do that, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. First we'd need some good nanobots, or maybe a replicator.....
Next thing to do would be to ask someone that recently switched to linux on the mainframe, like ebay... hope one of the links below still works...
http://www.cio.com/archive/010101_et_content.htm l
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/ib ml inux000517.html
http://www.zdnetindia.com/biztech/resources/ebusin ess/ecommerce/stories/45234.html
Only 'flamers' flame!
People these days seem to forget about the overhead of interpretters and virtual machines. If the article is correct, then the z800's running zVM emulate Intel x86 architecture in order to run Linux. Heck, even poorly written native compiled code generally has advantages over such a set up.
There are however, notable exceptions, given the nature of mainframe processors, if all of your apps are written unoptimized for such a system, then you would want to unify them in a familiar abstraction, given a close enough match, this makes Linux a natural choice. Of course, why would you buy an expensive mainframe and not optimize for it?
To the naysayers slamming Sun as merely trying to boost SunOS, well, yeah, they are, but lets look at the situation.
1) Sun still has SunFire servers, which are QUITE powerful.
2) Solaris is no longer competing with HP-UX, since HP-UX is no more. Sun sells windows and linux based solutions. In other words, Sun has no reason to just blindly nay-say against Linux. As far as exploiting Linux for being a hot technology, well, they're doing that too. That's business for you, you gotta do what you gotta do.
In otherwords, the z800 isn't exactly slaughtering Sun's business, but you gotta have whitepapers to back up your statements when you're bidding to large customers. Saying "just cuz" isn't good enough. Sun's scoring one for the people who want to buy their products. It's not "slamming linux."
I agree mostly with the article because I recently evaluated an IBM mainframe against an AIX SP2 and a Solaris 4-processor server. Most of the issues in the article, particularly performance, are right on.
The application we were testing was extremely processor and memory intensive. While there was a web component, the biggest problem was moving a large number of bitmaps in one format into the server, convert them from base 64 to a binary representation, rasterize them, and convert them to a "browser friendly" format such as JPEG, GIF, or PNG. We had to complete hundreds (> 200) of these operations per second.
I really wanted to use Linux because most of my staff is familiar with it and our customer felt warm and fuzzy about using IBM equipment. At the end of the day, however, the Linux mainframe only gave us 25% of the minimum speed that we needed for our process to be successful. IBM and a certain German Linux company tweaked everything they could but the performance wasn't there. The AIX vs. Solaris match was more evenly paired. My customer decided on Solaris because they offered a few advantages in Java tools that AIX didn't have. All vendor's boxes had equivalent processor and memory configurations.
I would like to spread the Linux credo as far and wide as possible. What we must understand is that, in order to make Linux a viable option in mission-critical applications (the kind of thing sitting on a mainframe), the performance and "hardening" of something like MVS must be present. Linux just isn't there yet.
Disclaimer: I'm under NDA so that's why some aspects of this posting are a bit vague. Drop me an email if you want more details regarding our experience but our conversation will be "off the record."
Have a nice wknd,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Now, Sun offers up the ultimate proof: Linux is just fine as long as it impacts the x86 world - but don't dare put it on a platform that affects us.
To be fair, IBM's offering is not perfect - yet. What Sun is preparing for is a future Linux and Big Iron combo that will be. They are afraid, and this FUD is the proof.
sounds like they have more of a problem with IBM than with linux.
-... ---
They keep shooting themselves in the foot wrt the Open Source crowd. Now the've reloaded and started shooting again. You'd think they would have run out of ammo by now.
One of the beauties of Linux is that it can be ported to so many different platforms easily. Sun uses it and then goes on to say IBM shouldn't? wtf? There are valid reasons to run Linux in multiple virtual machines. I even do it here on my PC.
Note to self: Must drink less coffee....
Wasn't there a story not too long ago that mentioned how Sun was going to support Linux on lower-end machines, but NOT on the high-end Enterprise systems? (bah, I can't find the link) Anyway, people were saying "Well, Linux isn't ready for Enterprise-type systems yet, so keeping the proprietary *nices on these systems isn't a big deal."
/. Yeah, right.
Now, Sun comes right out and says this, and people start complaining? Sure, perhaps Sun is trolling for
You may think I'm biased: I work for Sun, after all. Don't get me wrong - I'd absolutely *love* to take one of the *THIRTY* E10k's I have sitting around me at the moment and install Linux on it. Or, rather - I'd love to TRY. But I don't have any real notion that any version of Linux, AS IT STANDS RIGHT NOW, will work as well as Solaris on that box.
Sure, Solaris isn't very user-friendly. GNU/Solaris (Solaris with GNU Tools) is better, but still not anywhere near what most Linux folks are used to when it comes to command-line fun. However, Solaris is *made* to work with Sun hardware. And it does, very well.
I doubt it highly that someone is going to go buy a US$4M E10k/E15k box and start porting Solaris tools and system utilities *just* so people can run Linux on those systems. Right now, the only reason people have installed Linux at ALL on those systems is for bragging rights.
If you want to outlay the cash and start-a-porting, I applaud you. I really do. But I won't hold my breath.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
There's an article here on cnet news that explains the whole thing. They don't want you to go after the much more powerful and robust linux system that IBM has and go for their version of Linux for smaller systems. The alarming thing is that they are producing their OWN version of Linux, not using Redhat or another company. And also IBM I understand is doing this too. This can't be a good thing for linux at all. Proprietary versions of linux? Or perhaps some people think it'd be okay if its just branded, I just don't think its a good idea at all.
I think they want to utilize the benefits of linux however they do not want to allow Linux to creep into the larger servers where Sun dominates. And IBM which has AIX 5L (AIX w/linux compatibility) and now a special Linux for the mainframe it directly challenges their most valuable property, solaris which is valuable because all that software is made for it which makes people buy sun systems.
You find the program you need to run and then look at the systems running it, and unless you're already running AIX or HP-UX your first choice is probably Sun (and sun is usually always a choice). Now Linux comes in, becomes this pervasive server software and Solaris doesn't really look as hot as it did anymore.
And it was a seriously easy. There were never a problem with the virtual machine suddenly giving up the ghost from underneath us, and we'd never loose a Samba process for any reason whatsoever. We had load averages that were very normal, and it was like we were always scrambling to find new reasons to use it, as opposed to setting it up and just having forgetting about it. We used to tell the students that the machine was seriously hot, and it would never fall-over. We were even thinking of doing up artwork -- AND STARTING A RELIGION!
All those impressive demos where they have 32 hojillion instances of linux running on a mainframe are so meaningfull. Sure, you can do without it, but it will do everything. If you try actually working with the setup, you never have to reboot your machine -- instead of doing it 10 times a day, and those other take forever to freakin' reboot.
But who are you going to believe, ummm, me or ummmmm, that other guy.
Sheesh.
If the article is correct, then the z800's running zVM emulate Intel x86 architecture in order to run Linux. Heck, even poorly written native compiled code generally has advantages over such a set up.
That's not what IBM is doing at all. The version of Linux that runs on the 390 platform is natively compiled for that system and has been tuned to work with it. This is no different than Linux on any of the dozen or so other platforms it's been designed to run on.
Sun's FUD-slinger got his facts wrong more than half the time in that article, which in most places would get him grade of "F". I've been using and buying Suns for 16 years, and while I really like their products, I hope IBM takes every opportunity to point out what a nitwit he is.
The moral: Just 'cause it says "Linux" on the label doesn't mean it's running on an x86.
A 1000 processor Cray T3E 1200 would smoke your pathetic little mainframe :). And you wouldn't have to use crap like JCL. However, there's this little problem called cost of ownership. If supercomputers and mainframes were cost-effective there wouldn't be the huge push for commodity clusters, blade servers, and so on. There are probably applications where mainframes are cost-effective, but there are problems like almost nobody coming out of college with mainframe knowledge.
-Kevin
What do you mean by fledgling? Solaris dates back to 1991. I would hardly call that a fledgling operating system.
He basically has 1 valid point. Linux under VM is not as well behaved as it should be, for exactly the reason mentioned. Coming from the PC world where all hardware is real, it treats all memory as if there isn't anything else better to do that use it all for file buffers. Under VM, a better plan is to check to see if there is any memory pressure being exerted on the machine before using your entire memory allocation for buffering.
They're working on that.
As for the rest, it's mostly FUD. The endian-ness is not an issue for 95% (wild ass guess) of apps that I have seen. Maybe except for DB2. You have to plan your maximum capacity in a discrete server farm just like you do in a virtual one. You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
You wouldn't want to use it as a compute farm, but as a database server or news server or something which is usually I/O bound. They ain't exactly ferraris, more like 18 wheeler big rigs.
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
As far as I know, Linux wasn't really designed to be a mainframe anyway... so whats the big deal really? Linux is a web server/ server system, great for apache and the likes, stable and a life saver for small companies. So Sun has the better equipment and software for mainframe. IF linux had been designed to do that then there would be a real contraversy in the situation anyway. Its an interesting article with lots of good points, but its like comparing tomatoes and oranges.
-- RJ
Well then, you should buy a starfire, because you
can keep it running, slap in new processors, new
memory, and then suck them into a running
partition.
It seems that most of the criticisms of Shahin
Kahn's article are based on ignorance. It's a
fair assessment of the liabilities of using
mainframe hardware for typical modern web service
applications. IBM tried to save the mainframe
from declining market share in a very ingenious
way, and Linux and IBM have benefited from it,
but that doesn't mean that it is competetive
with Sun's hardware offerings for the same
application environments.
Not all of Kahn's objections to VMs are valid,
however. The robustness arguments are good, but
the performance ones are short-sighted. While
s/390 Linux may not be tuned today, you can be
confidently assured that it will be soon -- even
if IBM has to fork the kernel to do it.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Linux isn't designed at all, which is good. Thats why its so flexible. There was already that debate a while back.
Oh please. Like your going to have an easier time compiling non-Linux software? Still think so given how open and portable most Linux software is? Is mainframe software as portable? Is there lots of free mainframe software to port? Thats almost as irrational as Microsoft's "Linux isn't free" TCO argument. Per that can-of-worms, because both systems have TCOs means NT itself *is* free?
Articles like this are interesting because Sun definitly has a conflict of interest with Linux. They need to appear as if they support it so new blood will buy SPARC hardware with Solaris, but they also don't want people 'liking' Linux over Solaris/SPARC.
Personally, I love Linux on SPARC. I would prefer Sun making Linux more 'Enterprise'-like instead of hawking Solaris as a big-brother. However, I understand that Solaris is a huge investment and one they probably will think is superior for years to come.
For their sake, I hope the Penguins don't squish them. But if they don't look both ways before crossing the street...
With regard to the linked benchmarks, somehow I bet the benchmarkers at Tom's didn't compile parallel. Of course there is not going to be a speed improvement if you don't run a parallel make!
As someone who builds a small embedded Linux system from scratch (including gcc and glibc), a dual processor system is VERY nice. It cuts down the compile time by at least 30-40%. make -j2 is your friend with two processors.
The add that the server can't dynamically create more utilization capacity (extra hardware) dynamically.
Actually IBM's regular mainframes can. When you buy one of the higher end zSeries servers you get a box fully populated with ram and cpu's. If your liscense is for something less than the max # of cpu's and you later need to add capacity all you do is call IBM and they happily take your money and dial into your mainframe, they set a couple registers in the controller board and viola near instant hardware upgrade.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"What do the folks on Slashdot think?"
/. that has to do with Linux or Windowz will give you tones and tones of posting.
This is easy: anything posted on
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
They are both Unix(-like), both solve the same problems but Linux does it cheaper and allows you to look ath the source code.
Actually, the price of Solaris is not really that expensive unless you are using a system with very many CPUs. A single user copy if you download it is pretty much free. It is the hardware needed to run it on that is expensive. Also, the solaris source code is available.
I doubt Sun really cares that badly about the success of Solaris so much as they care about the failure if IBM. As far as I can tell, this article is mostly pushing the fact that a cluster of low end Sun boxes running Linux will be better than an IBM mainframe running Linux.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
This piece was so full of FUD that I could scarcely believe it.
Then why did IBM have to port the TCPIP stack from the VM world into MVS, if VM is so far behind?
Linux is "designed for Intel"??? What about M68K, PPC, ARM, Alpha, SPARC and others? (See the Debian ports page for a more complete list.)
Yes, MVS (z/OS) is rock solid reliable. But the machines don't bust either. CPU recovery has been an integral part of the architecture for almost 30 years. If a processor breaks, another takes over with no application effect, or a spare is assigned. Someone on the ibm-main list today mentioned that the processors are themselves duplicated on chip, with comparison logic to ensure that both sides are computing the same thing. Does Intel even parity-check their processors?
Small? Install a copy of SuSE SLES in a S/390 LPAR (logical partition, a hardware implementation of VM that is delivered on EVERY S/390... no z/VM necessary) and see how much software was delivered with it. You wanted OpenSSH and OpenSSL, though SuSE didn't deliver it? Go to the web, download it, and do configure, make, make install. The big problem with application portability is the proprietary vendors that ship binaries only.
What an amazing assertion. Wish Khan had provided a reference.
Merde. Why run it on a closed proprietary SPARCstation? Or a closed proprietary Mac?
Khan makes a couple of decent points, particularly regarding z/VM skills. But the hyperbole is way out there, and it's hard to take him seriously.
I fondly remember VM as the first operating system I ran into that embodied a really good idea.
There was a stage during the '80s when I was working more as an industry analyst than as a developer when Sun and IBM between them had become two of the then only four serious pillars on which the future of computing rested at a conceptual level.
At that level, Sun was the embodiment of Unix, taking evnagelical responsibility for the cause, and it is reasonable to assume that within their own envorins they genuinely see themselves in that position still.
From my own biased perspective, I felt they abdicated that authority when they allowed their elegant Network-extensible Window System (NeWS) to be rolled by a tide of industry resistance that mobilised against the upstart Sun and behind the then clearly inferior X.
But I'm sure in Sun's hearts they still believe they are the ultimate repository of deep understanding on all things Unix and are being genuine and honest in the technical basis for this critique.
The real problem is thay they can't see beyond their own world view. They do not have places in their heart for deep understanding of either the VM nor the Linux view or the world, let alone the two in combination.
Still Sun struggles to find its own identity and focus, to say nothing of a sustainable business model for the future.
From NFS to RISC, to industrial strength Web servers and on to Java, Sun has been a major contributor to the direction of mainstream computing, but now seems to be edging closer to following the fall to oblivion of that other former pillar of hearts and minds, Digital.
It will be a worse than sad day when we finally have to convey Sun to history, especially if that comes before Java gets to really stand on its own feet.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Sorry, but z/VM has nothing to do with emulation. z/VM is a low-level system that simply (or not so simply ;-) virtualizes the hardware by providing one or more virtual machines, each of which can run any native OS. As far as the client OS knows, it's running on the bare hardware. The z/VM layer provides the ability to flexibly divide the hardware resources between the VMs, and guarantees that each VM is completely isolated from all other VMs. In the case of Linux/390, the Linux kernel and applications have been compiled to run natively on the S/390 architecture. Check out this Linux for S/390 FAQ for more info.
READ: Of course, with an infinite amount of money, every business problem is solvable at the highest profit for the problem-solver...
READ: But Sun is of the opinion that it's proprietary servers, running with proprietary hardware (such as the special disk drives with the "magic" secret partition table, and the memory chips with the notch moved 1/10 inch) and, of course, running proprietary Solaris Operating System is the best solution overall, especially if you have an infinite amount of money to throw at YOUR problem...
READ: Definitely, here, we have a blatant attempt at fitting an hexagonal peg into a pentagonal hole. Linux was conceived to run on discarded low-end hardware in order to satisfy teenage-geek impulses, which is quite a different thing than to run on the Big Iron dinosaurs IBM is well-known for.
READ: You just can't run JCL and CICS and MVS and CMS and Assembler on Linux. Cobol (even GNU-Cobol) will make the kernel break into hysterics.
READ: On the other hand, Solaris is designed to run (well) solely on Sparc architecture that made Sun famous.
READ: Of course, you don't have any of those virtual machine nonsense with Sun products: you simply plug in as many boxes as you need of machines. No more software headaches for your operators!!!
READ: Why do in software what can be done far more profitably (and piracy-immune!) in juicy, expensi^h^h^h^h^h^h^h profitable hardware?
READ: Of course, you can dynamically add and remove ressources from a Sun cluster with the use of specially trained monkeys and servoids, which is a better proposition than software hocus-pocusery within the deep, dark bowels of an IBM mainframe.
READ: Of course, Sun cannot take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering either, but that's more alphabet soup to muddy the waters and instill doubts into potential buyers.
READ: Again, Linux fragmentation is a terrible tragedy that will never happen to Solaris.
READ: Even if " nobody ever got fired for buying IBM ", we whish the same could be said about Sun.
READ: IBM is double-plus uncool amongst geeks. SUN is the hip thing to use in IT!!!
As you wish! Check out http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/li nux/lcds/index.html and you can sign up for a chuck of a linux powered big iron... They even toss in some of their software. Very cool.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
You've got to be kidding me.
The economy and most business models are not a 100% research and development, not-quite-stable environment.
Don't tell a large business "Well, it will get better the more people who use it". They'll spit in your face. They need to know what works, and what works now, and what will continue to work in the future.
Right now, Solaris works. Linux-bigots will sit and say "Well Solaris doesnt provide useful GNU utilities and is a boar when it comes to performance!" Well, yes it is, but it's been around forever, and when Sun says they can make it work, they will MAKE it work. You can't sit around and play with something for awhile in a 100% production environment, and rely on tools which have a sketchy (in a business-model sense) support base. It just cant, and wont, happen.
Just my $0.02.
I like to call it FUD. In order to make sure your product sells, you need to market (kiss booty) to sell the product, plus create FUD about the competitions plans. Look at the Itanic CPU from Intel, touts 64 bit computing which DEC/Compaq has had with Alpha for over 9 years.
You make money by shrewd marketing, not by building a quality product i.e. Yugo's inception, Microsoft, Sun, etc.
But there are exceptions to that rule, build a quality product and market it "just good enough" like Cisco, and the market is yours. This idea failed with DEC/Compaq assuming the Alpha will sell itself.
I took that from what the article had stated.
He obviously doesn't address what you point out, but I think the argument against the VM-ized version is valid. The benefits of Free Software obviously do not apply when the underlying system is closed.
I wonder if Linux still suffers the horrible performance issues when running natively verses when running on top of a VM (or atleast, the issues pointed out in the article).
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Read between the lines, this article is mostly anti-IBM FUD. It was written by Sun, so I'm not exactly surprised.
... unless IBM mainframe R&D is actually a computer camp for children with down syndrome.
... uhh basically they don't exist, because many of the commercial UNIX systems out there exist on top of big-endian hardware.
And Linux isn't designed to run in a virtual machine; implementation decisions that make sense on PC hardware don't fit well in a virtual machine(4). This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
First, let's check what his "(4)" reference points to:
(4) For example: Filling all available RAM with file buffers is great in a real machine (as it speeds I/O via caching with otherwise-wasted storage), but in a virtual machine doing that is bad (as it inflates the working set of the Linux guest, which is competing for real storage with many other Linuxes-leading to paging/swapping).
Uhh, I have never seen a VM implementation that did not give a RAM limit. So this guy is basically saying that a memory leak on one of your VM's will take down the entire mainframe. Somehow I doubt IBM's mainframe R&D staff would do this
Often the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10)
(10) Intel uses something known as little endian; a mainframe uses something different. This is significant for certain applications and makes the port difficult.
I challenge anyone out there to name any significant piece of UNIX software that doesn't have a big-endian port
Just the way he phrased that last bit about endianness convinces me that this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I can't really know for sure though, since most of the stuff he talks about is beyond me. But, based on those few things he mentions that I'm familiar with, I'd say he's a typical manager who is loosely and incorrectly paraphrasing what some Enterprise developer told him, and decided to make a marketing advantage out of it.
Read between the lines!!
Sun should rather worry about their own licensing issues and their own problems with open source. Java's broken community licensing program and Sun's inability to evolve the platform more quickly has basically killed Java for open source applications (that's why Mono is being written around .NET, even though .NET is much less mature and comes from Microsoft). Sun keeps equivocating on Solaris, Linux, and which one is better in their not-so-humble opinion.
Sun should address their own issues before putting down IBM. I'm sure ten years from now, IBM is still going to be around. I'm not so sure I believe the same thing about Sun.
The IBM architectures you decided on are exotic compared to the Sun Quad SMP box and don't sound like you benchmarked the appropriate tools, or even like against like.
Mainframe: I/O throughput, *massive* loads.
SP: *parallel* clusters, CPU, *fast* network.
You'd have been better with an S80... Sorry, "pSeries".
Deleted
What do the folks on Slashdot think?
Well, I can't speak for others, but I think sun sells a competative UNIX on mainframe solution.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
He obviously doesn't address what you point out, but I think the argument against the VM-ized version is valid. The benefits of Free Software obviously do not apply when the underlying system is closed.
On the other hand some people will tell you that a small in-house team of hire'n'fire developers can make better progress on some things (like Intel's C compiler) than "Open Source" projects. Contrary to the mantra that "Open" development is always better for performance issues the advantage of Free Software have to do with Freedom: improved performance is a frequent desirable epiphenomenon.
I wonder if Linux still suffers the horrible performance issues when running natively verses when running on top of a VM (or atleast, the issues pointed out in the article).
The same general problem would still occur. However LPARed S/390 definitely doesn't suffer the same performance hits as you would expect.
Ps: Before anyone flames me I consider Free Software to be wonderful and desirable, but I don't believe that it is always more efficient or accurate or perfect as a result of that development process: it /can/ be, but it is not an immutable outcome
...there are other factors than performance, indulge me for a moment:
I work at a big corporation which relied on IBM mainframes for its whole business for almost 30 years until the PC and the high-end Unix servers shook up the landscape for good. I'm from the PC (IT) camp, which has been separate from the Big Iron (DP) guys in the organization since the early days.
DP, once very powerful, has lost a great deal of influence in the 90s, although they still run most of the mission-critical stuff, and the main reason for this were the high-end Unix servers, most of them Sun boxen running Oracle. Believe me, there's no love lost between those two fractions in our company.
Our mainframe guys see Linux as an opportunity to get better integration with the IT world, which was abysmal until now (3270 terminal windows, IMS/DB, TSO/ISPF and such horrors) and to better position themselves against the Sun/Oracle camp which is after their budgets and their butts. Today, we have Linux happily running on our mainframes (still in an experimental phase, not in production), serving up http and Samba shares without a hiccup.
If we're talking about bringing Linux into the large corporations, the crucial influence of IBM cannot be overestimated. We were a died-in-the wool IBM shop (S/390, Token Ring, 3270PC, OS/2, S/36, AS/400, the whole enchilada) and successfully trusted our business to IBM for 30 years (paid through our nose for it, too, I might add). IBM has lots of credibility and trust, so if they say Linux is cool, our CTO listens. Microsoft, on the other hand, is viewed with some "new kid on the block" suspicion. Our management doesn't like downtime and security breaches, and the memory of the ILOVEYOU aftermath is still very vivid, for example. Plus, we migrated to NT4 late (about 28'000 systems, ended September 99) and now Microsoft is practically forcing us into another expensive upgrade cycle sooner than we wanted and with IT budgets cut short on account of the less-than-stellar economy because NT4 support is withdrawn in 2003.
We thus have the following situation: IT and DP are up against the Unix enterprise server guys, all this with the backing of IBM. The astronomically high cost of Sun/Oracle solutions is being questioned more and more, and technologically viable low-end solutions (x86 multiprocessor servers, Linux) begin to rattle the foundations from below.
I don't want to make bold predictions here, but if I were Sun, I'd be worried. To me, it looks like interesting times are ahead.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Linux on the mainframe can't respond to the workload demands of Web serving with high utilization--something IBM touted at the time of its z800 announcement. Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.
If you have a VM system with two virtual machines, and one of them is nearly idle, and the other virtual machine is very busy, VM will automatically take resources away from the less busy machine and devote it to the more busy machine.
This means that you don't need load-balancing software. VM is the load-balancing software.
Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels. Contrary to what many believe, consolidating a Linux farm into multiple images on a mainframe would not change the demand pattern. Although z/VM can start and stop Linux images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand.
Of course it can! The VM kernel will parcel out memory and CPU on demand.
As a result, a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would;
All computer systems need to size for peak demand. The difference is that with a mainframe, you can size one machine for the peak demand of the busiest of a large number of virtual machines, and get rid of the overhead caused by the load-balancing software, because you don't need it anymore.
high utilization is a myth.
VM systems can utilize 90-95% of the native computer resources. The overhead on a VM system is very, very small.
Naturally this article is going to be met with some skepticism because it appears to be a self-serving marketing piece from Sun. This is unfortunate because the author makes several good points. I think it is important to note that this is more of an attack on mainframes and VM architecture than it is against Linux. It really does not make much sense to run 10, 100 or 10,000 copies of Linux on one super-duper computer. Sure it's neat, but we need to remember that computers are supposed to do useful things. What a collosal waste of cpu and memory to have 10,000 operating systems when the right one (yes, 1) would do the job just fine. Add to that the inherent performance hit from running on a "virtual machine" and it makes even less sense. I actually tend to think that IBM's use of Linux is more self-serving than Sun's attack. It's just an attempt to sell more expensive proprietary hardware by capitalizing on the intellectual generosity of others.
Of course, IBM on the other hand, took linux seriously and now have a profitable product that is being very well received in the market and which *is* saving businesses lots of money.
Sun doesn't have anything quite like it.
Deleted
It seems lately with Sun floundering about the market and pulling silly moves re Java that all this really points to is that Sun really, really, really wants to be Microsoft.
.Net rules the world. Do you honestly think that this company would be any more ethical than Microsoft?
And they aren't. And they're pissed about it.
Imagine for a moment that Sun has the hugely dominant market share in server revenues that it wished it had, and that cross-platform Java programming and their version of
Given the way they've been acting, I think that Sun - if it had the opportunity - might even turn out to be *less* ethical. Much of what they've done lately reminds me of a five-year-old screaming "my toys are better than your toys! And they're my toys! And you can't touch them unless I say so, and only if you'll play with them the way I want you to!"
I don't trust IBM any more than I do Sun when it comes to their motivations re Linux, but at least IBM has some class....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I wish I were joking, but this really does seem to be the way it is at all too many places, not that I would have any direct experience with THAT *cough*ATGDynamo*cough*.
Hmm? Can we, can we?
What d'ya think? Anyone want to post odds?
IBM are giving out VMs on some of their mainframes.
Deleted
Sun's big pitch is RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability), and they have got it absolutely spot on with the new F15K. The dynamic system domains on the 10K and 15K (and the next size down Serengeti machines) allow multiple Solaris instances to run on a single frame, and for processors, memory and I/O to be put into and taken out of a running Solaris instance. But unlike VM, the domains run in partitioned sets of hardware, so that (for instance) any CPU fault will only bring down a single instance, whereas with VM style logical partitioning you could lose a whole lot of domains with a single hardware fault.
No, this article is about the fact that "Linux Mainframe" sounds like the benefits of the Linux API with the RAS of a mainframe, whereas in reality you are getting something which is not as resilient as a E10K or F15K, and the Linux kernel won't linearly scale out to 72 CPUs and 500GB of memory as a Solaris kernel will.
GNU/Linux on mainframe has its place, all Sun are trying to do is point out the IBM might get a bit carried away by what they achieve, and try to pitch it into situations where a different system might be better.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Putting linux on a E10K is just as dumb as putting it on a mainframe.
Big irone are priced at a premium.
For one thing, resources are shared among CPUS, so you can't scale linearly, giving you less bang for the bux, the bigger the box.
What is worse, is that the price tends to cale almost exponentially.
For example a beefed upentry level server with the same performance as a half full mid-range/enterprise server typically costs only the third of the bigger box.
Why would anyone want to buy such expensive boxes to run linux? The only reason I see is that they think they can save money by having fewer linux admins. Me, I think you can buy a lot of linux admin payroll for the 5-10$ million premium you pay for a big iron. I also think that an operation with some big iron tends to require a higher head count than the same computing power on commodity servers.
The only places I see a market for the big iron, is where they're just ading software and capabilities in an operation where they already have big iron. I.E IBMS's and suns goal with this, is to stop existing customers from throwing out their existing machines.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Sun is loosing a great deal of business recently due to the introduction of Linux into the server market.
I find that unlikely. I think Sun's stockholders would be very upset if Sun were actually "letting loose or releasing" business. However, it could be argued that Sun is failing to retain business due to Linux deployment. The word you were looking for is losing.
Congratulations! You have been participant #35 in my campaign to rid Slashdot of this error.
Proudly correcting Slashdot's most irritating linguistic error since 2002.
Sun and HP are both doing this now, as well, at least with CPUs (I don't think the do it with memory).
I know Sun had problems with the "hot add CPUs" idea -- people just didn't want to plug a cpu module into a million dollar machine while it was running and handling millions of dollars of transactions a day. Also, I know at least one case of someone trying to do that, and having the Sun technitian blow 3 CPU modules before giving up on it.
Given that the marginal cost of a CPU is low compared to the development costs, it really makes sense to ship disabled CPUs and turn them on as the customer needs them.
System partitioning isn't the same as IBM's VM technology.
With your E15K, you're dividing up processors and memory between various partitions, each running an instance of the OS.
IBM's running multiple OSs as virtual machines on the same system.
With Sun, if partition A is really busy, and partition B is idle, you can't make use of those idle processors unless you re-allocate your partitions.
With IBM, the processes in VM1 can use all the processors of the mainframe, unless VM2 also needs processing time.
With either one, if one OS instance crashes, it shouldn't affect the other instances.
Published Today by Gartner. Quote
IBM surged in server market share in 2001, gaining at the expense of Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer as the overall market shrank, new figures show. IBM's server revenue decreased from $13.9 billion in 2000 to $13.6 billion in 2001, according to figures from market researcher Gartner released Friday. But because the overall market shrunk faster--down 15 percent, from $55.6 billion to $47 billion--IBM actually gained share. Big Blue cemented its first-place spot in the worldwide market, increasing its share from 25 percent to 29 percent. The increase mirrors similar changes in the North American server market. IBM has benefited from resurgent sales of its old-guard mainframe line, spurred in part by the new ability to run the Linux operating system. But demand for servers in general dried up, with companies worried about the recession and overcapacity left over from the Internet spending spree. Worldwide, second-place Sun dropped 2 percent, to 15.4 percent, while third-place Compaq dropped 0.9 percent, to 13.9 percent, and fourth-place HP dropped 0.1 percent, to 12.8 percent. Fifth-place Dell Computer eked out a 0.1 percent gain to 6.4 percent. In the key Unix server market--a sweet spot with a good balance of server power and price--IBM also gained, increasing share 2.3 percent, to 20.3 percent, with sales of $4.2 billion. The Unix server market dropped 18.7 percent, from $25.3 billion in 2001 to $20.6 billion in 2000, Gartner said. The Unix server market is the biggest single segment of the server market, accounting for 44 percent of total sales. But IBM's gain wasn't enough to topple No. 1 Sun, whose share shrank 3.1 percent, to 35.2 percent, with sales of $7.3 billion. And No. 2 HP, after a concerted effort to stanch losses, rose 1 percent, to 20.5 percent, with sales of $4.6 billion. Dell gained the most in the Intel server market, increasing 0.5 percent, to 17.6 percent, with $3.1 billion in sales. No. 1 Intel server seller Compaq lost 1.6 percent share, dropping to 26.3 percent with $4.5 billion in sales. The overall Intel server market dropped 16.2 percent, from $20.5 billion to $17.2 billion, Gartner said.
Help fight continental drift.
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware in which it's running.
Wow. In one whole sentence this fellow managed to slap the face of just about every kernel developer since the 1.0 days. A vast amount of the effort over the past 7 years has been dedicated to making certain the kernel can run on as many architectures as possible. Apparently, Sun has decided to pigeon hole Linux as an intel only kernel.
IBM is largely targeting the markets where they number of instances > number of CPUs. Or, where you want peak loads of different applications load balanced dynamically (ie, without having to say "move this processor to that node").
As far as I know, Sun's dynamic domains are dynamic in the sense that they can be reconfigured on the fly, not that they automatically move resources where they are needed.
No. Sun is selling HARDWARE. Sun has been resisting Linux because Linux allows you to use just about ANY hardware. Solaris only runs on Sparc (Yes, I Do know about Solaris x86. It's such a pile of crap that nobody uses it, therefore it might as well not exist.) Sun is worried that if all their software partners ported to Linux that they would lose sales. They are right to be worried.
BTW, I DO like sun hardware, but depending on the needs of the application, I run various OS's on various hardware. If all the software that is Sun only would run on Linux, this would reduce the need for sun hardware quite a bit.
BTW, Solaris is for the most part free. They do require you to buy a copy of the media for something like $90 (which I did, for both sparc and x86) but you can install it on as many systems as you like.
Solaris is better that Linux for some tasks, but not many. Linux is pretty rock solid and has pretty decent performance. Don't forget the BSD's either, which seem to make better firewalls, proxies, etc. due to network performance and other issues.
Sun is beginning to remind me a lot of Apple. Their hardware is way overpriced and they refuse to accept the fact that commercial proprietary *nixes are quickly dying out, being replaced by Linux and *BSD. Instead, they're sinking large amounts of capital into maintaining their own closed operating systems. It's a shame, really, because they both make well-built hardware, use non-Intel cpu's, and have a solid customer support record. They could be making more money and doing the OSS community a great service by helping out if they'd just wake up.
>buys a single cpu room sized mainframe
Not only that, but mainframes don't take up a whole room anymore.
The Z/Series starts at a footprint of about 14 square feet and goes up to 30 in a two frame configuration, the S/390 is about 10 square feet, and a 42U rack cabinet is about 7 square feet.
So even if you take the worst case scenario, the "room-sized" perception suddenly shrinks to about the size of four standard racks.
Matt
Let's face it -- few organizations have people with mainframe talent, and those who have them don't have enough of them.
So you are going to have to "engage" IBM Global Services to run the thing -- probaly a project manager @ $275/hour and a one or two consultants @ $200/hour.
Add to this the INSANELY expensive hardware and software maintenance charges every year and you are talking about a serious amount of cash for little benefit
When you consider the alternatives, it makes even less sense. You can buy 100 Sun E220's or 2-processor intel 4U servers for the cost of one mainframe that lets you emulate 20 Linux boxes.
Mainframes have been on the wane for the last 20 years for good reason -- they are too friggin expensive!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I think that when I read a report from someone without a vested interest one way or another, there may be a believable word in it. Until then, I choose to do the typical
>These dual proccessor motherboards both scored
>worse in kernel compilations with both
>processors active!
And I'd bet you my next paycheck this is yet another example of the poor benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. They don't mention what options were used, but from the results it's pretty clear they just did "make" instead of "make -j2", so the compile was running a single job at a time.
>It was faster to run the kernel compilation on a >single processor.
Let me rephrase that for you - it was faster to run the kernel compilation on a single processor on an single processor kernel, as opposed to running the kernel compilation on a single processor on an SMP kernel.
>While two 32-bit CPUs != 1 64-bit CPU, it does
>illustrate how a major hardware change can make >linux (or indeed any OS) flounder around. [
This is pretty much just speculation though. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
And running 64-bit is hardly new to Linux. You have to set the way back machine all the way to late 1994 if you want to glance at the first efforts to make Linux run on a 64-bit platform. So 7 years of the 10 year history of Linux is as a multi-platform 64-bit capable operating system.
Matt
but there are problems like almost nobody coming out of college with mainframe knowledge.
Which is why IBM is trying to save the mainframe by running Linux on it. Suppose a company buys a z box running Linux. They get one 48U rack for the system and another for the DLT tape libraries. They contract out one mainframe support guy from IBM, and hire 8 cheap CS college grads to run the Linux virtual servers. Or one seasoned vet and 6 kids. All IBM has to do is guarantee job security for a few new hires a year by giving them mainframe training.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I'm on the s390 tech side as well, and I'm not AC, _and_ you're wrong. z900 processors, and perhaps earlier ones as well, have processors that lie dormant. Pay extra money to IBM and they will provide authorization codes to "turn on" that extra hardware.
1. Hard to find techs
Yes it harder to find technical people who know sun over windows or linux.
2.Web serving on sun box is a waste of money
Why buy one big box when many cheaper ones will do...? Save the big box for the Database server. Tux is much faster than anything from Sun.
3. Not many applications available
Most of the good sun stuff is the ported open source stuff that you have to go to ibiblio to download. Applications were mostly written on intel (SAP, Oracle) on linux and then ported to sun. Free stuff is almost all available for linux first.
4. Incompatibility across versions
The linux distros now have more in common than the big linux distros. They are more posix compliant as well. For example Sun threads and sun libraries are not portable to AIX or any other OS.
5. Propretary hardware
Yup - have a look at Suns network cards... nice but they ain't standard pci cards. 5,000 each for the nice ones. I have found the big vendors scr*w you at every turn. Memory upgrade - 50x the x86 price...
6. OK for database servers I still see the need. That is until postgresql or some other db vendor supplies fast distributed rdbms.
Actually I don't have anything against sun - they are probably one of the more "open" unix vendors. But they play the game just like everyone else.
my 2 cents worth................
Solaris may be more scalable, but more stable? It depends very much on the hardware.
To pull an example out of the air, I don't think I've ever seen a stable Solaris on the Sparc Ultra 5 (their 'cheap' IDE-based workstation.) I've also witnessed some really nasty wedging with LDAP authentication and panics on Sun Ultrasparc machines fighting it out with Sun-branded RAID arrays under load.
Maybe the latest version of Solaris is completely unlike its predecessors, but it seems a little unlikely.
Some versions of the Linux kernel, together with XFree, GNU software and other tools, have been exceptionally stable on certain combinations of x86-based PC hardware. Given that Sun control their own hardware, it seems unfair to criticise Linux's stability when compared with Solaris.
There's a story from the '89 quake that somebody placed a service call to Tandem after the quake. (Tandem, later bought by Compaq, made highly reliable fault-tolerant machines with N processors, disks, backplane busses, etc. backing each other up.) The machine had fallen over on its face. It was still running just fine, but they wanted Tandem to come put it rightside up just in case anything went wrong in the process... (Also, they were big heavy machines....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That said, anything that will compile and run properly on ppc (big-endian) as well as x86 (little-endian) should be endian-clean, and hence should run fine on a mainframe.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Mod the Parent *DOWN*.
I've developed Linux on the mainframe, and none of this is true. It IPLs very quickly, and is just as easy to use as any other Linux. That post ought to be (-1, Troll), not (5, Informative).
Here for proof that I know what I am talking about (down toward the bottom).
_sig_ is away
I'd hire the Linux Advocate because at least he doesn't have his head up his ass so far that he can't see out (ie no delusions of grandeur).
Many, even most quality systems suck like a Kirby: they fail to deliver on their promises, introduce significant overheads, and cost heaps. It's a good way to dig yourself into a hole with confidence.
Quality Consultant is usually resume code for ``I'm useless in my industry, so the only job I could get was as a combined critic, form-herd and bullshit merchant.''
The Linux Advocate will actually have some focus, and will be more likely know enough of the details of what he works with to be useful.
Really? Write or do significant modifications to a device driver then, go on! A driver for Conexant WinModems would be a good place to start...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Imagine a CIO of a Fortune 500 company, planning a new web project. For the hardware he has two options:
/1/, if the software guys are saying that it will work. Probably they will have all a Linux partition on their PC :-).
/1/ Add a dozen or more CPUs and some RAM to the existing mainframe infrastructure, to support a number of Linux images. (His data center probably runs a number of several MVS, OS/390 and maybe z/OS images in parallel.)
/2/ Buy and install two new Sun Starfire 15K.
Obviously his choice would be
If costs is the strong argument in the situation, Sun will have only a chance with large discounts.
I think Sun's strategy to build the next mainframe with the 15K backfires here, because for web servers the Intel rack hardware running Linux is the better option and IBM's virtual OS images will use CPU and RAM more efficiently than Sun's domain per 4-processor cartridge by definition. The nightly mainframe batches map well with the usage patterns of online services.
So Sun's revenue is now attacked by Linux from below and from above. These guys are forced to love Linux. Remember Linus's joke about world domination?
I took a quick look at the article and was astounded. It's to the point and seems to address real concerns - at least to one like me who has no opportunity for first-hand testing. /. frontpage soon :)
:) Kudos for the writer. Bashing, but informed instead of empty FUD.
;) ), compartment servers, home machines, firewalls or embedded solutions. Even more, it feels to inversely prove their fittedness for such tasks, as they're obviously "by their very nature" more geared toward such environments.
These points really require addressing from IBM's side, I think. Well, waiting for that to appear on
There was no article rating system available on Sun's page, so I had to write this here
On the other hand, free OS'es certainly don't grow on mainframes; they grow in the wild, so it's natural they're more fitted to the small-to-medium size HW. It doesn't lessen their absolute importance as cost-efficient clusters (Imagine a Beowulf of these!
OT: It's been a nightmare with the Kernel of Pain for me even on Intel hardware trying to put up some more serious servers (I wont' go into that in length, but reiserfs/RAID losing content still in 2.4.17 - blah!). I'm sticking with 2.2 stables and taking time to apply frisbee on server side in the future.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
and they're great:
http://www.cobalt.com/
their web server times out on me. Why?
Because Sun's firewall is broken and drops TCP connections using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
How stupid can a single company be? I bet that article goes to great lengths to say how well suited Sun is to provide scalable web servers. And they can't even get their own web server configured properly!
What a buch of losers. ECN is, by the way, an official internet standard (RFC3168), which happens to be implemented by Linux.
He's referring to the common clueless assertion that mainframes are crap by comparing JCL (a set of control statements) to awk (a scripting language). JCL does suck, but it's very well documented, unlike too many Unix functions (and no, confusing man pages don't count).
almost nobody coming out of college with mainframe knowledge
And of course you would trust your Solaris cluster to someone who'd only used a Sun workstation at college/university. Or have you never heard of training?
You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
Sun does that too with their big machines. The scheme is called COD (Capacity on Demand) and works the same as IBMs plan. Also, to reply to the other reply to your reply (confused yet?), Sun machines are rather unique due to the fact that they can run both endians, big and small. I've never actually heard of anyone DOING something with that feature, but it does exist none the less.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, I tend to believe that a company whose mainstay for the last 70 or so years has been service can make their system work, too. And a bit better than some "fly-by-night" firm that seems to have a "solution of the week" fetish.
That is all.
Firstly, I have to modify Linux source code very seldom (maybe one system in thirty), and when I do it's for very obscure reasons, and it's good (yea, verily, even great!) to have the choice in that circumstance - especially since I specialise in odd systems (the kind of stuff that the MCSE brigade don't even dream of doing (and when they're stupid enough to try anyway the resulting house-of-cards heap of VB makes Heath Robinson look positively conservative)).
If I installed ``cookie-cutter'' Office+Web+Email desktops all day, and servers to suit, there's no reason I'd ever bother working with source. Or for that matter, for dirtying my hands with media, since net boot ROMs have become common.
The alternatives are:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Some drivers, yes. I shouldn't have been quite so specific.
Amen, brother, amen... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Whereas a quality zealot will bury you in mostly-useless paperwork instead. Great choice.
But Advocate != Zealot. I'd avoid hiring a zealot of any kind, if I could, they're more trouble than they're worth. This is not to say that strong personal preferences are bad (they generally aren't), but that monomania is.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is also, as I recall, what lets you yank out random processors while the system is running, and plug them back in. The problem is that Linux for these puppies doesn't support most of this functionality; there's no way to tell it "Hi, I know you're happily running, but here's an extra 512 megs of RAM for that database process. Ta!" At the moment, this is basically a way to consolidate a rampaging buttload of little servers into one big honking server; one could do much the same effect by buying a really really big x86 box, running one copy of linux, then using that to run (number of processors -1) copies of VMware, set processor affinity, then use those to run images of Linux.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Nice straw man! If that were anything close to what I said you would've totally kicked my ass.
I'm just listing one disadvantage of using mainframes at a company -- that colleges don't typically use them or teach about them. I never said only college grads administer computers or that nobody needed training after college.
-Kevin