Why The Dinosaurs Won't Die

DaveAtFraud writes "Ace's Hardware has a nice introductory article to the animal that will not die: The Mainframe. Ever wonder why these things are still around and what makes them different from a PC or UNIX box? The article is IBM-centric so there's no discussion of say the CDC Cyber series but when most people don't even believe that mainframes exist anymore, what the hay, let's disabuse them of that notion first. Hopefully, the author will follow up with the additional promised articles that go into more technical detail but this is a good place to start. I wonder if they still make card readers, too?" This guide came out last month, but it's worth looking through, even just for the pictures.

Comments

Mainframes

[Anonymous Coward]

There still in use at our local hospital.

as long as it works and gets the job done

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats all that matters, ppl will still use it - cost is also a factor.

Redundency!

[Prien715]

Actually you could. On a single system (RAID level 1 or higher) ensures that if any one hard drive goes bad, no data is lost. In raid 1, a second drive simply mirrors the first for example (it gets more efficient and more complicated as one goes up levels but you get the idea.)

No hardware is totally reliable. According to the article, in an early mainframe, there was a 2nd CPU to check the operations of the first.

In the bank example, the cheap and brute force way would be to simply have two systems keep track of any one account. If either system goes down, nothing bad happens. Just put up a new system and have it mirror the data of the one working system.

Redundency is the key to reliability. It doesn't matter if it's implimented on a beowulf cluster or a mainframe.