Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids

OSS_ilation writes "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast. At R.L. Polk and Co., one of the oldest automobile analytics firms in the U.S., an aging mainframe couldn't cut it, so the IT staff looked elsewhere. Their search led to a grid computing environment — more specifically, a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers. The mainframe's still there, apparently, but after an internal comparison showed the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs, Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."

Comments

right tool for right job

[r00t]

You use the mainframe when you want error recovery at every step of the way. One of them even runs two CPU pipelines in lockstep so that a failing CPU can be safely isolated without crashing the app that was running on it.

The mainframe also gives you nice IO and super-efficient virtualization.

Workload doesn't need all that? Gee, maybe it's not a workload for the mainframe.

Re:right tool for right job

[mwvdlee]

You are thinking of the old Tandem machines, I think they're called Himalaya now, or whatever. Those are failsafe machines which are supposed to have zero downtime on hardware problems.

The Mainframe discussed in the topic is an IBM one, most likely a predecessor of the current zSeries machines (OS/390).

So Linux beat it. I guess they just had tasks which weren't fit for large scale processing behemoths like mainframes anyway. I dare bet the Linux grid would be a lot slower if it had to batch processes a few hundred MB worth of data. And despite all the claims about Linux stability, mainframes boast far superious uptime (a few minutes of scheduled downtime a year and no unscheduled downtime; everything can be hotswapped, including CPU's and memory). Although the increase of real-time processing decreases the need for mainframes a bit, the ever increasing processing load still makes them invaluable to large companies.