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

we don't need mainframes, but standalones may lack

[jimstapleton]

what we need is "multiframes"

Consider an virual operating system, that can run on one or more other operating systems. This operating system is actually a set of nodes, one node per machine (or one node per CPU), with command nodes and worker nodes.

Command nodes distribute the workload and exist for redundancy. If one goes down, all others have a backup of it's data and state, and the next most senior node takes over.

Worker nodes then take the tasks and interface with the users via a standard shell.

Files can be distributed amongst the nodes for speed and redundancy, and if a node that needs a file doesn't have it, ant can request the file and temporarily have it locally. Each node will have a list of what files exist, and where they exist.

UI tasks are written to run solely on the machine of the user, but data crunching tasks are written to be split between nodes.

Thus, a person just goes to his or her machine, and interacts with it like a normal machine, except, rather than having a logon for his machine, he or she will have a logon for the multiframe.

Also, because of this setup, a multifram could work on top of multiple operating systems (say an office that is 50% windows for the normal users, and then 35% Linux for the devs, 10% FreeBSD for other devs, 5% HPUX/Sun for some server, and all machines coudl contribute to the multiframe.

The multifram could also have recorded statistics of uptimes and drops for various nodes, performance statistics for load balancing, etc.

The caveat to this system is that it would need some pretty heavy networking, even if optimised, and there could be latency issues. Still, I like this idea better than a mainframe.

Re:What are they trying to prove ?

[Ingolfke]

I agree that this isn't a good comparison of grid computing against modern mainframes... but I think that's more the fault of the post, not the article. I thought the article was still interesting though. It was interesting to learn a bit more about grid computing in a specific implementation and to see that companies are choosing alternatives to mainframes for massive processing tasks.

Re:What are they trying to prove ?

[R2.0]

It's not just in IT - people in ALL industries want "new and shiny" over "old an and boring".

I recently had a request to install a new type of medical irradiator (products, not people)in lieu of an older model. The new one doesn't use a radioactive source, and instead uses xray tubes. It was the cat's ass - no radiation safety officer required, no NRC hassles, and another part of he company did an ROI and the results were great. But when I looked at the specs, the cycle time was slower, it had 1/2 the capacity, and the xray tube needed replacement after a certain number of cycles, and it wasn't a cheap part.

Skeptical, I requested a copy of the "ROI". It was a 2 page narrative saying how great the new unit was, and how the staff was so much more comfortable with it. Not a dollar sign to be found. So I ran my own ROI, with the criterion being a 10 year payback. Guess what: not only didn't it have a 10 year payback, it didn't have a payback EVER. The added maintenance costs, plus the added personnel due to the slower cycle times, never ever made up for the increased licensing costs and paperwork.

And it STILL took me 2 more months to explain to the end users why I wasn't going to buy the new unit.

Actual performance numbers

[spookymonster]

We still have a 2066 in our shop. According to my power charts, the 2066 rates approximately 77 MIPS. If the Dells are giving a 70% performance increase, that means roughly 130 MIPS, or 1.1 MIPS per server.

In comparison, our standard model mainframe (a 2084) kicks up about 1600 MPS. Assuming the performance numbers for the Dell grid were to scale (the safe money says it doesn't), that translates into almost 1450 Dells. Keep in mind, that's not even a top of the line mainframe...

Let's not even start on hardware maintenance (which would you rather do: hot swap a power supply on 1 system, or 25?), network overhead, shared DASD, coupling facilities and RRS (think: Beowulf clusters).