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Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the big-iron-not-so-big dept.

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."

3 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. What are they trying to prove ? by Ksempac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So a NEW system outperforms an OLD system. I fail to see how this is a news.

    If they had compared a NEW mainframe with the NEW grid, then we would have been able to draw some conclusions about which one is better. But saying "We bought a new system, its better than the old one" proves nothing.

  2. right tool for right job by r00t · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Year of the Mainframe? by dbneeley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As others have pointed out, the comment left a great deal out.

    For example, any mainframe that can be replaced by 120 PC compute nodes isn't well utilized and/or is completely outmoded.

    I had a chat with a gentleman once who participated in a replacement of multiple PC servers with a mainframe--but it entailed replacing 7,000 servers with a relatively high-end machine.

    The result was that power and real estate savings alone paid for the mainframe--which had more capacity for future expansion as needed.

    As always, proper implementation of the right equipment for the job is always crucial--and a shallow analysis that doesn't cover all the variables is simply misleading at best.