The Mainframe Still Lives!

coondoggie passed us a NetworkWorld blog post about the incredible rock-em-sock-em mainframe. Knocked frequently in recent years, the site notes that IBM's workhorse continues to do important work in a number of enterprise environments. "While there are some out there who'd like to see its demise, a true threat to the Big Iron has never really amounted to much. Even today, the proponents of commodity boxes offering less expensive x86/x64 or RISC technologies say the mainframe is doomed. But the facts say otherwise. For example, IBM recently said the mainframe has achieved three consecutive quarters of growth, marked by new customers choosing the platform for the first time and existing customers adding new workloads, such as Linux and Java applications."

Comments

Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe?

[Just Some Guy]

As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem.

If only there were some way to make a "dump" of the "core" of that application's memory, then you could use some sort of a debugger to look at that application's state and figure it out. I'd call it, oh, "Genuinely Decent Bugridder", or gdb for short. If only.