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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."
no shit dept.
Of course it lives, and in fact it has done things in 20+ years ago the the PC is just now approaching.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mainframe? Don't you mean a high capacity, legacy compatible application server?
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
My two AS/400s keep chugging along. They have never screwed up when they have been needed. With every other type of computer I've worked with, there has always been a case that I've gotten screwed by them. But those two old IBM mini-mainframes just do what they're told, so I'm happy.
Besides, I love the sounds of IPL'ing one of those monsters.
comes out with an object-oriented RPG and 9 track tape drive for a micro.
(and no, newbie, "RPG" does _not_ stand for "role playing game.")
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Why would anyone want to see the demise of the mainframe, or any other particular technology? I don't understand all the emotion about such things: if the mainframe continues to provide value in certain areas, then customers in those areas will continue to buy it.
I remember back in '93, calling for the end of the mainframe era, when some of my friends were taking COBOL classes at university. Look how wrong I am! Here we are, years later, and I'm still hooking into some mainframe system or another.
...nah.
I have come to very much appreciate the high availability (24/7/365) and stability of the mainframe. In fact, when I get approached by vendors these days telling me I can support virtualization on high-end PCs, which cost $1M or more, I ask, "why not just by a Z-Series."
Long Live the Mainframe!
Maybe someday, I'll learn COBOL...
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Hardware quality is the key here. It may not matter, if the application is even 30% faster on x86. But if the motherboard is buggy, or the parallel port is flaky, or cable can fluctuate, or the video card can get loose (early AGPs anyone?) — it is death. Even if the probability of it ever happening is very low, the costs will be devastating. Thus the expectation (probabilty times cost) of the loss is still lower than the cost.
I've heard of machines, where the CPUs or memory can be replaced without shutting down — 15 years ago (Sequoia)... Meanwhile, some controllers and OSes still don't fully support hard-disk replacement, or even network cable unplugging — today...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
if you're a major business operation, and you have the usual multiple terabytes of data that needs to be stored and processed with near-100% reliability, you need big iron. My company has an AS400, and it does a lot of things that we'd be hard pressed to accomplish using PCs. Predicting the demise of the mainframe is like predicting the demise of our economy. You'd best hope it doesn't ever actually happen.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, I'm sorry. I just cant do it.
With the flexibility afforded by virtualization who wouldn't want big iron to pump out the megabytes? You can run dozens or hundreds of webservers or databases on a single mainframe with virtualization.
What is better equipped to handle iSCSI and fibre channel storage data that the massive crossbar-IO throughput capabilities of the mainframe.
Blade servers are to mainframes as a pack of mice are to an elephant.
All hail Big Iron! All Hail IBM! Hail Eris!
I'm just sayin'
I clicked on the link, but did not see any photos of mainframes fighting each other to the death. It wasn't even mentioned in the text! I want my money back.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The move away from mainframes, minis and midrange boxes happened because the commodity PC platform reached a point where it was a viable replacement for processing/storage requirements for which the old systems were sold as complete overkill (or there was no choice at the time). Wherever it was actually needed, there has been exactly ZERO migration and the mainframe is still the king of the hill, by far. So no, some of us are not "surprised" at all.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Seriously, at what point does a large, highly redundant server become a mainframe? (Yes, I've checked the Wikipedia article and somewhat out-of-date FOLDOC definition.
Or is the definition merely, "any large computer descended from one of the old-guard mainframes?"
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to work on a VAX VMS system. It was an 11/750, shaped like an oversized washing machine, and took up an entire room with all its cabling, Hard Disk stack, RAM box, and a huge multiplexer.
Although it was a thunderously loud, kilowatt-sucking machine with the processing power of an 80286, it had a number of features that are simply not available until you start ponying up some serious cash:
1) Dynamic memory remapping - when memory failed, it would "fix" the bad parts with checksum or by reloading the data in the memory from disk, and remap the addresses to another chip that wasn't failed. It would VM out as needed if/when it simply ran out.
2) File versioning - you could "bring back" previous copies of any file in the system simply by specifying its revision NN times back. EG: "edit myfile.txt" could be replaced with "edit myfile.txt:1" to see the previous edition. This was simply awesome and I've not seen this elsewhere.
3) Automated clustering - simply by connecting several of these machines together with a fairly simple serial adapter, they would immediately "recognize" each other and start sharing loads as needed. I don't know how many of these could be clustered together, what the limits were, but the fact that it was so simple to set up and it "just worked" was simply amazing.
ECC RAM doesn't hold a candle to #1. I'm unaware of a production-ready filesystem that can match #2 above, and #3 is simply in another league.
Why hasn't this technology persisted to this day? DEC/Compaq/HP screwed the pooch on this one.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My first experience was with the CDC 3200 series back in 1970. It programmed in Compass (assembler level). Cobol and Fortran as compiled languages. It was an Octal machine with the primary input being the card reader.
Each gate was on a separate printed circuit board and there were probably in excess of 5,000 PCB's in the mainframe and the various controllers. Quite a monster to troubleshoot unless the circuit was fully understood. We had a Tektronix's 545 scope with delayed sweep to trace out the circuits.
The main timing chain for the core memory was initiated by sending a "0" down a ringing coil that has various taps on it for the whole read/write cycle.
We kid about having to key in the boot code manually, but the 3200 required about a 20 step boot program. I still remember parts of the code even now.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Which is not to say that using mainframes never makes sense. If you have a lot of tried-and-true legacy software, it might well be cost effective to keep legacy hardware around to run it. The alternative is to write replacement software that runs on modern systems, meaning you have to go through the whole development, QA, and deployment thing all over again, at huge cost. Very often it makes more sense just to keep using mainframes. But that's a matter of economics, not technology.
I would also point out that modern mainframes are not really "mainframes" in the original sense. The original mainframes used technology that became obsolete on the day microprocessor-based systems became more cost effective. What we now call "mainframes" are just specialized microcomputers that are optimized to run legacy mainframe code.
Well, yes you are young. Perhaps a better definition for you would go thusly:
If it takes Chuck Norris a round house kick to destroy, instead of a simple side kick, then its a mainframe.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So why not upgrade the OS to a supported version? If your hardware is recently purchased/new, it probably cannot even run too many releases of unsupported operating systems anyway. And all the latest IBM operating system versions run on all the mainframe models stretching back to the end of 2000 (three generations). IBM always has a lot of overlap.
If you have z/OS V1.x, the upgrade to 1.8 or (soon) 1.9 is free. If you have OS/390 still -- hard to imagine on recently purchased/new hardware since it doesn't run on the z9 anyway -- the upgrade to z/OS is probably better than free (i.e. you typically save money), and you usually save money on the other software that runs on z/OS. (z/OS introduced subcapacity licensing.) And you have a full year when you can run both on the same system for no additional charge to get the migration done.
An OS upgrade is extremely unlikely to break any applications. There's 40+ year old code that's still running, right along with 64-bit Java code written an hour ago. Your 17 to 18 year old code should be perfectly happy on the new OS. And here's a radical notion: you can actually change your code if you wish. You know, add features and functions. You're allowed to do that. :-) You run code as long as it has value on the mainframe, for as long as you wish, without the vendor saying, "Sorry, that code must die this year." Just keep your OS and middleware on at least relatively recent releases, that's all -- it's backward compatible. Change your code and add code as you want, when you want.
What is it that makes a computer a "mainframe"? For years, the "Big Iron" programmers insisted that they worked with the only real computers, and the term "mainframe" was always associated with big machines that could only be used by the most experienced programmers. That's just silly; either your computer is Turing Complete or it isn't (making allowances for finate memory limitations, of course). The important distinctions are:
Big Iron has always had points 1 and 2, but clusters of cheap PCs can often match their level. In practice, current Big Iron hardware isn't fundamentally different from current PCs--it just tends to have better quality control and "more" than whatever's in the PC (more RAM, more hard drive, more processors, etc.). In fact, an AS400 is about the same size as a large server PC, not the room-filling Big Iron machines of yore.
Number 4 simply has to do with what sort of connectors and drivers you have available.
I've had personal experience with RPG, which is why I say with confidence that mainframes are utter failures at number 3. The languages are so primitive that they've barely discovered indentation blocks (and some older programmers shun this "freeform" mode). Sure, they run Java now, but I didn't need Big Iron to run Java. I'll take a VB job before I touch RPG again.
If the programming languages are what make it "Big Iron", then I hope it dies a horrible death.
Overall, we don't need the special terms "mainframe" and "Big Iron" anymore, because all the machines that fit those descriptions are better called "servers" or "supercomputers".
I must say, however, that I am impressed that old Big Iron still works, and in fact still runs a lot of financial transactions. It's no exaggeration to say that removing all the old Big Iron tonight would kill the world economy by tomorrow. It's best to keep those machines and programs in working order, since they obviously work, are quite robust, and solve many problems, whereas a new program may fail.
Not a typewriter
We are one of the new mainframe customers out there. We are actually in transition. Running hundreds of Linux servers is less efficient for our workload and application type than a few large-scale 'big-iron' systems. Not that a cluster of Linux servers couldn't beat the big box, our engineers just can't hack it. It is HARD writing applications that scale well across hundreds of totally unique systems. More often than not our software boys have created islands or pockets of computing regions in the cluster - so it no longer is a cluster. It's just a bunch of stand-alone servers. In this scenario (bad programmers) we can mask a lot of the poor design by consolidating the workload up instead of scaling out. I would prefer they'd fix the code. However, you can't tell a software engineer he's wrong - it gets ugly fast. I admit that the process is 'broken' when compared to some ideal business standard. The truth is, it's like this at a lot of companies.
:)
As a system administrator, I wish I had a few big-iron boxes to babysit rather than hundreds of smaller ones. There are dozens of reasons why the mainframe is easier to manage and deal with. There has been years and years of engineering that has gone in to these things. They are on a different level.
The downside is that we will probably have to have a 'work-force reduction' due to the decreased demands of the hardware support team. It is an ugly but necessary part of a capitalist work force. I'm keeping my resume up to date - just incase.
Well, from what I understand, one thing makes a mainframe a mainframe is that it's not commodity boxes clustered together. It will carry a larger price tag, but should come with the increased reliability and support over the commodity boxes.
It's similar to the difference between military grade and consumer grade equipment. For example, a GPS receiver you purchase that doesn't crashes on the trip to grandma is no big deal. A Navy SEAL squad that has a GPS receiver crash IS a big deal.
One of the things about the "Beowulf cluster" of commodity boxes is that they are cheap, giving some aspects of high-end computing power without the cost. This is for those garage-based start-ups that need some serious power but if a hard-disk drops out or a LAN connection goes dead it's not a huge deal.
Your mainframe setup is for large scale businesses, universities, nuclear research, all that fun kind of stuff. If your job is riding on it, get a mainframe.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
I have seen old crappy RPG apps, what you are reffering to (crunching 500 million unique vehicles) sounds it could have been one of those crappy 20 years old application full of spaghetti code.
Let's not mix hardware and software.
Linux and JBoss run just fine on zSeries. Rewriting an application in Java and running it on JBoss is one thing. The hardware you will run it on is another thing.
Note that I don't run zSeries, they are too expensive ;-)
I do use virtualization although to reduce the number of deployed servers. For rundundancy, the good old shared drive with a standby machine principle is used. This principle is used by Oracle, IBM, MSCS, etc. and is still viewed as more robust than linux grid computing by most corporate decision takers.
Linux grid computing is becoming more and more mature although and it will be interesting to see what happens in the long run.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
There are some pretty obvious reasons why there are still mainframes around: there's lots of "legacy" applications out there (in a US context, consider the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or the FAA). And there are systems with BIG databases (something like SABRE, or the IRS and SSA again). Mainframe technology has been running those for a while. To replace those with an unproven (in a similar context) new technology is not likely to be a career-enhancing move for the IT Director.
More to the point, though, is that in the rush to embrace the newest and coolest, some of the genuine virtues of the mainframe environment were overlooked. Back in the early 1980's, I was the head of IT, and a partner, in an investment management firm, the subsidiary of a larger financial services corporation. Our investment analysis process was pretty quantitative: we used statistical valuation models and optimization methods to build our portfolios. We ran all our internal applications on our IBM 4341 under VM/SP, and were linked into our parent's big iron running VM and MVS. We also were linked to fund custodians and to DTC [Depository Trust Co.] for trade confirmations, and got data transmissions from various exchanges to get prices for fund valuations.
Every person in the firm had an IBM 327x terminal, or the equivalent, on her/his desk. (The clerical staff had IBM DisplayWriters with 327x emulation.) I just pulled out a "Getting Started" guide from 1985: it has a terse synopsis of how to send and receive E-mail, how to use the scheduling system for things like conference rooms and overhead projectors, how to access our internal client and research data bases (including a small but growing index of technical documentation), and how to use our portfolio management application. Using these facilities was routine for the most non-technical people in the firm.
(Part of that was by design. For example, we made it nearly impossible for a portfolio manager to do a trade without using the portfolio management application. There was a bypass, for emergencies, but it was designed to be highly visible.)
Now, I am not claiming this was Nirvana. It was expensive, and I spent a lot of time negotiating with IBM, and other near-monopoly suppliers, to get better terms. And having what we had was entirely dependent on the fact that we were 100 percent an IBM shop. I'm not arguing for going back to those days at all; I do think, though, that sometimes people may have, as one of my colleagues memorably put it, "thrown the baby out with the dishwater". I still, for example, haven't seen a "virtualization" solution that is as elegant as VM on IBM hardware.
It's true the AS/400 is an expensive platform. It's also true you save money every year because you don't need sysadmin's or DBA's (at all at the low to medium end and much less at the upper end). Additionally, in my experience with similar workloads between AS/400 and PC servers, you need lots of PC servers to match the throughput in OLTP applications.
I think when you balance these things, the AS/400 is much less expensive than it may seem when you are buying disk or memory at extremely high prices.
I knew this news was coming.
After the advent of client/server and GUI interfaces the mainframe was declared dead. Yet the web happened, and all of a sudded all the inefficiencies of the GUI interface was replaced with, effectively, a 3270 terminal because it's a more efficient network model. Enter data, submit, wait for a response, just like a mainframe, but somehow... new?
In the past few years, virtualization has become a huge topic, and it's most interesting following the developments of Xen and Vmware and Solaris Containers and all the hardware vendors just now designing and building support for virtualization... and then I realize again... haven't we been here before? Virtualization is old technology, tried and true on the mainframe, and it's going to be some more years before it becomes a commodity. Oh it'll be here, someday, but again, don't hold your breath waiting the mainframe to go away as yet another generation realizes the advantages of what as invented long ago.
What a fluff piece. The real news is that IBM is actively in the process of trying to kill the only competition that it has left in mainframes. And that they are using a bogus software patent lawsuit to do so. Against a product which is Linux based, no less.
The company in question is Platform Solutions, Inc., who realized that they can completely emulate the Mainframe CPU opcodes by changing the microcode in Intel CPUs. And use Linux to handle all of the IO. The result is that you end up with a much faster Mainframe than IBM can build. And you can charge a lot less for it.
IBM got pissed off with the only competition that they have left (since all of the other mainframe builders went out of business years ago; and in fact PSI has a ton of ex-Amdahl guys who are about the only ones left who understand mainframes outside of IBM, but I digress). So, IBM filed a bogus lawsuit against this start-up. This is Deja-vu if you remember how Amdahl got started.
PSI has countered with an Antitrust lawsuit, and some other ones, last I heard. But the bottom line is that IBM is behaving worse than Microsoft to try to kill off the only competition that it has left.
You almost never hear about IBM's actions with software patents in the Linux community. But their actions clearly show that they are willing to do whatever it takes to enhance their monopoly.
Don't forget the thin client technologies that are currently making a big impact. We're pretty much back to dumb terminals again. Having a large, centralised system is obviously an advantage until we find some way of utilising all that wasted power in the 2GHz desktops with 1Gib of RAM that companies buy in the hundreds.
It strikes me that along time ago some clever sod managed to dupe companies into buying and maintaining individual PCs at huge cost when small, lightweight terminals connected to a central mainframe were doing a great job. It's taken us nearly 20 years to notice that all people in most companies ever run is Office and most of them don't use even half of the features that were available in, say, Word 6.0. The idea of having hundreds of desktop PCs was a big mistake full of compromises like network drives, roaming profiles and remote control apps like VNC or Microsoft's Remote Assistance, none of which you need if you have the mainframe serve out desktops.
The greatest example of the evolution of the mainframe is the web. Web apps and office suites are quickly evolving thanks to technologies like AJAX and this all harks back to the general mainframe concept: Your clients show the UI, your (possibly distributed) servers do the work, keep the backups, and store everything in one place that's relatively easy to administer. If it goes down you have redundancy in the form of HA clusters or whatever to keep the system as a whole working. These ideas never went away, for some reason we just lost focus.
I'm honestly not dissing the line; I'm sure they really are great hardware. But oh, the price! I don't remember the exact cost I heard for a mid-range server, but I do remember getting back to the office and running the numbers to find that I could buy something like 60 nice Dell rackmount servers for the same price and make a small Linux cluster of them. I'd end up with about 30 times the throughput, 100 times the storage, and 0% of the software cost.
I cannot believe that the AS/400, solid as it is, has better uptimes than a 60-machine cluster (given that only about one tenth of those machines had to be online to exceed the AS/400's performance). Heck, for half the price, you could have two smaller clusters in geographically distinct locations with a high-speed link between them.
I think the iSeries has a solid position of running legacy systems, and I could even understand the justification for buying newer, more powerful machines as those systems grow in size and scope. That seems perfectly reasonable. But for new development, I just don't get how that single expensive box is more cost-effective than a small group of decent x86 systems. Think of it as a RAIS (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers). I'd rather place my trust in a few good but affordable mirrored drives than one hyper-expensive bulletproof device. Well, same concept here.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
One important reason for the refusal of mainframes to die, is the enormous body of non-portable software written for them. Non-portability is a key advantage. Non-portable applications are what kept people buying mainframes, what kept DOS alive for many years, and what kept people using Windows 3.1 and Windows ME when it sucked ass.
Non-portable applications were written for Mainframes and DOS because the systems were so old that portability wasn't really a consideration when those apps were written. In other words, non-portable apps are a side-effect of having an old system, and they cause the old system to linger.
...The problem with running Oracle on a Sun E10k, is that you can swap out the E10k. Your application code doesn't have to change. Same with java applications. But something written in COBOL that accesses weird hardware-specific data ports and weird OS APIs will keep that hardware around forever. Because those applications will never be rewritten. Because, when it comes time to re-write the apps (ie when you want to run them on another system) they will have decades of convoluted business logic embedded in them, making a re-write practically impossible.
The reason Mainframes still rule the world is because of the IO speed. I do JAVA and COBOL development and the reason JAVA will NEVER win is because of the slow ass TCP/IP database access. My COBOL programs run 13.88x times faster because they use Assembler calls to DB/2 routines where as JAVA uses JDBC. JAVA loads at 3.6 recs/sec where as COBOL loads at 50 recs/sec. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is when you are waiting on the network.
--Scott
--Scott 8-}
Of course it lives, and in fact it has done things in 20+ years ago the the PC is just now approaching.
Mainframes aren't just about capacity. Mainframes are about reliability. They keep running - even as broken pieces are repaired or replaced, and equipment is upgraded. They use error correction to insure that the overall machine never drops a bit or makes an error, even though the individual components do. And so on.
It's not just IBM either. For instance there's Amdahl (now wholly owned by Fujitsu). Last time I looked (a few years back) ALL the baby bells did their real-time call accounting on Amdahl mainframes. Keeping them running was important - because if you had to reboot all the calls on the network were free. That's several million per hour down the drain - but NOTHING compared to a similar problem in a server supporting a brokerage's trading.
There's a lot of stuff you can do on networks of comodity machines. But when you truly need a "no bit shall fall" environment there's still no substitute for a mainframe.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
RAIS is great idea call me when they have invisible failover. The only company I know of doing this with PC hardware is Stratus. I'm talking about not losing any processing due to a machine or OS borking. I'm serious if you have this then the problem is solved.
Last time I looked the Linux/HA and all other projects had some serious issues with failover, there always seemed to be a single machine at some stage that could take the cluster away from the user.
The AS/400 like the mainframes has been built to be reliable. Hardware costs because it's specced not to fail, redundancy on everything is available. Not to sure about a processor failure on the As/400 though, might still be able to take the machine down. But everything else failsover cleanly.
So what have you?
And don't forget that Unisys still maintains and sells descendants of both the old Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series mainframe line and the Burroughs MCP-based A-series mainframe boxes (both are part of their Clearpath mainframe line). Both are quite dissimilar from IBM's in terms of architecture and software, but each is quite similar to IBM's big iron in terms of basic capablities.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I could buy something like 60 nice Dell rackmount servers for the same price and make a small Linux cluster of them. I'd end up with about 30 times the throughput, 100 times the storage, and 0% of the software cost. I cannot believe that the AS/400, solid as it is, has better uptimes than a 60-machine cluster (given that only about one tenth of those machines had to be online to exceed the AS/400's performance). Heck, for half the price, you could have two smaller clusters in geographically distinct locations with a high-speed link between them.
I don't doubt your numbers, but I believe you're leaving a lot out. Let's analyze this:
1) You equate an AS/400's price with 60 Dell rackmount servers. Although you didn't specify *which* Dell rackmount servers, assuming 1U each, this is two racks of Dell, minimum. The AS/400 takes about half a rack, but we'll just generalize to 1 rack. The Dells cost at least twice as much in floor space. Data center space: AS/400 wins.
2) Power. Minimum 60 AC-DC converting power supplies for Dell. How much is wasted in the conversion for the Dells? AS/400 wins. Minimum 60 power drops needed for Dell. How many does the AS/400 need? AS/400 wins.
3) Cooling. 1 rack for the AS/400 vs 2 or more for the Dells. AS/400 wins. I will guess that all the extra heat from having so many power supplies will just make the Dells more of a loser.
4) Network access. 60 individual NICs to configure for the Dells, and 60 different network sessions. AS/400 wins. 60 individual network drops for the Dells, and that would be at least a 48 port and a 12 port switch combo --maybe three 24 port switches? AS/400 wins again.
5) Storage access. You have 2.5 options. 60 individual disks for the Dells, 60 individual Fibre Channel HBAs for the Dells, or 60 saturated NICs running iSCSI for the Dells. AS/400 wins on either not needing 60 disks, or 60 HBAs. iSCSI could be a wash.
6) Console access. If the network fails, you will need to get onto the console. All 60 of them for the Dells; 1 for the AS/400. AS/400 wins. Good luck with 60 KVM ports. I recommend Avocent. If you can "get by" on one console at a time for the Dells, you'll need to pay someone to switch the cables, or physically be there yourself. AS/400 wins.
7) Sys admins. You only need 1 for the AS/400 -- and still have time for 59 more AS/400 servers. Good luck with the Dells -- you'll be bogged down with just that one cluster while the AS/400 admin is busy with the equivalent of your 60th (just an educated guess). AS/400 wins.
8) Fault tolerance: See #1-7. Simplification allows for easier problem resolution and time for other tasks. AS/400 wins.
9) Service contract: 60 machines for Dell vs 1 for IBM. Does the AS/400 support cost 60 times more for the same level? I'm guessing, no. AS/400 wins. Dell might not even offer service contracts for the machines you're comparing (hard to tell since you never mentioned which ones).
Hey, I'm not an IBM shill, nor am I short on Dell (I'm only expanding on your comparison). But you have to seriously consider the application here. And you will run into scalability issues with that many machines -- and scalability means money. Along the same lines, you might not want a whole lot of reliability, but you'll sure be spending the money you save (and likely more than that) for all the hidden costs I've listed above.
Google does fail though. I have gotten error messages when trying to load google.com and the search results. Only twice mind you, but still.
:x
I've always heard it referred to as a midrange system.
All modern mainframes (since at least 2000) can run the latest Java(TM): it's a standard, no extra charge feature in z/OS (the flagship operating system among the 5 available, Linux being another). So if you're running Java on the mainframe accessing DB2 on the mainframe you're going to see a much different number. (That's typically using something called JZOS, by the way, for Java batch programs. JZOS is free with z/OS, too.)
If it's J2EE (e.g. WebSphere Application Server for z/OS) then you'd typically be using the Type 2 JDBC driver to access DB2. As least as far as Java goes, that database access path is fast and tight.
In the modern mainframe (since 2004), your Java can run on a special Java accelerator called a zAAP. You turn on the zAAP on your z9 (latest model) or z890/z990 (prior generation model) and you pay zero extra (that'd be $0) for software but suddenly about 75% (give or take) of your WebSphere processing shifts over to the zAAP(s). The capacity you had been using on the main processors is now free for other work, or you can cap it and pay less for software, or buy less of it in the first place, or some combination.
So, yes, COBOL code accessing DB2 locally is fast, and Java code accessing DB2 over the network is slower. But Java code accessing DB2 locally is at least much closer to COBOL. You have choices.
As someone who works in a 'dinosaur pen', I've been hearing about the mainframe's demise for years. Of course these are also the same folks that promised us the 'paperless office', yet we go through pallets of paper every week.
We have two mainframe systems, IBM & Tandem (HP Non-Stop), as well as over 100 HP UNIX boxes. In general, the mainframes do the heavy lifting while the so-called 'distributed systems' handle storage, data warehousing & whatnot. There isn't a day that goes by without some kind of problem with the HP boxes. The UNIX tech services group is always running around putting out fires, while the IBM & (to a lesser degree) Tandem groups only have to deal with scheduled maintainence & upgrades & such. The running gag is to refer to them as Maytag repairmen since just like the commercials, they sit around waiting for something to go wrong.
Bottom line - a bunch of over-clocked PCs does not a mainframe make.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let's assume gdb actually works and delivers the information you want.
Were you running it at the time? In production? All the time? Did it catch the fault? And did the hardware/driver/OS stay up in order to catch it? Was there hardware key-protected memory so that you know exactly what put what into that memory location? Did a cosmic ray bounce an electron inside the microprocessor?
Say what you will about the mainframe, the original poster was right. Debugging, tracing, fault analysis, and related tasks are like nothing else around. These capabilities are embedded deep into the hardware levels, and you cannot escape them. The philosophy is that if you're going to run it you damn well better be able to troubleshoot it at all times. And I'm serious about that cosmic ray reference. The dirty little secret is that microprocessors, as they get faster and hotter and more dense, are getting less reliable and generate less consistent computations. Mainframe processors effectively run everything twice, compare, and reconcile automatically, and the layers above (OS, middleware, applications) have absolutely no clue it's happening. The mainframe never lets so much as a fault add or bit shift surface to the OS: it'll dynamically swap in a spare under the covers until the redundant circuitry fully agrees.
I would like one.. at home For now, it is just play with the one at work Price / Space / power consumption is also better than compared to a rack full of crappy build x86 machines which need their separate environment and infrastructure build around
considering the 24-way, 20tb disk, and 10g memory monster in the room next to me. Its got a cousin in another state as well.
AS/400s are essentially mainframes now. The next generation of iSeries will run the same processors as the zSeries. They already share a HMC and a lot of basic hardware.
We have a shop with multiple AS/400s, a zSeries, couple of xSeries, a Tandem, and a whole mess of PCs. The only systems we have downtime with are PCs. The network goes down, Notes server dies or locks up, etc. As such the Notes server is being moved to an AS/400 because we cannot afford downtime even for e-mail.
PCs look attractive because of their individual price. When setting up enough of them to do the same work they start getting expensive in base cost, power, and cooling. The other big factor in our use of AS/400s is that with over 80 of them we only have one primary Administrator and 3 back ups. Our Network support department (supports just managing the network servers and such) is larger and busier!
Mainframes (inc AS/400s) are here to stay because they just work. They nearly run themselves and that counts for a lot. You cannot underestimate the greatness of a system when people don't have to tweak or manage them daily - mostly because it seems to encourage some people to manage/tweak systems into downtime
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That's news to me, and it would surely surprise my current and multiple former employers (all of which still heavily use either current OS2200 or current MCP mainframes from Unisys).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The Alpha processors took things to the next level.
Q: Who made the first 1Ghz CPU? Intel?
A: Nope. It was DEC that made the first 1Ghz CPU. It was one of the early Alpha processors.
Some of the Alpha features live on in AMD processors and are designed by ex-DEC hardware engineers.
Having said that, DEC never produced a 'mainframe' system, not even the ill-fated 9000 series.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
Multiple CPUs? Not traditionally. There were multiple processors, but usually one CPU and a bunch of I/O processors (also called channel processors.) The channel processors were similar to the kinds of RAID processors you'd plug into your PCI bus, or network cards (back when you used separate network cards that tried to be intelligent and off-load work from the CPU, as opposed to having them built into the motherboard.)
Multiple access mechanisms? Traditionally you had terminals controlled by a 3745 or similar front-end processor, which was channel-attached to the mainframe, and maybe a network protocol. SNA was ugly and hierarchical, basically letting each mainframe think that it was the only computer in the world and the computer at the other end was some peripheral device - and the protocols that preceded it, like bisync, were either uglier or dumber or both. (To give it some slack, it was made to run on terminal controllers that were about as bright as digital watches...)
Error detection and correction? Mostly that was a database function, and some of the database protocols gave you really good rewind capability, but traditionally you weren't rewinding the CPU, you were rolling back the database and restarting the batch process.
Multiprogramming and parallelism? Not particularly on a user level. The system did let you have multiple users running at the same time, and gave you some fairly fine-grained control over who got what fraction of the resources, but it was a lot clunkier than something like Unix timesharing.
These were some mean nasty ugly machines
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks