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Burying a Mainframe In Style
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
As far as I can work out from the article what survived for 47 years was the server name and the applications.
" in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."
There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all
this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the
mainframe which hardly ever happens).
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Yeh, you are quite right.
I dug around the article and links in it a little more, came to the server timeline/history
1960 IBM 650 / IBM 1401 (Punched cards)
1965 IBM 360/50 / IBM 1401 (funded by NRC)
1970 IBM 360/65 / IBM 360/40 (first IMS applications)
1975 IBM 370/168
1980 Amdahl V7
1985 Amdahl 580 and V7
1990 IBM 3090-600
1995 Amdahl 5890-300
2000 Amdahl Millennium 415
2005 Amdahl Millennium 1015
Still a nice gesture, once again, mostly cause of the people who worked with it, than the machine itself.
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
changes...
>25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
>per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
>vendors.
This is called "no single point of failure". 25 servers with one down= 24 still working...
>25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
>duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
Are you retarted? Sorry, excuse this rhetoric question..
The disc unit alone pulls more power than a normal 110V line can supply. A full machine most likely would have drawn as much as a fully pimped out modern rack... with about 6 orders of magnitude more of everything in it.
>25 servers that will be decommissioned in three years at
>``end of life''.
As opposed to paying the same rate for a long depricated machine...
>This is progress.
Well yes. but nobody will stop you if you want buy that piece of shit and put it in your room if you like it better than modern computers...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
From TFE (The F*cking Eulogy), right below the text you quoted:
But now we must lay you under the flora, because we have to go deal with this bloody Aurora. So we commit your parts to be recycled.
Perhaps its parts were indeed recycled. So they got the money and kitchy media attention.
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You put a rack of 25 servers, running virtualisation software with an FC array of disk storage.
Welcome to the modern mainframe.
Deleted
Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.
The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.
Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you read TFA, you'll find the mainframe they were decommissioning WAS modern - it was installed in 2005. What the funeral was for was for the line of mainframes, not a 45 year old machine still in service.
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Original link incorrect... Here is a timeline of the mainframe from the university's website..
"Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the smartest thing we ever did.." Homer Simpson
It's funny the way you win your bet.
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As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.
There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.
I think there's a lot of misleading information in the original article, so I'm glad you dug up the truth. To expand on what you discovered, in 2000 (7 years ago this month) IBM began shipping its 64-bit z900 model. At virtually the same time you could boot the operating system into 64-bit mode, and you got a substantial subcapacity software discount as soon as you did that. The same year, the University of Manitoba bought the now-obsolete 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 415, probably with full knowledge that the 64-bit revolution was already in motion. By early 2001, 64-bit Linux appeared. UoM couldn't run it. By that time, if it wasn't clear before, Amdahl was telling the newspapers they would not develop 64-bit technology, so UoM had to know. In 2002, IBM introduced the 64-bit z800, a smaller machine than the z900. UoM didn't buy one. In 2004, IBM introduced the 64-bit z890, an even better smaller machine, with still lower software charges, more configuration choices, and various other improvements. UoM didn't buy one. Also in 2004, IBM introduced 64-bit DB2. UoM couldn't run it. In 2005, UoM bought an incredibly crusty 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 1015, which couldn't run 64-bit software IBM introduced now 5 years prior. In 2006, IBM introduced the 64-bit System z9 BC, with even lower software charges, even more configuration choices, various other improvements, and slashed the hardware price up to 50%. UoM didn't buy one. By this time z800 prices were crashing into the US$30K to $40K range on the secondary market, lower than the price of a mediocre distributed UNIX server. UoM didn't buy one. In late 2006, IBM introduced 64-bit WebSphere Application Server. UoM couldn't run it. In the spring of 2007, IBM introduced CICS Transaction Server Version 3.2 with 64-bit features. UoM couldn't run it. At about the same time, IBM introduced the second version of 64-bit DB2. UoM couldn't run that either. In March, 2007, after literally years of notice, IBM discontinued support for 31-bit z/OS, the last version that can run on an Amdahl. On April 1, 2007, UoM was unsupported.
At the end of 2007, UoM unplugged their thoroughly rotted, year 1999-priced, can't-educate-anybody-on-anything-still-relevant, non-IBM mainframe that couldn't run software that IBM introduced over the past 7 years. Why should anyone be surprised that an organization would unplug technology they mismanaged so badly?