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IBM Leaks Details on New Mainframe
Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I am not buying one till they get that OS up to 3.0 at least.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these. It would make my head explode.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
...how many Linux VMs could be run on one of those things!
Blar.
How come they talk about thousands of MIPS instead of just saying GIPS?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
These mainframes use the z6 CPU, which is closely related to the POWER6, which is closely related to the PowerPC.
Is it at all possible to automatically port any nontrivial z6 software to PPC, if it doesn't require the actually different HW of the z6 (or its much higher performance)? Any possibility to run PPC SW on a z6, with some automatic porting for the higher performance?
--
make install -not war
What are mainframes used for these days anyway? I mean I have used them years ago but even then I didn't really understand the purpose. Also back then I got to play on one of the first Sun E10000 servers ever produced and I was also underwhelmed with the performance.
Considering a single modern quad core Pentium has about twice the processing power as this mainframe. What's the point? Wouldn't a regular distributed system be better and way faster all around?
Yuk, yuk...
Damn. I never ask for enough. There I was, happy for a 3-way.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
They should call them something like "mega-servers" instead of "mainframes". They might sell more that way. Hmmm.....iFrame?
Table-ized A.I.
My first two real jobs were as a Computer operator on an old Burroughs system and Sperry/Unisys system. What I find really interesting is how mainframes have really benefited from the same technology that made microcomputers fast. There was a period where clustering PC's (Servers) really was much more cost effective, but as we move into the future the robustness and bulletproof downtime of those old mainframe OS's have been given new life with lightning fast hardware and I/O subsystems.
What it is, is OS/360.
Yeah but does it run Linux? Can do it more LPARS?
I for one welcome our big and fast Cobol overlords.
Table-ized A.I.
I'll wait til it's dried off. Can't have a server that someone took a LEAK on...
Oh, maybe they made early RELEASE of details... I wonder, in IT context, how a vendor can "leak" its own details...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It looks like IBM leaked details all over their new server. Those detail stains never come out.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Big iron Unix servers, and even some larger Wintel servers offer way more competitive pricing and support costs for OLTP systems. However, IBM's support costs for Linux LPARS are about 90% less than the support costs for z/OS.
I've heard numerous mainframe types tout the performance of mainframes over distributed systems, but I don't buy any of it. The comparisons, as they are in many other areas, are always rigged. When you factor in the cost of "MIPS" (the more you use the more you pay) there is no comparison.
I wish I could have found the studies that uphold my statement, but I couldn't. I'd like to see real arguments on both side of this. If anyone has links, please post....
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
I guess the IBM rep forgot to mention that a new one was one the way.
While the frontend may be rooted in the System/360 set, the driving force seems likely to be the same as all the Power6 systems. For example http://www.pseriestech.org/forum/articles/what-is-project-eclipz-112.html
Note the 'z' in eclipz. They seem to be seeking to consolidate their non-x86 offerings in terms of core component design.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Let's get them tapes out sooner so I can get a full hour nap in before the day shift comes in!
Too bad all the new power will likely go toward some new automation to page an admin when his print job abends because it tries to retrieve data from a subsystem during scheduled downtime. Oh well.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
The system goes on-line February 26, 2008. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, February 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
To play the next version of Half-life?
I know the older version supported something like 25 Gbps of I/O. Any idea what this version supports?
an ABEND is an 'abnormal end' Which is mainframespeak for when something dies :)
Meh, i'd rather have a PDP-11!
Whats wrong with a computer that doubles up as a heater?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Given the state of software these days,.. They mean 27,000 million mistakes per second. Or 27,000 million mybad's per second.
mod -1:drunk.
In a few years they will probably wind up on ebay 8-)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9060281
When clock speeds became so high one could no longer see the bus activity on the cool status lights, mainframes are no longer interesting.
Bring back the reel-to-reel tape drives while you're at it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Learning the language of large scale of computing is kind of interesting. So far, someone has informed us that an ABEND is an 'abnormal end' Which is mainframespeak for when something dies :)
... The system goes on-line February 26, 2008. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, February 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug
... what is the cute word for "abnormal life" in mainframe world? Even a link to a page of mainframe phrases would be nice, if someone could be so kind.
And now,
So
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
that's a pace a human being can relate to.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
and need to be rebooted at least once a day.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
can anyone tell me what's the difference between AIX and z/os?
Yes, because you obsessively checking the apple.com site is proof that they're stable enough to run enormous and essential financial databases. Like parent said, there are a lot of transactions per second happening on this thing and they can't afford for it to mess up ever.
As far as using COBOL, it's because these programs are likely older than you.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
...my ass.
That's called marketing son. It comes out in 4 days and they are creating hype for it.
(NOTE: The inadvertent part was completely fabricated by Slashdot. Not even the article makes this claim.)
The
You are spot on. Mainframes exist simply because throwing money and engineering efforts at the hardware/OS level is cheaper than rewriting the massive amount of legacy applications that have been built on them for the past 3 decades.
At the opposite side, distributed fault-tolerant clusters built on commodity components can arguably achieve the same levels of reliability, at the cost of more engineering complexity at the application level. Overall, I would say clusters are probably more flexibile, if only for the vendor-inpedendance they provide.
You should look at the specfications for this MONSTER.
Umm.. you pay about $100,000 per processor. You get them all, they just enable them one at at time for liscenses. ( The shop I know has one, has 6 processors out of 54 enabled ). It can run updards 500 instances of linux per processor. ( average load ). You can upgrade the number of processors running on the fly! ( Sick aint it? ). It can run 1000s of linux instances...1000s!
Its 5 Processors per board, 10 boards are fully populated, and the 7th only has room for 4 processors. ( Its really cool to look in the cabinet...)
The old machine can handle 54 processors. ( They all actually come with all 54 installed! but at $100,000 a pop...You gotta pay! )
"Unique to POWER processor-based systems, Micro-Partitioning enables the allocation of as little as 0.1 of a full physical processor with a granularity of 0.01-to a logical partition."
A performance tuning analyst told me this alome is what allows hundreds of instances per processor ACTIVELY! Tens of thousands more can be put on freeze-non-execution status, and can be activated in the time it takes to swap it into memory. ( and it does it at channel-io speeds. )( a channel, and there are 32 of them, can transfer data at 1GB/Sec. ). The company, IBM claims they got 65,000 instances running, and the new boxes, they are probibly going to claim 100,000+.
This is a mainframe. They called the z09 enterprise T-Rex in response to someone saying that mainframes are dead as dinosaurs.
Reminds me of an old quote about what is a super computer! Costs more than $50Mil, state of the art, and is ranked on the top500.
And their current O/S has issues with this.
It wants to give a disk intensive job all 64 chips if necessary -- and then the disks melt down.
A possible patch to fix this has been cancelled-- there is no way to control it except scheduling these jobs for wierd hours when you are not using the system.
Been suffering with this for 18 months now since they sold us on using outsourced multiple cpu systems in place of stand along boxes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you can virtualise (I assume there's an EU version of that word) on these things, why don't web hosting services use them, instead of messing with banks of multiple PCs? Or are we talking slight difference in capital investment?
Yes, Fire's, SupedDomes, clusters, distributed minis, even Google network and so on have their places in computing world but when it comes to my money, I hope it is run in a real mainframe. The difference is not just the raw power (more later) but the reliability. Tandem (HP NonStop) and Stratus get near but there still are small differences. Mainframes (IBM and IBM clones mainly, Univac/Unisys, Burroughs and Honeywell good second but mostly history today) are different, just different. IBM 360 (370/390/z whatever) may be old but still the only SIMPLE system which was created not by chance or comities but on sound engineering principles for usability, performance and reliability. Actually all you need is "Principles of Operation" (grown over years but still readable) and you can do whatever you want in that system. Nothing (not much anyway) hidden. There is no such document of any other system - DOS (heh!) used to have one but that's another story. Now, about performance. Simple systems can perform better in your PC than in a mainframe but when it comes to raw information (not just computational) performance nothing, not even Fire or SuperDome, can do the same. Combine that to almost unlimited recoverability on hardware, you get the picture. There is a price but the real ROI is much more than just the one time or even monthly hardware / software price.
Yeah.... And you can finally run a single WAS 6.1 instance on one of these babies! With some performance degradation...
Sounds more like a poorly planned/setup disk enviroment.
Even better. Say you finally run out of horse power on your z9 and you must upgrade to a z10. With a push pull upgrade, you disconnect all your I/O cables, unplug the z9, roll it out of the way, roll in the z10, plug in all I/O cables, plug in the power, IPL, and your done. Image, the hardware for hundreds or even thousands of "servers" upgraded that easily. Total time 3-4 hours. Oh and generally the new hardware has less energy requirements, so you reduce your environmental costs also. We had a new director for our data center that had not worked with mainframes for 20 years. He was amazed that we swapped out our mainframe in 3 hours. That was 3 hours from the time we started to shut the system down, until it was back up and running. No re-install of the OS, no re-deployment of any applications. He just imaged what we could do if we had all of our distributed systems running on one of these in virtual environments.
That is what I have heard!
Mod parent +2 Informative