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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
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They also support partitioning on the hardware level, so you can run z/OS or Linux virtual machines with almost no overhead (something you've been able to do since it was called System/370). You also have a huge amount more fault tolerance with a system like this (take a look at how many transistors on the CPUs are dedicated to error checking, and then start looking at the peripheral systems).
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Yes, but only if you buy the upgraded model with 5 TB of RAM and 512 processors. Hardware requirements these days...
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Damn. I never ask for enough. There I was, happy for a 3-way.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
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You don't get out much do you? Mainframes are going strong in data centers that need high availability, fault tolerant, error correcting, massively parallel systems. There is also a LOT of old code that is still going strong on them. Their inherent ability to run multiple virtualized OSes is another strong suit.
Your math is also way off if you think 4 x86 cores outperform this. I'll leave you to do the proper calculations as your homework.
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.
I work currently in an organization that uses mainframes. They are the z9 series - and honestly are some of the most useful things.
We use them due to ability operate in something called a sysplex. A sysplex is when multiple mainframes share data (known as DASD) and work together. When a mainframe is in a sysplex, you can do all sorts of things to the machine without having to bring your application down. These range from whole operating system upgrades to hardware maintenance and the end user will never see the impact. A sysplex literally is designed to be a 24x7 operation.
You can buy other types of machines that will be more powerful, faster or do operation x better, but it is hard to find a set of machines that are as stable and reliable as a mainframe is (and process millions of transactions per second).
Also, in terms of virtualization - a single mainframe on z/Linux can host many virtual linux servers - enough that you can save a substantial amount on power costs (my org estimated 400k a year in savings in terms of power alone - if the linux servers that are hosted individually on one of our distributed networks went to virtual on a mainframe).
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
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...
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In the mean time, IBM, Hitachi and a few others will be raking it in for you.
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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.
Z6 is nothing. I've used a Z80 before.
Just look at the customers who buy these machines. Insurance companies and banks will buy six-packs of these new main-frames for their data-centres.
Current financial situation aside, these people know value when they see it. The mantra "Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM" doesn't hold up any more. If there was any sort of competition from other platforms these people would buy them.
In the past manufacturers like Honeywell, Burroughs, NatSemi, Amdahl and so on have built IBM mainframe clones and prospered.
But they didn't control the OS. (Aside: I spoke to one operator on a clone system that came with its own OS. He said that the OS manuals were photocopies of IBM manuals). There is a huge legacy of MVS specific software, too. Unless someone can come up with a FOSS version of each, forget it.
It would be a brave (or foolhardy) bank that would trust its online network to anything but Big Blue. We're talking real banks here, not these Mom&Pop operations that pass for banks in the US. Maybe millions of transactions per minute. No Wintel PC is going to handle that.
an ABEND is an 'abnormal end' Which is mainframespeak for when something dies :)
Google style clustering, where you know some of your hardware will fail from time to time and you're just OK with that, is the first promising alternative to mainframe uptimes since the days of VMS clusters. The best hardware from Sun or HP never came close.
The thing is, it's really hard to write code for a "soft cluster". Being fault-tolerant in your software instead of your hardware is decidedly non-trivial. With a mainframe you just write a check with enough 0s. That's very appealing unless, like Google, you're developing everyhting from scratch anyway.
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Their internal "bigtable" distributed database sounds like it needs better accuracy, but not their actual product.
Mainframes could share DASD *long* before the introduction of sysplex. Now - *parallel* sysplex, that's different - that's shared memory for things like DB2 lock structures, etc.
:)
I'm a mainframer from way back and I've got the grey hair to prove it.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
Shouldn't the branch predictor be different since the instruction set is different? Or it does its magic on the micro-instruction level (if there is one in P6 and z6)?
BTW, the first message was kind of a joke. It is possible to make more or less the same chip look like a few different ones by changing just a few small parts.
IIRC, there is a company being sued by IBM for making custom-microcode-Itanic-based servers that look too much like IBM mainframes.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
and need to be rebooted at least once a day.
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Yes, it IS really that easy. The cooling lines are all quick disconnect and you literally shove a module ( about the size of a typical intel box ) into an empty bay, and the system will POST, recognize and begin assigning work to another 64 processors. I have seen it with my own eyes, and it is just insanely cool!
I know a lot of /.rs are to young to remember VM / PROFS and stuff like that. VM will let you run just about any operating system as a "Guest OS" and that is some cool shit.
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Performance isn't the only issue at hand here. There's also reliability, integration, management, etc. I'm not intimately familiar with IBM mainframe technology, but I've learned enough from people who are to know these are incredibly reliable, and trusted machines. That's why they are used in financial industries, not merely their ability to handle large loads.
If you were to suggest to to a mainframe guy that he needs to upgrade to a cluster of Unix boxes, you'd get the same look you'd give someone suggesting you should upgrade to a rack of Dell servers. You all think the others are f'ing nuts for different reasons.
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.
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...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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene is massively parallel. z series mainframes are not.
Google style clustering, where you know some of your hardware will fail from time to time and you're just OK with that, is the first promising alternative to mainframe uptimes since the days of VMS clusters. The best hardware from Sun or HP never came close.
Google have a very specific set of applications which, for the most part, don't really care if chunks of data from the database go missing occasionally, can be easily mirrored and it's not particularly crucial that every mirror is in perfect lockstep.
Try proposing a system like that to the IT (or, for that matter, the Finance) director of a $multi-million firm and let me know how you get on.
You can't measure things in terms of "processing power".
Mainframes are almost like networks in a box. They're all about I/O bandwidth: moving large amounts of data from one place to another where useful work can be done on it. Individual CPUs don't have eyepopping performance because that's not how you increase the amount of work that gets done on a mainframe. You add more CPUs and attach them to the fat data pathways. If you have tasks like cryptography that might tie up CPUs, you offload it onto a co-processor. If you have tasks that require very fast individual computations rather than aggregate performance, you need a supercomputer, which is a different beast.
It's true you can design a microprocessor that looks pretty powerful compared to mainframe processors, but the trick is to find a way to keep it busy. If you are doing a non-I/O intensive task like doing an integer computation benchmark, of course it's going to look "more powerful". As soon as you do something that requires processing lots of data, then your microprocessor is spending the vast majority of its time twiddling its very muscular thumbs because you can't give it enough data to work on. Mainframes are designed so this doesn't happen.
Mainframes are not optimal for every kind of workload, but where moving data around is the bottleneck, you eventually either get a mainframe, or construct the equivalent of a mainframe yourself out of racks of servers, SAN, server virtualization and management software.
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