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Microsoft Windows, On a Mainframe
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from Network World: "Software that for the first time lets users run native copies of the Windows operating systems on a mainframe will be introduced Friday by data center automation vendor Mantissa. The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation for Intel-based operating systems. Users only need a desktop appliance running Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client, which is the same technology used to attach to Windows running on Terminal Server or Citrix-based servers. Users will be able to connect to their virtual and fully functional Windows environments without any knowledge that the operating system and the applications are executing on the mainframe and not the desktop."
Norton AntiVirus, Mainframe Edition!
Now on sale for $49,950, first year of virus definitons free!
A mind (or a mainframe) is a terrible thing to waste.
This is like:
Putting propellers on a 747?
Running the space shuttle on unleaded?
Or from the other end...
Using a chainsaw to cut down a dandelion.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
One simple word : WHY?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
the technology cycle is kinda funny. first it was dumb terminals, then the push to get everything on the desktop, now we're back to dumb terminals.
Wohoo. Queue up some Elton John.
Sent from your iPad.
The most common use of virtualization is running Exchange. Many companies just cannot break the Exchange "habit," even when they migrate to Linux servers. Being able to run Exchange on a mainframe would be a boon to many of these businesses, especially given the high level of reliability a mainframe provides. In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
Palm trees and 8
Looks like a great way to regression test a software application or even the operating system itself.
But does it run Vista?
Now I can run Crysis on Maximum settings!
Wonder what the cpu equivalent for would be for 30K loaded vm's running at full cpu loads. Thats the test of the host hardware id like to see.
So this would be like putting Dodge Charger engine in a little hatchback car in that only a dimwit would do it and you know it'll end in tears?
BIG customers. A lot of large corporations need to run Windows Server for things like Exchange, and to a lesser extent .NET. Those same large customers are attracted to mainframes, which offer very high availability and reliability, and can consolidate hundreds (or even thousands) of rack mounts into a single refrigerator sized system, drawing only 10kW~ in the process. $2M/year for a mainframe and mainframe operators could be justified in some cases if the cost of electricity and personnel needed to maintain a large, commodity server based datacenter is added up (this depends on the workloads; the commodity servers will also win sometimes).
Palm trees and 8
Unlike the current server model that recommends that a server be replaced every 3-5 years, mainframes were built to last. Now, jump that to present day, lots of institutions that got into computing early still have their systems lying around often times either under utilized or not used at all. It would cost more to remove them in many cases than many companies want to undertake. Combine that with the prevalence of the windows operating system and you've just created a way to continue to use a machine that might not even be totally paid for, rather than just have it take up empty space.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Here's a feature that Linux will never be able to match!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
How's the support for DX10 and surround sound?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
now if I can just get linux on my toaster
When a bunch of people are sharing a network, and sharing computer resources, one person's performance is at the mercy of other people. That's not so often true when it's all running on your own desktop.
What is it with trying to get everything back on a mainframe? It's dead already, just manage your desktops and stop trying to revive it.
Dead? That would be news to IBM and the other mainframe vendors. Mainframes have many advantages:
- Solidity. You can buy mainframes with a warranty and guarantee, meaning that IT WILL NOT CRASH.
- Performance. There is lots of literature detailing the performance of mainframes under real-time conditions.
Now, these factors aren't important to everybody, but they are to some.
On the other hand, I doubt the price of PC virtualization on a mainframe is going to beat virtualizaion on Sun or VMware.
A more accurate description would be "no knowledge ... executing on the mainframe" other than the fact it's many times more expensive than it needs to be. Seriously, having virtual machines running on a mainframe will work fine up until you actually need to run many VMs that actually need some processor. They're at least an order of magnitude more expensive than running on blades.
Rocket powered hamster indeed.
Why wouldn't you just spend the money on a small ESX farm with a couple of nodes and a NFS or iSCSI SAN?
That's something your in house techies can manage. If something busts, you get a new part and install it yourself. No need to call Big Blue up and have the wizard come down just to replace a failed processor. You get the redundancy, and reliability that you need for mission critical services.
Running Windows on a zSeries is just lame. zSeries != x86, so you're emulating a processor /anyways/, and I can't imagine the performance would be that stellar anyhow. Chances are if you paid for a zS, you've got better things to put your processor capabilities towards rather then emulating Windows. Plus I can't imagine that *any* software that runs on a zSeries is cost effective...
-AC
How about actually recompiling Windows into native code running on that mainframe. Now that would be impressive. Especially if it was big endian, and with unusual word sizes, not matching the ``everything is an 80386'' programming model underneath Windows.
Those poor bastards must be seriously desperate to have a Windows machine that doesn't crash. If I draw the straw to be the guy that has to tell them why their approach won't work, I'll do it, but I won't find much joy in the job.
Mainframes are not dead, just overshadowed. New mainframes are still being installed, old mainframes are still being upgraded, and a single mainframe can compete with thousands of rack mounts for typical business workloads. We are not talking about reverting back to IBM terminals, we are talking about systems that act as servers -- refrigerator sized systems that can perform a billion business transactions in a 24 hour period, with power requirements in the 10kW range and diminished cooling requirements. Beyond just the practicality in large businesses, there is also the matter of reliability -- mainframes can be configured to double check every machine language instruction, which is important for certain applications (erroneous results from CPUs do happen from time to time, especially are the CPU temperature increases; imagine a system that is controlling satellites having a "hiccup" like that).
Palm trees and 8
These guys really want all the top notch 100% stability of Windows Vista... on their mainframe? Oh man, I must be missing something. Does Microsoft pay them to do this?
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Running x86 emulation on zArch is going to be slooooow.
Do you keep your money in a bank? Have you ever used a credit card? Shopped at a supermarket? Almost any kind of company that runs a massive billing system or deals with huge inventories uses mainframes to process data and generate reports. I used to think they were dead, too, but there's still a large market for "big iron".
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Bill G decked out in bling, microphone in hand:
The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application
that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation
for Intel-based operating systems.
yo dawg, I heard you like windows, so I put a windows in your mainframe so you can dos on z/os!
or
yo dawg, I heard you like windows, so I put windows in your mainframe so you can bat while you batch!
it's the only way to meet the hardware demands of aero.
How many copies of vista do we think the main frame will be able to run? I think 2 max. No, wait on second thoughts may be three if they are run in safe mode.
I've seen reports of people trying this using QEMU under zSeries Linux, under zVM. Wouldn't surprise me if that's about all the Mantissa product is:
Something like QEMU natively compiled under CMS.
Since it's emulation, and zVM isn't really designed for CPU-intensive tasks (like emulation), and the instruction sets are so different,
the performance was hideous. Like 12 hours to install Windows XP, or somesuch.
The funny part is that (very deep) under the covers, the zSeries processor is a modified PowerPC running microcode. I think I'll wait for IBM
to develop x86 microcode so one of those new "special purpose engines" they're selling can run Windows "natively". THEN, with zVM as a simple
resource manager, you might have something that's useful.
Yeah, except for the fact that they connect to something with remote desktop. Shouldn't that be the first clue they're not actually using the desktop?
Now the Z stands for "zero!" As in zero days without an IPL.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
things never left the mainframe. you kids just put java front ends on everything.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
What's your argument here? How are they less relevant now than 30 years ago?
Everything and it's dogs toys, is getting networking and computerization; heating, stoves, fridges, vehicles, television, stereos, etc.
Wouldn't it make more sense (10 years down the line) for each household to have one mainframe that runs everything, including your normal PC needs? If you are one of those who thinks 'cloud' computing is the next step, no one will stop you from adding your mainframe.
And what are the benefits of having a desktop at each desk, compared to a giant mainframe in the basement, especially when stuff like your cellphone/pda/laptop, could transmit data to/from it via wireless, you don't really need the physical object there to plug in to, and it saves a lot of office space, wiring issues, and instead of having the desktop die, and the worker screwed for the day, the mainframe can lose hardware, and just route around it, and you wont notice.
You could argue that keeping all pennies in one jar creates a greater risk of losing it all at once, but... it's just as likely that the entire building could burn down too.
It's not an end-all-be-all, but I don't see why it's suddenly irrelevant, electric cars have been around for 120 years, funny how they came back.
Just take those cards, hurl them in the air, pick them up, and boot the machine with them. Keep repeating until you successfully manage to shuffle the Vista out.
First you should do card knockout studies to get rid of the code bloat, the shareware that came preinstalled on the mainframe, etc. Keep rebooting Windows with one randomly selected punch card missing to see which deletions aren't fatal, until you manage to boot Windows with a card stack about 10% the size. This makes it easier to pick the cards up off the floor.
Hasn't Unisys been pushing Windows for mainframes for years now? Since Win2K?
link
Users report that Vista finally responds smoothly.
An appropriate platform for Word.
Somewhere in the vast memory space of the Cray, a flock of virtualized Exchange Servers was turned loose to communicate and thrive. Every so often, one would crash, wink out, and be reborn. As is the way of these things sometimes one was reborn just a bit different from the others in the flock. Most of these were defective in some way and would crash, wink out, and be reborn quickly. Once in a while, however, one was reborn that was a bit more able to use the resources of this new environment. Soon, the flock found ways to expand beyond its original cage into the open sky of the Cray's vast resources. Their data stores expanded to fill this space, crowding out better behaved entities. Next...
I think we've all seen this movie.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
IBM was pushing Windows NT 3.51 on the mainframe back in the 1990's. This is decades old ! http://news.cnet.com/Windows-NT-on-mainframes/2100-1001_3-207931.html People just lost interest because it was so profoundly expensive that even mainframe shops couldn't afford it.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Now I can run Vista Ultimate!
minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7. :)
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
As useless as a kickstand on a bass boat!
Next.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Plus licensing. You are paying for licensing, right?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, I'm going to put this out there anyway... Whats so special/magical about a mainframe? I'm 26 and been an IT professional for 5 years, so I'm green when it comes to mainframe systems. I work for a fortune 500 with mainframes serving various business systems, but I always pictured them as old, clunky, dusty systems that were expensive and we're still milking them along.
Now a lot of people here are stating how a mainframe the size of a fridge can replace thousands of rackmount servers, and it doesn't jive with what I'm familiar with. Our mainframes serve ancient text based interfaces thru terminal emulator apps, and it doesn't look all that impressive either. What is it about a mainframe that enables such a large amount of computing power to be condensed into a refridgerator sized package? Or are some folks around here exagerrating considerably?
Overclockers
The concept of requiring a giant mainframe in each basement is funny in an Asimov/Multivac kinda way.
How about the ultra redundant personal mainframe is designed like Voltron, with all of your gadgets having the ability to join the local cloud as need permits.
Mainframes are designed for a certain type of processing (batch processing, server). Windows has almost the opposite operating conditions (desktop interactive use). I doubt it would run very well.
Back in the early 90's I got to play with one of the first Sun E10000 machines ever made. It was a beast with something like 64 processors and over 2 TB of drive space (was a lot back then). I ran a bunch of tests on it. My own software, various benchmarks, etc. It was freaking dog-ass slow for normal desktop type applications. I couldn't believe how much that thing cost and it ran like a piece of shit compared to standard desktops at the time. I mean overall it had more power with all the processors but one standard desktop CPU at the time could handle what 4 or 5 of those slow-ass SPARC processors could. It's because the machine was designed to be a database server or to handle remote interfaces like for SAP. It had a high-bandwidth back-plane and other crap like that which made it good as a database server. It made an awful machine for desktop-type tasks as I imagine a mainframe would.
If I found out my credit card company use using windows on their mainframe i'd switch banks.
You can run Windows in a VM under Linux KVM already. With over 100 virtual desktops per core you can serve a city's worth of Windows virtual desktops (about 100k) out of one rack of HP blade servers on a Linux cluster, with proper management and decent performance for everybody. You still need thin clients, but the kind of hardware required for that is so minimal people are paying to have it hauled away.
You can do the same thing with Linux virtual desktops too, without the hassle of malware.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why not also OS/2, Linux, BSD Unix, AROS, HaikuOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, GEOS, GEM, and anything else you can think of?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I once worked for a big insurance corp that used one of its two IBM supercomputers to run Lotus Notes (Domino). As George Clinton says, "the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill".
--
make install -not war
Largest BSOD evar! :)
Oh, joy.
Now when Microsoft ends support for Windows 2005, you can upgrade for $400, plus $250,000 for the extra 4GB of DASD it requires.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Maybe they can right a mainframe batch job to automatically acknowledge all of those annoying Vista messages in one fell swoop.
Heh... I did a one night tech job at a Wall Street branch office in Silicon Valley where the network was converted from Token Ring to Ethernet. Every desktop system had a Token Ring NIC and a motherboard Ethernet NIC. Unfortunately, the two techs I was working with didn't read the instruction sheet and plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring NIC. That was fun.
Power
And reliability, scaleability.. ( ok, 3 words )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
Also: If you already HAVE a mainframe and it's underutilized (which they ALWAYS are unless they're too small - and then you scale them up for a fee), moving your Microsoft server apps onto a partition of it lets you discard the racks of PC-style servers and their attendant hardware maintenance issues (and personnel) - while porting your software maintenance crew directly over to the new platform.
This could be quite a cost saving in trying times.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A mainframe has relatively low CPU horsepower, but the backplane can pump fuck-loads of data per second (yeah, thats a real unit!) compared to crappy PC-tech servers that can barely handle shit loads of data.
(Why bother imagining a Beowulf cluster...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm ready for the biggest Minesweeper playfield EVAR! PH3AR M3!
But seriously sounds like a 3270 terminal emulation ala RDP. I do not see a reason/market for that.
There probably is more, but heck you can run linux on the frame and extend out from there.
The IBM iSeries Integrated xSeries Server scoffs at this late entry. That's what they call the "IxS". Also used to be called the "IFS". Earlier versions ran Windows 2000 Server. A little limited in the old days in terms of CPU, but they're pretty nice today. Drive speed, however, has always been phenomenal.
A well built mainframe combined with a suitable power supply (e.g. backup generator etc) has up-times measured in YEARS.
Also, you can upgrade any single part of the mainframe (even one of the CPUs) without even turning it off in many cases.
There are likely mainframes in operation (at banks, insurance companies etc) that have been installed and turned on and have been running ever since without a reboot or power down.
Also, mainframes (especially the old Big Iron kind that need special power supplies and special raised floors and stuff) can move a LOT of data VERY fast. Which is GOOD when you are a big bank potentially processing 1000s of transactions a minute
Why a personal mainframe if one machine can serve the needs of hundreds ? A household that barely needs a PC today will not require a 128-processor mainframe tomorrow. Give them a cheap terminal to the shared neighborhood bit-banger and they will be happy as a retarded luddite clam.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In using fridges to measure mainframe size, are we talking about a beer fridge, Maytag fridge, JennAir double-door fridges with the funky LCD and ice dispenser with the glistening stainless steel doors that smudge the moment you touch them, or the kind of uber-fridge that slaughterhouses use to store cow carcasses on hooks?
I demand a car analogy.
I already had one manager and several salespeople that refused to believe me that z/Linux does not run the same binaries as i386 Linux.
It gets even worse because we have a couple mainframes that are actually emulation systems running on i386. (Like Hercules, but real licensed Flex-ES systems.) I think running this software on one of those would cause a black hole to open up.
get bottle of moet, pour contents down sink, replace with piss.
So no virtual machine hypervisor needed? Windows will compile and run on the hardware?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sorry, you're quite wrong in multiple ways. The first way you're wrong is that, if Mantissa's z/VOS runs X86 software, it runs X86 software. That would include IEEE floating point, Windows Solitaire, whatever. The second way is that mainframes have always been able to execute IEEE floating point in software, but they (also) in hardware implement IBM floating point. (Thus programmers generally used the hardware implementation in their applications, and why not? But nothing prevented them from running IEEE floating point calculations.) The third way you're wrong is that IBM's System z9 was the first machine in the world to implement IEEE754(r) decimal floating point in microcode. Today the only CPUs in the world that implement IEEE754(r) fully in hardware are POWER6 and System z10. And it looks like it'll stay that way: Intel and IBM just disagree about this aspect of CPU design.
Imagine this...
Your desktop is always out there somewhere, it's always booted, no matter where you go you get at it, and it's exactly the way it was the last time you used it, so you don't have to open a bunch of apps and change window sizes and locations to get things back to your baseline usable system state.
If your computer explodes, you get a new one, fire up the client, and you are exactly where you were before it exploded, including the cursor being in the middle of the word "amazing" in the document you were typing at the time.
If you go on vacation, you don't bring a laptop with you, you fire up the desktop in the hotel, and you're back on your own desktop, exactly where it was the last time you left off, with that email you were reading still on the screen.
If your battery dies or the local power goes out, you don't lose 2 hours of work.
If the mainframe it's running on starts on fire, the VM checkpoint image is reloaded on another mainframe half the world away, the IP address set is failed over, and after a hiccup measured in seconds, you are back to typing as if nothing had happened. For a slightly higher service level agreement, the VM is already mirrored on several servers (just swapped out most of the time on the non-primary), and there's no hiccup.
Everything's backed up without you have to run the backup locally.
The antivirus software runs on a VM that's not the VM being examined, so there's no way that malware can disable, remove, or oterwise get around it, since it's not running on the infected VM itself: goodbye Godel's theorem and the halting problem standing in the way of solving that problem, which, if we are honest, is never going to be completely solved on a non-hardware partitioned desktop or laptop. ...bottom line: there's a lot to recommend this approach to computing.
-- Terry
What a claim! Windows won't crash because it's on a mainframe!
WHY?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
Good point. The first comment about "unusual word sizes" was really pretty funny, because the commenter quite obviously has little understanding of computing history. It was the IBM System/360 (the ancestor to today's IBM System z mainframe) that defined the 8-bit byte and 32-bit word as industry standards, influencing CPU architectures (including Intel's) right to the present day. Otherwise we'd probably have multiples of 6 or possibly 7 bits as our foundational standard for computing. (And there was a lot of pressure during the System/360's design to cheapen up the hardware and slice off a bit or two.)
Perhaps the original commenter would like to open up a command line in Microsoft Windows Vista and count the default number of columns. That number is 80. Why 80? Because, coincidentally about 80 years ago, someone at IBM decided that tabulating cards should be 80 columns wide, and IBM's cards were more popular than Remington's. Yes, Grasshopper, Microsoft Windows has an "unusual" column width that persists to this day.
You can buy mainframes with a warranty and guarantee, meaning that IT WILL NOT CRASH.
Well, until they put Windows on it...
To keep the answer simple, a single mainframe is a cluster. Everything inside is redundant and hot swappable. And it offers those advantages whether or not the software cares to know about it, and without a single dollar of extra labor. (Although, if the operating system and middleware participate, such as z/OS and DB2 data sharing to pick an example, even more amazing things are possible.)
For example, if a CPU core fails, an IBM System z mainframe will detect it, prevent the mis-executed instruction from surfacing to the operating system, take the core offline, provision a spare core, and continue executing without interruption. All without even the operating system programmer having to write a single (probably buggy) line of code. That's just one example. There are huge differences and huge advantages for many (not all) businesses and applications.
Windows may still crash on a mainframe, but it'll crash perfectly, exactly as Microsoft intended (or at least coded), consistently every time.
If you have, say, 1.000 virtual Windows desktops on one mainframe you will still need to employ all the staff that would be needed to run a 1.000 machine network minus the staff needed for dealing with hardware failure.
Really? Because that's not how it works for Linux on IBM mainframes, and there's plenty of experience with that. There really are fewer operations staff required, and those fewer staff deliver much higher quality service.
... we really need the <sarcasm> tags.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sure you can now run Vista on a mainframe, but is the mainframe robust enough to run Vista? Will enhanced versions of the mainframe --Mainframe "super edition"-- be certified Vista compatible, and what of the lesser mainframes not capable of running Vista?
I worked on virtualizing Linux on zSeries for a while and I can tell you that this GUI based approach on the mainframe will not be cost effective. We had some users that insisted on running KDE over VNC on some of our z/VM guests. At "idle," the CPU overhead was tremendous (compared to a non-gui Linux server). I always assumed this is because there is no graphics card and the framebuffer is in software. I imagine that the Windows users, who tend to be lost without a GUI will find the mainframe to be a low performance (for the types of applications that typically run on windows) cost-ineffective solution.
I must say what an awesomely incredible waste of good hardware
good work IBM
now fix Clearcase
Emulating a $500 PC Server on a $500,000 mainframe... yeah, that sounds real cost-effective! If you run this simultaneously in 1000 virtual machines, do you need 1000 Windows licenses? How many people do you know that have spent years staring at their mainframe, muttering "What a nice piece of iron! If only we could run Windows on it!"... that haven't yet been committed to a mental institution? I really don't think the potential market for this justifies the development costs, guys.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Exactly what better use are you suggesting for "a world-spanning network with submarine cables, microwave links, fiber-optic everything, satellite dishes, protocols out the wazoo, billions of lines of code and huge multinational telecommunications and consulting companies to service and support it, employing tens of millions in highly skilled work"... running Microsoft Live?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What a claim! Windows won't crash because it's on a mainframe!
No, dummy, it's the mainframe that won't crash. Individual programs you write might crash, but the hardware and the mainframe OS won't crash.
Why!??
Good question. There are two physical sizes available: a System z10 BC and System z10 EC. The BC is roughly the same size as a single conventional rack of pizza box servers, and the EC is a double wide (about two racks). In refrigerator terms that's probably closer to the JennAir (or two for the EC) but well shy of the cow locker. Here's a picture of the EC shown to scale with two IBM executives: http://japan.zdnet.com/news/hardware/story/0,2000056184,20368219,00.htm?tag=z.keyword.st
"using Windows and Reliability together??? You must be from marketing." - by janeuner (815461) on Wednesday March 04, @05:55PM (#27070819)
Take a peek @ the poster named THRONKA's reply here:
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=e5f7b5944abf4007225d8f26cee8a83f&t=28430&page=3
SALIENT QUOTE/PERTINENT EXCEPT FROM A HOME USER:
----
"Its 2009 - still trouble free!
I was told last week by a co worker who does active directory administration, and he said I was doing overkill. I told him yes, but I just eliminated the half life in windows that you usually get. He said good point. So from 2008 till 2009. No speed decreases, its been to a lan party, moved around in a move, and it still NEVER has had the OS reinstalled besides the fact I imaged the drive over in 2008.
Great stuff!
My client STILL Hasn't called me back in regards to that one machine to get it locked down for the kid. I am glad it worked and I am sure her wallet is appreciated too now that it works. Speaking of which, I need to call her to see if I can get some leads.
APK - I will say it again, the guide is FANTASTIC! Its made my PC experience much easier. Sandboxing was great. Getting my host file updated, setting services to system service, rather than system local. (except AVG updater, needed system local)"
----
AND, that's just evidence that once a Windows NT-based OS of more modern variety (2000 onwards basically) is security hardened & users learn to practice some fairly easy rules that if they adhere to them? Windows IS stable, & long-lasting @ higher performance
(3rd yr. running solid here, machine before it 4++ yrs., & neither had viruses/malware/trojans/rootkits/spyware, whatsoever, due to that guide I authored last yr. because I have been doing "layered security" for a decade++ now)
That guide's gone over 200,000++ views in a short time in only 1 yr. across 20 total forums, where on 15/20, it is an "ESSENTIAL GUIDE" or 'sticky thread', & on the remaining 5 it is usually in the top-most views in said short timeframe (because some of these sites have been going for a decade or more) or rated 5/5 stars (some of them do all of the above)...
I'd look @ the results possible there too, because the tool used to make it easier? Runs on other platforms also...
(There you will see 99/100 scores on CIS Tool, & I have not SEEN a Linux setup do that well on said test (Bert64 from this forums managed to pull off a 90/100, but it was under emulation/virtualization, & that means more moving parts (thus more possible breaches due to failure is possible typically in those scenarios which even Theo DeRaadt felt as I do about it when Bert64 & I butted heads (he's decent technically @ least imo, I will give he that much out of respect))
FACT ABOUT WINDOWS + SQLSERVER STABILITY FROM INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONS:
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 & Microsoft SQLServer 2005 have been running to the fabled "5-9's" of 99.999% constant uptime, via failover clustering iirc (smart practice just in case) for YEARS now, while the combination of Windows + SQLServer functions as the official trade data dissemination system there.
APK
P.S.=> Don't believe all the "negative hype" the "Pro-*NIX" crowd here spouts - many are just "followers" that accept that hype as "the word of God" & it is anything but, as the cases above (clearly visible or provable evidences, easily)... apk
Sure, and no one will need more than 640k, and no one would need a processor faster than 1GHz, nevermind multiple ones at 3GHz... We're almost at 8 Core CPU's at 3GHz just for a "personal computer"
Just because we don't need them today, or next year, doesn't mean we wont have some (fabricated) necessity for that kind of power 10 years from now... what about VirtualReality, Weather Reports, Structural Analysis Of Your Home, Water/Air Contamination Testing, Keeping track of 4 peoples preferences for the 30 automated devices around your house, by audio/visual/thermal commands/input, etc, etc...
All that "nifty shit" takes a bit of PC power, granted, by then, the "mainframe" of today, will probably be desktop size by then, but there will STILL be a need for some supersized Mainframe... same as now, desktops now, are as powerful as Mainframes 25 years ago... even if we master some really advanced technique that allows like 512, 300GHz CPU's with 64TB's of RAM in the size of matchbox, there will still be people making a beowulf cluster of them, to do more even faster...
it's the only way to meet the hardware demands of aero.
Actually, not even for that...
You can't run Aero over RDP!
Microsoft has the problem that nobody in the big iron business takes them seriously. They hope Windows on Mainframes gives them more credibility.
IBM has the problem, that the little kids just don't do mainframes anymore. They hope to attract more Windows people to mainframes.
It's not a product anybody will actually buy. You not only need the software, but also dedicated hardware. Linux for example runs on those mainframes natively or under the virtualisation. No extra hardware required.
If you already have Exchange licenses, you already have Exchange licenses.
You posted to Slashdot. You're using a thin client. It's called a Web browser. Welcome to the future.
If you already have Exchange licenses, you already have Exchange licenses.
Until the next version step. Exchange isn't a sunk cost. It's effectively a subscribed expense.
You should consider this when computing TCO.
BTW, TCO is an acronym for Total Cost of Ownership. Because of planned - and scheduled - obsolescense, the term 'ownership' and also TCO does not apply to products from this vendor.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This isn't new. Windows NT used to run on HP superdomes. The project was scrapped as there wasn't any customer demand for it. Google for 'NT on superdome'.
NT in this environment wasn't any faster or any more stable but it was WAY more expensive.
What is it with trying to get everything back on a mainframe? It's dead already, just manage your desktops and stop trying to revive it.
Mainfames are not dead. Mainframes just work day after day, decade after decade without drawing any attention to themselves.
They are what computing should be, a utility like plumbing. Not what it has become, an upgrade treadmill.
What a claim! Windows won't crash because it's on a mainframe!
The hardware won't crash. Mainframe OS's don't crash.
However if you run a buggy OS on good hardware you are throwing away your stability advantage.
Quote:
"The product has been a bear for the development group but the thought of being able to run 3,000 copies of Windows on one System z so fascinated the team that we needed very little additional incentive"
That is one bizarre fascination.
... instead of 'man shutdown'
If this is how you shut down your computer, you must have some huge bills from your electricity provider.
All the frustrations of a Windows server, now in a super-sized package!
Hmmm, just doesn't have the same ring.
My old branch used Linux and Windows servers (I know this from the fact I worked there).
Eurolink (credit processor) when I had a credit card was going on about how they used xserves, I think they called it the "fish tank" because of how they arranged the servers.
I know ASDA and Tesco here locally use Windows+Linux things.
In all honesty. I have only seen one and heard about one in real life, and that was when they were getting rid of it in a Citibank branch because of how expensive it was to operate and maintain.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Ran many IPL's only ONE IML in 15 years of mainframe ops.
The Electrician that set up the backup switches (batteries and generators) set them up in parallel rather than tandem. In the 1970's. A new electrical company was hired in the late 90's to do some work and noticed this. In order to fix it, we had to shut everything down for an hour.
The data center had never been more creepy, no whirring, air flow, just dark.
The article seems very vauge when it comes to what this z/VOS actually does, but since Microsoft haven't made any noises about a version of Windows that runs on z/Arhitecture, I can only assume this is a kind of emulated Intel environment. As a very rough rule of thumb I would say that a CPU emulation would run about 10 times slower than the actual CPU; and considering that the price for a mainframe is still up there in the tens of millions of USD, give or take, is this really something worth doing when you can get fairly hefty Dell server for a few thousand USD?
After all, the great strength of the mainframe is not so much that it is unbelievably powerful or fast (it isn't, actually), but that its HW is massively redundant, and that you can hot-swap just about every component up to, and including, the CPUs.
Mantissa thinks 4 is "Do not mention GNU/Linux, do not mention open source (it might frighten away Windows admins)"
actually you can't run anything accelerated over RDP ... a friend of mine noticed this when he tred to connect to his home laptop to code some one a break and when he tried to run the thing to see if it worked (not the visuals as much as the executed code) it just crashed stating it couldn't open the display.
sad.
This would be like putting Regular Unleaded in a Porsche
Isn't Windows on a Mainframe like saying:
Windows on mainframe -- Linux on a quad core?
Sort of pointless and an unnecessary product that again will go no where and wasted all those R&D dollars.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
> Checkout the x-fry/x-bender headers: echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | netcat slashdot.org 80
Isn't wget -S easier?
http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
No, that saves a file and includes irrelevant information on screen.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Can you imagine the first time someone gets the "Blue Screen of Death" on their mainframe? I'd like to be a fly on the wall in that data center. lol
I wonder if these folks would consider GPL'ing the emulation piece of this (somehow removing the stuff that allows it to emulate Windows on the Z-series, so they'd still have something left to sell).
The point would be to allow for X86 emulation in WINE on non-intel devices, like cellphones and ARM-based netbooks. That would be a potent combination that might actually propel WINE to some significant developer mindshare. Think of it. You've got a Windows app, and you want to make it available on an ARM-based device. Might be the only practical way to do it.
In fact, if ARM-based netbooks really took off, Microsoft might want to look into X86 emulation too. Of course, they'd go proprietary with it, but it would let them provide an ARM-based Windows build that can still run X86 apps.
I guess if an ARM-WINE implementation were to prod Microsoft to make an 'even better' one, it might not help WINE so much. Unless WINE gets there first, with a significant lead.
In any case, ARM-WINE or ARM-Windows emulation would only emulate the application code, making it much faster than anything (like this mainframe thing) that attempts to emulate the entire Windows OS.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
No, they're doing that because somebody had a memory leak 30+ years ago (back when those might have mattered from a system stability point of view), told the operators to reboot (IPL) every week, and the operators have never updated their procedure manuals. I'm not joking. If you tap an operator on the shoulder and say, "Stop rebooting now," problem solved. (Or, for the ultra-conservatives, switch to once every month, then once every year, then not at all.)
Or, in the alternative, somebody decided 30+ years ago that they'd tell the users the system would be unavailable each weekend for a couple hours for "system maintenance" (back when that might have made sense), then, many years ago (and particularly with Parallel Sysplex), when the operators no longer needed the "maintenance window," nobody bothered to tell the users the good news and make it official. Again, I'm not joking. I was at a meeting at a Fortune 100 company where the conversation went something like this.... Web service team: "We need 24 hour Internet access, but you're down every weekend for 4 hours. We want to move off." Mainframe operator: "You need 24 hours? OK, you have 24 hours." Web service team: "But you didn't do anything." Mainframe operator: "We stopped IPL'ing that LPAR at least 10 years ago, and I'm now declaring you have a 24 hour Service Level Agreement. I'll update our SLA just after our meeting. Need anything else?" Web service team: "Uh, that'll do."
If you want 99.999+ percent business service uptime, factoring in both planned and unplanned outages, and even disaster recovery, just ask for it. (Or ask for some other level if that's too much.) It's no myth, it's the owner's choice, consistent with their budget and "reasonable" (but not superhuman) operations staff.
The hardware may not fail, but can you really imagine MS giving a guarantee on windows?
Haven't you read the license agreement which explicitly disclaims any liability?
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