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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."
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
Ugh. Of all of the news stories about NetBSD on a toaster, you had to link to one that puts `Linux' in the headline even though the story has nothing to do with Linux.
As one of the comments said, NetBSD is not Linux. Not everything related to Free Software is about Linux.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Whats so special/magical about a mainframe?
The I/O. On a mainframe, you can run a query and generate large datasets so fast it'll blow your mind (in 2002-ish, say tens of gigabytes). On the mainframe it's no big deal, and you can run queries like that all day and never have any idea how much data you're moving around until you try to move it somewhere else and wonder why it's taking so long.
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?
The mainframe isn't about looking pretty, it's about getting work done, and the folks touting their benefits generally aren't exaggerating. Mainframes aren't generally designed for CPU-heavy tasks, although they certainly can be clustered pretty impressively if you really need lots of CPU. The biggest advantage is that you can really use the CPU's you've got. There are service processors to offload things like memory management, encryption, I/O, virtualization overhead, etc. There are really really fast I/O channels. You typically attach them to really really fast disk and tape. These things together allow you to move a lot of data around very quickly, and get a lot of work done.
Additionally, lots of large companies have lots of man-hours invested in systems that run their businesses. I've seen attempts to reimplement some of the beasts to get them off the mainframe, and they typically don't go well. I've also seen assembly code written in the late 1960's still running in production more than 35 years later. The underlying hardware had been upgraded many times, but IBM made sure the old stuff would still work.
Things like this are worth a lot of money to a certain class of purchaser.
A well built mainframe combined with a suitable power supply (e.g. backup generator etc) has up-times measured in YEARS.
Worth noting that this is not the same thing as that old legend about the Novell NetWare server that got sealed up in a room for years and ran fine. That was just luck. Mainframes, on the other hand, are designed to have uptimes measured in years. Typically, every single component is redundant and the system is designed for failover in the event of a hardware outage. In a transaction-processing environment, a mainframe can detect things like RAM and CPU failure in the middle of a transaction and fail over to a different processor module or addressing space without a hitch. Try that on your Linux box.
Mainframes tend to be designed with support for transaction processing baked into the OS, software, and the hardware, which is what makes them attractive to financial institutions who really, really, really need their transactions to process quickly and reliably 100 percent of the time.
Another thing to consider: VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products are essentially trying to recreate a computing environment that is new to the world of commodity x86/x64 hardware, but that existed on mainframes at least as far back as the 1970s. What makes VMware's achievements so remarkable is that the x86 hardware was never meant to do this sort of thing. Mainframes, on the other hand, were designed for it. That makes it a lot more efficient and reliable on the mainframe.
The bottom line is that a mainframe is not just an old-fashioned idea of what a server should be. Think of them instead as purpose-built, industrial-grade hardware. Think about power tools, then think about the equipment you'd find in a factory. That's the difference.
Breakfast served all day!