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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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
it's the only way to meet the hardware demands of aero.
Users report that Vista finally responds smoothly.
Do you honesting thing the person sitting in front of the average windows workstation is the only person using it?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
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
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.
I'm ready for the biggest Minesweeper playfield EVAR! PH3AR M3!
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.
Actually the raised floors were not a requirement. It was just a hell of a lot neater for running all the cables.
and yes, an IBM Z Series. Need more horsepower? Wonder down the hall, find your IBM Engineer ( yes they all come with one ) and tell him, well actually he will tell you, that we need another CPU/Memory block. It will arrive in a lovely wooden crate and sometime after morning coffee he will unpack it, walk over the the Z Series, open the door, slide it into place, connect the cooling hoses and close the door. He will then walk to the maintenance terminal, type in the secret code, and your Z Series now has 64 more processors. All of this without anyone ever knowing it happened, well except for the nervous nelly of a CIO who jsut had to watch.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
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
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!
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.
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.
You posted to Slashdot. You're using a thin client. It's called a Web browser. Welcome to the future.
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.