Slashdot Mirror
NASA Unplugs Its Last Mainframe
coondoggie writes "It's somewhat hard to imagine that NASA doesn't need the computing power of an IBM mainframe any more, but NASA's CIO posted on her blog today that at the end of the month, the Big Iron will be no more at the space agency. NASA CIO Linda Cureton wrote: 'This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe.'"
It's also that $730,000 / year in ongoing maintenance for a Z9 is not really all that practical, especially considering that newer deployments based on GPGPUs have far lower operating costs, and provide higher performance than a 5 year old big iron.
Thirty four characters live here.
The cited page is a copy/paste of Linda Cureton's blog post. Lame and uncool to copy someone's article whole without a link, don't you think, even if they are paid with taxpayer $$? Here's the original article : http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/NASA-CIO-Blog/posts/post_1329017818806.html
I've seen mainframes used at Insurance companies and Banks, but the rest of the world seems to favour the the cloud ways of Elastic Cloud and what not.
I've heard mainframes have high IO thoroughput, but what about their equivalent Cloud solutions and scalability especially?
Thanks.
Latency. Confidentiality. Reliability. But most of all: sunk costs and proprietary software embodying key business knowledge. Replacing mainframes requires a large enterprise to start not only major software procurement or development (or both, as in ERP), but also business process reengineering... none of which is particularly fun, cheap or in themselves something that helps capture greater market share.
Mainframes aren't about computational performance, they're about reliability and to a lesser degree (these days) I//O performance. If you want computational performance, you go with a cluster or perhaps a cluster of GPUs (depending on the nature of the problem).
Mainframes are about reliability. When your app absolutely positively must run 24/7, a mainframe is a reasonable consideration. We can get about 90% of that with multiple failover servers and other similar strategies. Where that's good enough, we go that way because of the vastly lower prices. However, if the 90% solution just isn't good enough, mainframe it is.
Yes: http://www.hercules-390.org/
But IBM won't allow to run z/OS (the operating system usually used) on it.
You don't have to IPL (Initial Program Load - reboot) every LPAR (Logical Partition - like a virtual machine) in the sysplex (cluster) at the same time...
LPAR is a Logical PARtition, a section of hardware in a mainframe dedicated to one operating system instance. Basically a form of visualization.
A sysplex is a SYStems comPLEX. Basically a cluster of mainframes.
Basically, you reboot a single LPAR containing one specific thing rather than the entire physical system or cluster.
It's basically like having multiple independent servers for each thing, but more reliable and more flexible.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
As much as I use and abuse VMWare, it's not yet comparable to IBM Mainframe class virtualization.
I just put our IT department into a spreadsheet, went through and counted the mainframe people. At a guess, there are 50,000 employed in our organization. In my IT department are about 325 people. Out of those 34 are dedicated to the mainframe 24x7x365. The other 300 are supporting mostly MS products and customers (public and internal). The network people are probably a couple of dozen, and maybe a dozen or so UNIX/Linux people. So no, mainframes are not over staffed. And we moved database clusters off servers and onto the mainframe Linux LPARs because of the huge increase of speed due to IO.
PHP + SQL beats SAP in almost all instances. SAP's use (as it is) is a merging of the front end and back end so that you don't need to know two separate programs to support it. It's instant integration. The front end and the database are inextricably linked. Someone thought it a good idea, but in practice, it makes things worse. Worse performance, worse security, harder support, more expensive.
Learn to love Alaska