The Mainframe Still Lives! 372
coondoggie passed us a NetworkWorld blog post about the incredible rock-em-sock-em mainframe. Knocked frequently in recent years, the site notes that IBM's workhorse continues to do important work in a number of enterprise environments. "While there are some out there who'd like to see its demise, a true threat to the Big Iron has never really amounted to much. Even today, the proponents of commodity boxes offering less expensive x86/x64 or RISC technologies say the mainframe is doomed. But the facts say otherwise. For example, IBM recently said the mainframe has achieved three consecutive quarters of growth, marked by new customers choosing the platform for the first time and existing customers adding new workloads, such as Linux and Java applications."
Brought to you by the (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it lives, and in fact it has done things in 20+ years ago the the PC is just now approaching.
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I agree, my low cost "mainframe" is a quad core packed with RAM and running a bunch of VMware.
Mainframes have been running VMs for years.
With more powerful PCs, virtualization is now possible with PCs.
I tend to enjoy virtualization, it saves a bunch of money in deployment, management, maintenance, backup procedures, etc., etc. compared to having 12 physical servers to maintain when you can all run it on one piece of hardware (depending on your use case of course).
Re:Brought to you by the (Score:5, Informative)
Years? More like decades. IBM more or less invented virtualization back in the 60s for the System/390, and it lives on today as z/VM.
Re:Brought to you by the (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right, but in the 60's it was System 360. Then they went to System 370 in the 70's, and the 3090 in the 90's (go figure).
Mainframes are stable not entirely because of their architecture, but because of the cast-iron operations environments you find them in. You spend a few million on a comp, the folks paying the bills will insist that it's looked after. Lots of x86 based servers end up kicked under someone's desk, which I find a bit annoying -- people equate their cheapness with their value to an organisation, and mistreat them. You get a mainframe, it's false floor and air conditioning all the way, baby.
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I know little about IBM mainframe development practices (I'm a Unisys guy), but sound software development practices are not platform-specific. If we can write modular MASM and F66 code, you guys can write modular COBOL...
Re:Brought to you by the (Score:4, Funny)
Great! I smell an Amazon patent brewing...
Not to mention things non-mainframes don't attempt (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainframes aren't just about capacity. Mainframes are about reliability. They keep running - even as broken pieces are repaired or replaced, and equipment is upgraded. They use error correction to insure that the overall machine never drops a bit or makes an error, even though the individual components do. And so on.
It's not just IBM either. For instance there's Amdahl (now wholly owned by Fujitsu). Last time I looked (a few years back) ALL the baby bells did their real-time call accounting on Amdahl mainframes. Keeping them running was important - because if you had to reboot all the calls on the network were free. That's several million per hour down the drain - but NOTHING compared to a similar problem in a server supporting a brokerage's trading.
There's a lot of stuff you can do on networks of comodity machines. But when you truly need a "no bit shall fall" environment there's still no substitute for a mainframe.
Re:Not to mention things non-mainframes don't atte (Score:3, Informative)
And don't forget that Unisys still maintains and sells descendants of both the old Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series mainframe line and the Burroughs MCP-based A-series mainframe boxes (both are part of their Clearpath mainframe line). Both are quite dissimilar from IBM's in terms of architecture and software, but each is quite similar to IBM's big iron in terms of basic capablities.
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That's no mainframe (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's no mainframe (Score:5, Funny)
What is a mainframe, anyway? (Score:3, Informative)
Or is the definition merely, "any large computer descended from one of the old-guard mainframes?"
Re:What is a mainframe, anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) multi-user with fine-grained security model
(2) multiple access mechanisms (LAN, WAN, multiplexed terminals)
(3) multiple storage layers (caches, core, paging devices, disk storage, backup media), with redundancy and partitioning
(4) high-scalability, high-throughput busses
(5) error detection and correction (ability to 'rewind' your virtual machine at least a few steps back) which typically requires CPU redundancy, very good management of CPU state, and SECDED memory
(6) multiprogramming with good handling of parallelized tasks
(7) batch execution, and automatic recovery from nearly every imaginable error condition
All of this needs to be pretty transparent to applications and users, too.
Not all of those really apply (Score:3, Informative)
Multiple CPUs? Not traditionally. There were multiple processors, but usually one CPU and a bunch of I/O processors (also called channel processors.) The channel processors were similar to the kinds of RAID processo
Re:What is a mainframe, anyway? (Score:5, Funny)
Still going strong... (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, I love the sounds of IPL'ing one of those monsters.
Re:Still going strong... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still going strong... (Score:4, Informative)
They then realised that their customers had shitloads invested in CICS/COBOL apps, and the competencies to maintain them, and were not about to spend millions rewriting them...
Hence the idea of 'replacing' the
I was one of the original S/38 fanboys when it came out - a superb machine and OS that was far more powerful and easy to use than the 360. The
So could say that the AS/400 was the 'mainframe than never was'
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It Beats Me (General)
I've Been Moved (IBM Internal)
Itty Bitty Machines (CDC)
IBM, UBM, we all BM for IBM (David Gerrold, "When Harley Was One")
It might just as well be a mainframe... (Score:3, Informative)
AS/400s are essentially mainframes now. The next generation of iSeries will run the same processors as the zSeries. They already share a HMC and a lot of basic hardware.
We have a shop with multiple AS/400s, a zSeries, couple of xSeries, a Tandem, and a whole mess of PCs. The only systems we have downtime with are PCs. The network goes down, Notes server dies or locks up, etc. As
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do you have lots and lots of things to learn
Are you trying to use CICS on the AS/400, I heard it was available but never seen it used?
Do tell more, I like a good laugh
Many years ago I did a CICS/COBOL to AS/400 COBOL conversion. The database came across real easy, almost no changes. The batch programs were pretty easy as well, All the JCL was re-written by hand. Reports were
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With every other type of computer I've worked with, there has always been a case that I've gotten screwed by them.
True - getting screwed by an AS/400 is more like a state of being. I went to a free lunch given by the local IBM rep and he was talking about the wonderful, affordable iSeries. Everyone else in the room thought that subscribing to CPU output levels was perfectly reasonable, and that paying a base rate and a (much) higher per-time-unit rate for higher utilization so that you could power through quarterly reports was simply marvelous. Oh, and they'd dropped their prices for SCSI drives to only $3000 per
True, but.... (Score:4, Informative)
I think when you balance these things, the AS/400 is much less expensive than it may seem when you are buying disk or memory at extremely high prices.
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I've used AS/400s in two different shops, and I use x86's with Linux now. I've never worked in a shop where we didn't need or have sys admins, and we had a couple of DBA's in one of the AS/400 shops as well (the other was too small to hire a DBA, and probably would have been more efficiently served with x86 machines, anyway).
Don't get me wrong. I loved working on the AS/400s -- they are really cool machines with one of the best designed operating systems I've e
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IBM's hardware logistics is amazing. I've had many a part some hand delivered from Birmingham to Tupelo MS.
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For most companies the 400 is not running some small irrelevant task like email, it's running the business. We currently have approx 1000 users using our ERP package in numerous time zones. No ERP package, no business transactions!
$250,000 for a decent sized server is the cost of two staff for a year.
Yes IBM charges us high rates, but the stuff doesn't go down unplanned. I never have to worry about my 400.
In the past some AS/400 sites swit
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Don't go dissing the AS/400 line. It gets it done. You wish your Linux box was as solid.
I'm honestly not dissing the line; I'm sure they really are great hardware. But oh, the price! I don't remember the exact cost I heard for a mid-range server, but I do remember getting back to the office and running the numbers to find that I could buy something like 60 nice Dell rackmount servers for the same price and make a small Linux cluster of them. I'd end up with about 30 times the throughput, 100 times the storage, and 0% of the software cost.
I cannot believe that the AS/400, solid as it is,
Re:In a mid-sized manufacturing or distribution... (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I looked the Linux/HA and all other projects had some serious issues with failover, there always seemed to be a single machine at some stage that could take the cluster away from the user.
The AS/400 like the mainframes has been built to be reliable. Hardware costs because it's specced not to fail, redundancy on everything is available. Not to sure about a processor failure on the As/400 though, might still be able to take the machine down. But everything else failsover cleanly.
So what have you?
Flawed comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't doubt your numbers, but I believe you're leaving a lot out. Let's analyze this:
1) You equate an AS/400's price with 60 Dell rackmount servers. Although you didn't specify *which* Dell rackmount servers, assuming 1U each, this is two racks of Dell, minimum. The AS/400 takes about half a rack, but we'll just generalize to 1 rack. The Dells cost at least twice as much in floor space. Data center space: AS/400 wins.
2) Power. Minimum 60 AC-DC converting power supplies for Dell. How much is wasted in the conversion for the Dells? AS/400 wins. Minimum 60 power drops needed for Dell. How many does the AS/400 need? AS/400 wins.
3) Cooling. 1 rack for the AS/400 vs 2 or more for the Dells. AS/400 wins. I will guess that all the extra heat from having so many power supplies will just make the Dells more of a loser.
4) Network access. 60 individual NICs to configure for the Dells, and 60 different network sessions. AS/400 wins. 60 individual network drops for the Dells, and that would be at least a 48 port and a 12 port switch combo --maybe three 24 port switches? AS/400 wins again.
5) Storage access. You have 2.5 options. 60 individual disks for the Dells, 60 individual Fibre Channel HBAs for the Dells, or 60 saturated NICs running iSCSI for the Dells. AS/400 wins on either not needing 60 disks, or 60 HBAs. iSCSI could be a wash.
6) Console access. If the network fails, you will need to get onto the console. All 60 of them for the Dells; 1 for the AS/400. AS/400 wins. Good luck with 60 KVM ports. I recommend Avocent. If you can "get by" on one console at a time for the Dells, you'll need to pay someone to switch the cables, or physically be there yourself. AS/400 wins.
7) Sys admins. You only need 1 for the AS/400 -- and still have time for 59 more AS/400 servers. Good luck with the Dells -- you'll be bogged down with just that one cluster while the AS/400 admin is busy with the equivalent of your 60th (just an educated guess). AS/400 wins.
8) Fault tolerance: See #1-7. Simplification allows for easier problem resolution and time for other tasks. AS/400 wins.
9) Service contract: 60 machines for Dell vs 1 for IBM. Does the AS/400 support cost 60 times more for the same level? I'm guessing, no. AS/400 wins. Dell might not even offer service contracts for the machines you're comparing (hard to tell since you never mentioned which ones).
Hey, I'm not an IBM shill, nor am I short on Dell (I'm only expanding on your comparison). But you have to seriously consider the application here. And you will run into scalability issues with that many machines -- and scalability means money. Along the same lines, you might not want a whole lot of reliability, but you'll sure be spending the money you save (and likely more than that) for all the hidden costs I've listed above.
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You buy an AS/400, plug it in, and ignore it. It just works for years and years.
Sure, it's not sexy-GUI, but who cares -- you're tracking profit-loss numbers, not pictures of your classmates.
For techno-lust: they're 64-bit with single-level storage. Which means that all attached storage is mapped into a single address space. Add a new RAID array? To the OS, it just means
It's all over, though, as soon as someone... (Score:4, Funny)
(and no, newbie, "RPG" does _not_ stand for "role playing game.")
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"Hmm... let's see... I want this EMPNUM, EMPNAM, EMPDAT, EMPSAL, and EMPTRM... Now I want EMPDAT and EMPTRM compared to give me EMPEMP... and go! Yaaaaay! Reports!" - pointy-haired bosses everywhere, circa 1975
Re:It's all over, though, as soon as someone... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's all over, though, as soon as someone... (Score:5, Funny)
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Some want to see the demise of the mainframe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why would anyone want to see the demise of the mainframe, or any other particular technology?
Because they're a burden to maintain, but have developed "traction" because they've invaded every part of a business.
I don't do mainframe stuff (and hope I never will), but the little I've heard is ugly. Ancient COBOL (yick) code written 40 years ago running on a dinosaur OS.
Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe? (Score:5, Interesting)
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As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem.
I'm not sure what language you're talking about here, but I write in Java. When something miss-behaves I get a thrown exception and a line number. Most of the time you can do exactly what you're saying and find out what went wrong. The same is true for most any interp
Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe? (Score:5, Insightful)
PCs are built cheap, and designed to be replaced every few years. They're cheap, but they require frequent attention to keep things running, and every few years you have to chuck them out and replace them (or put up with degraded performance and the growing threat of component failure). PC software is written by trained monkeys on Ritalin and the hardware is designed by a bunch of hopped up Asians working for low wages. Yes, I'm exaggerating (a little) but the fundamental difference between PC and mainframes is the PC is built cheap from head to toe, hardware and software, so that the average jobless twit will buy one and put animated gifs on his MySpace page, but more importantly he will buy another whole PC every few years. The mainframe is built for serious workloads, handling important data and transactions in a reliable and efficient manner. The fact that we don't hear about crashed mainframes every day on TV is proof that they're doing their job. You also don't call the Honda-driving "freelancing" on-call Dork-on-wheels when your big iron bursts a pimple... you call the guy who sold you the machine and he sends his engineers.
What you're doing is like comparing a Ford Escort to a Jet liner. Just because the average Joe doesn't own and operate a Jet, doesn't mean jets are a dumb idea. I'm sure the serious airlines that own them are quite happy to not be trying to catapult a bunch of cheap American cars over the Atlantic, but in the world of computing it often seems like "crafty" admins are trying to do just that with their cheap hardware. Just because Google does it, doesn't mean the typical card-carrying MCSE twit can.
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About that gdb.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's assume gdb actually works and delivers the information you want.
Were you running it at the time? In production? All the time? Did it catch the fault? And did the hardware/driver/OS stay up in order to catch it? Was there hardware key-protected memory so that you know exactly what put what into that memory location? Did a cosmic ray bounce an electron inside the microprocessor?
Say what you will about the mainframe, the original poster was right. Debugging, tracing, fault analysis, and related tasks a
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Call us back when you get that level of reliability with anything else.
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The main issue with management wanting to leave the mainframe environment centers around licensing fees, not software quality, maintainability, or performance.
Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe? (Score:4, Informative)
The main reason companies have decided to move off mainframes has more to do with extravagant licensing fees than anything else. Well-written mainframe software (even old Fortran or COBOL stuff) is no harder to maintain than newer stuff, and it's often much less susceptable to things like memory overflows and the like.
That's one problem with hearsay -- it can sometimes be accurate, but sometimes wildly offbase. :-)
Almost all of our mainframe stuff is Fortran with some MASM and other languages thrown in, but we're not using IBM mainframe, either (our older stuff is all running on Unisys big iron).
I've played on mainframes professionally now for 18 years (19 years in August!), and I love the history of the platform as well as the relatively bulletproof application environment I get to work in. If only we had some of the same tools on Solaris!
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Wrong Again! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have come to very much appreciate the high availability (24/7/365) and stability of the mainframe. In fact, when I get approached by vendors these days telling me I can support virtualization on high-end PCs, which cost $1M or more, I ask, "why not just by a Z-Series."
Long Live the Mainframe!
Maybe someday, I'll learn COBOL...
Virtualization is old technology! (Score:5, Insightful)
After the advent of client/server and GUI interfaces the mainframe was declared dead. Yet the web happened, and all of a sudded all the inefficiencies of the GUI interface was replaced with, effectively, a 3270 terminal because it's a more efficient network model. Enter data, submit, wait for a response, just like a mainframe, but somehow... new?
In the past few years, virtualization has become a huge topic, and it's most interesting following the developments of Xen and Vmware and Solaris Containers and all the hardware vendors just now designing and building support for virtualization... and then I realize again... haven't we been here before? Virtualization is old technology, tried and true on the mainframe, and it's going to be some more years before it becomes a commodity. Oh it'll be here, someday, but again, don't hold your breath waiting the mainframe to go away as yet another generation realizes the advantages of what as invented long ago.
Hardware quality... (Score:5, Informative)
Hardware quality is the key here. It may not matter, if the application is even 30% faster on x86. But if the motherboard is buggy, or the parallel port is flaky, or cable can fluctuate, or the video card can get loose (early AGPs anyone?) — it is death. Even if the probability of it ever happening is very low, the costs will be devastating. Thus the expectation (probabilty times cost) of the loss is still lower than the cost.
I've heard of machines, where the CPUs or memory can be replaced without shutting down — 15 years ago (Sequoia)... Meanwhile, some controllers and OSes still don't fully support hard-disk replacement, or even network cable unplugging — today...
Put it like this ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mainframes are not Magic (Score:3, Insightful)
And why is that? Because PCs are fundamentally incapable of running the kind of software you need? Computers don't work that way.
Which is not to say that using mainframes never makes sense. If you have a lot of tried-and-true legacy software, it might well be cost effective to keep legacy hardware around to run it. The alternative is to write replacement software that runs on modern systems, meaning you have to go through the whole d
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I can only speak for the AS/400, not mainframes, but I can tell you there are numerous things in the system that simply are not found in PC's and PC OS's. Many of the time saving or satbility/realiability things the other poster was referring to really are technology issues.
I would also point out that modern mainframes are not really "mainframes" in the original sense. The original mainframes used technology that became obsolete on the day microprocessor
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For example?
As do modern microcomputers. Having a lot of complex logic all over the place isn't what separates mainframes from micros. Originally, mainframes were distinguished by the fact that they used discrete components [thefreedictionary.com]. They stopped doing that when integrated logic got fast enough to replace discrete technology. N
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This is taken from a website from Christopher Brown on operating systems (I didn't feel like typing it):
Object-based organization. Everything is an object, and only the relevant operations can be performed on them. You cannot 'open' a program object and 'read' it like a file, etc.
Capability-based addressing. System pointers are 128 bits wide, of which 96 bits are the address, and the remainder the authority. The hardware uses a tagged architecture to make it impossible to counterfeit a sy
Re:Mainframes are not Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainframes are designed not just for speed, but also for reliability and throughput.
Throughput is limited in a standard PC because everything has to go through the northbridge chip and all I/O has to go though both the northbridge and southbridge chip. Depending on the make and model, a mainframe will have multiple and redundant I/O buses for drives and networking. And multiple CPUs with multiple redundant banks of memory.
Everything is monitored. If a stick of RAM starts to fail (they use ECC RAM of course), programs and data are dynamically moved to another bank and a service call is automatically logged. Same thing with drives, CPUs, power supplies, etc. Everything is monitored and redundant.
Mainframes are designed so they don't even have to be powered-down for service. Anything; CPUs, memory, drives, power supplies, can be replaced or upgraded while it's running. Users won't even notice.
Mainframes are designed from the ground-up for companies that absolutely, positively can not afford downtime. It's a completely different market than a typical server PC.
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Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
No, I'm sorry. I just cant do it.
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait.
god bless virtualization and Big Blue's Iron (Score:3, Insightful)
What is better equipped to handle iSCSI and fibre channel storage data that the massive crossbar-IO throughput capabilities of the mainframe.
Blade servers are to mainframes as a pack of mice are to an elephant.
All hail Big Iron! All Hail IBM! Hail Eris!
I'm just sayin'
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I'm fairly sure my 400 blades run rings around any mainframe for what I do - floating point calculations.
Apart from that, go mainframe! As long as I don't have to get involved with it;)
Misleading article (Score:5, Funny)
I clicked on the link, but did not see any photos of mainframes fighting each other to the death. It wasn't even mentioned in the text! I want my money back.
Chuckle (Score:5, Insightful)
The move away from mainframes, minis and midrange boxes happened because the commodity PC platform reached a point where it was a viable replacement for processing/storage requirements for which the old systems were sold as complete overkill (or there was no choice at the time). Wherever it was actually needed, there has been exactly ZERO migration and the mainframe is still the king of the hill, by far. So no, some of us are not "surprised" at all.
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It is a real problem with CPU's now coming with 4 cores per chip, with more cores planned in the future.
Features that you can't even buy anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Although it was a thunderously loud, kilowatt-sucking machine with the processing power of an 80286, it had a number of features that are simply not available until you start ponying up some serious cash:
1) Dynamic memory remapping - when memory failed, it would "fix" the bad parts with checksum or by reloading the data in the memory from disk, and remap the addresses to another chip that wasn't failed. It would VM out as needed if/when it simply ran out.
2) File versioning - you could "bring back" previous copies of any file in the system simply by specifying its revision NN times back. EG: "edit myfile.txt" could be replaced with "edit myfile.txt:1" to see the previous edition. This was simply awesome and I've not seen this elsewhere.
3) Automated clustering - simply by connecting several of these machines together with a fairly simple serial adapter, they would immediately "recognize" each other and start sharing loads as needed. I don't know how many of these could be clustered together, what the limits were, but the fact that it was so simple to set up and it "just worked" was simply amazing.
ECC RAM doesn't hold a candle to #1. I'm unaware of a production-ready filesystem that can match #2 above, and #3 is simply in another league.
Why hasn't this technology persisted to this day? DEC/Compaq/HP screwed the pooch on this one.
Re:Features that you can't even buy anymore (Score:4, Informative)
What they have failed to do is avertize properly so people know what it can do and what it cannot.
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#2 and #3 seem to be happening even on PC's now. Give it 5 years and they'll be widespread. I know that #2 sounds remarkably similar to what's going on in Mac OS X's new "Time Machine" feature as well as ZFS. I give them both a couple of years before they're stable enough for everyday use. #3 is partially already there in Mac
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For the
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2) File versioning - you could "bring back" previous copies of any file in the system simply by specifying its revision NN times back. EG: "edit myfile.txt" could be replaced with "edit myfile.txt:1" to see the previous edition. This was simply awesome and I've not seen this elsewhere.
Plan 9 [wikipedia.org] has had it in various implementations for a very long time, the most recent being Venti [wikipedia.org] coupled with Fossil [wikipedia.org].
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I loaded my software and started a compile. I felt the room move as the washing machine sized fixed disk started to churn on the compile. I waited... waited... waited.... and finally what took 5 minutes to compile on my lowly PC took 10 minutes o
My first Mainframe (Score:5, Interesting)
Each gate was on a separate printed circuit board and there were probably in excess of 5,000 PCB's in the mainframe and the various controllers. Quite a monster to troubleshoot unless the circuit was fully understood. We had a Tektronix's 545 scope with delayed sweep to trace out the circuits.
The main timing chain for the core memory was initiated by sending a "0" down a ringing coil that has various taps on it for the whole read/write cycle.
We kid about having to key in the boot code manually, but the 3200 required about a 20 step boot program. I still remember parts of the code even now.
What is a mainframe? (Score:2)
What is a mainframe now? Multiple hard drives running live backups? PCs do that. ECC memory, PCs do that too. 24/7 operation? Non-windows based systems do that.
So how is a mainframe different from a PC?
Guess I'm too young (Score:2)
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Re:Guess I'm too young (Score:5, Funny)
If it takes Chuck Norris a round house kick to destroy, instead of a simple side kick, then its a mainframe.
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It's similar to the difference between military grade and consumer grade equipment. For example, a GPS receiver you purchase that doesn't crashes on the trip to grandma is no big deal. A Navy SEAL squad that has a GPS receiver crash IS a big deal.
One of the things abo
What Makes a "Mainframe" Anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is it that makes a computer a "mainframe"? For years, the "Big Iron" programmers insisted that they worked with the only real computers, and the term "mainframe" was always associated with big machines that could only be used by the most experienced programmers. That's just silly; either your computer is Turing Complete or it isn't (making allowances for finate memory limitations, of course). The important distinctions are:
Big Iron has always had points 1 and 2, but clusters of cheap PCs can often match their level. In practice, current Big Iron hardware isn't fundamentally different from current PCs--it just tends to have better quality control and "more" than whatever's in the PC (more RAM, more hard drive, more processors, etc.). In fact, an AS400 is about the same size as a large server PC, not the room-filling Big Iron machines of yore.
Number 4 simply has to do with what sort of connectors and drivers you have available.
I've had personal experience with RPG, which is why I say with confidence that mainframes are utter failures at number 3. The languages are so primitive that they've barely discovered indentation blocks (and some older programmers shun this "freeform" mode). Sure, they run Java now, but I didn't need Big Iron to run Java. I'll take a VB job before I touch RPG again.
If the programming languages are what make it "Big Iron", then I hope it dies a horrible death.
Overall, we don't need the special terms "mainframe" and "Big Iron" anymore, because all the machines that fit those descriptions are better called "servers" or "supercomputers".
I must say, however, that I am impressed that old Big Iron still works, and in fact still runs a lot of financial transactions. It's no exaggeration to say that removing all the old Big Iron tonight would kill the world economy by tomorrow. It's best to keep those machines and programs in working order, since they obviously work, are quite robust, and solve many problems, whereas a new program may fail.
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There's a very large performance gap between all three of those groups of computing hardware.
I would also put SuperComputers in a fourth unrelated group.
The difference isn't just software. Believe me. And most Big Iron isn't "old" -- it has been going through the same types of advancements that single-user desktop machines have been, but their focus in advancement has been on wi
Big-Iron Is Great (Score:2, Informative)
Ressurrect my mainframe exp on the ole resume (Score:2)
Reading the article I can believe IBM is moving the mainframe forward.
It's hard to believe that ANYTHING Unisys does with it's mainframe is anything decent. (The system I was in charge of was a Unisys 2200/622)
Is this really surprising ? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some pretty obvious reasons why there are still mainframes around: there's lots of "legacy" applications out there (in a US context, consider the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or the FAA). And there are systems with BIG databases (something like SABRE, or the IRS and SSA again). Mainframe technology has been running those for a while. To replace those with an unproven (in a similar context) new technology is not likely to be a career-enhancing move for the IT Director.
More to the point, though, is that in the rush to embrace the newest and coolest, some of the genuine virtues of the mainframe environment were overlooked. Back in the early 1980's, I was the head of IT, and a partner, in an investment management firm, the subsidiary of a larger financial services corporation. Our investment analysis process was pretty quantitative: we used statistical valuation models and optimization methods to build our portfolios. We ran all our internal applications on our IBM 4341 under VM/SP, and were linked into our parent's big iron running VM and MVS. We also were linked to fund custodians and to DTC [Depository Trust Co.] for trade confirmations, and got data transmissions from various exchanges to get prices for fund valuations.
Every person in the firm had an IBM 327x terminal, or the equivalent, on her/his desk. (The clerical staff had IBM DisplayWriters with 327x emulation.) I just pulled out a "Getting Started" guide from 1985: it has a terse synopsis of how to send and receive E-mail, how to use the scheduling system for things like conference rooms and overhead projectors, how to access our internal client and research data bases (including a small but growing index of technical documentation), and how to use our portfolio management application. Using these facilities was routine for the most non-technical people in the firm.
(Part of that was by design. For example, we made it nearly impossible for a portfolio manager to do a trade without using the portfolio management application. There was a bypass, for emergencies, but it was designed to be highly visible.)
Now, I am not claiming this was Nirvana. It was expensive, and I spent a lot of time negotiating with IBM, and other near-monopoly suppliers, to get better terms. And having what we had was entirely dependent on the fact that we were 100 percent an IBM shop. I'm not arguing for going back to those days at all; I do think, though, that sometimes people may have, as one of my colleagues memorably put it, "thrown the baby out with the dishwater". I still, for example, haven't seen a "virtualization" solution that is as elegant as VM on IBM hardware.
What the article missed - IBM's illegal actions (Score:5, Interesting)
The company in question is Platform Solutions, Inc., who realized that they can completely emulate the Mainframe CPU opcodes by changing the microcode in Intel CPUs. And use Linux to handle all of the IO. The result is that you end up with a much faster Mainframe than IBM can build. And you can charge a lot less for it.
IBM got pissed off with the only competition that they have left (since all of the other mainframe builders went out of business years ago; and in fact PSI has a ton of ex-Amdahl guys who are about the only ones left who understand mainframes outside of IBM, but I digress). So, IBM filed a bogus lawsuit against this start-up. This is Deja-vu if you remember how Amdahl got started.
PSI has countered with an Antitrust lawsuit, and some other ones, last I heard. But the bottom line is that IBM is behaving worse than Microsoft to try to kill off the only competition that it has left.
You almost never hear about IBM's actions with software patents in the Linux community. But their actions clearly show that they are willing to do whatever it takes to enhance their monopoly.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Itaniums have microcode? And it can be changed to run z/Architecture instructions rather than IA-64^WItanium instructions? That's news to me....
Or do they, instead, do binary-to-binary translation of z/Architecture instructions to Itanium instructions in software? The Information Week article on the IBM lawsuit [informationweek.com] quotes the IBM lawsuit as say
Sure, and without mainframes (Score:2)
I'm just saying, Mainframe, DB2 and even Cobol/CICS. At this point, I'll retire before thay do.
Yesterday, I had a Z series computer to myself! (There are some perks to bein
Don't forget (Score:4, Insightful)
It strikes me that along time ago some clever sod managed to dupe companies into buying and maintaining individual PCs at huge cost when small, lightweight terminals connected to a central mainframe were doing a great job. It's taken us nearly 20 years to notice that all people in most companies ever run is Office and most of them don't use even half of the features that were available in, say, Word 6.0. The idea of having hundreds of desktop PCs was a big mistake full of compromises like network drives, roaming profiles and remote control apps like VNC or Microsoft's Remote Assistance, none of which you need if you have the mainframe serve out desktops.
The greatest example of the evolution of the mainframe is the web. Web apps and office suites are quickly evolving thanks to technologies like AJAX and this all harks back to the general mainframe concept: Your clients show the UI, your (possibly distributed) servers do the work, keep the backups, and store everything in one place that's relatively easy to administer. If it goes down you have redundancy in the form of HA clusters or whatever to keep the system as a whole working. These ideas never went away, for some reason we just lost focus.
Forgot to mention... (Score:3, Insightful)
One important reason for the refusal of mainframes to die, is the enormous body of non-portable software written for them. Non-portability is a key advantage. Non-portable applications are what kept people buying mainframes, what kept DOS alive for many years, and what kept people using Windows 3.1 and Windows ME when it sucked ass.
Non-portable applications were written for Mainframes and DOS because the systems were so old that portability wasn't really a consideration when those apps were written. In other words, non-portable apps are a side-effect of having an old system, and they cause the old system to linger.
...The problem with running Oracle on a Sun E10k, is that you can swap out the E10k. Your application code doesn't have to change. Same with java applications. But something written in COBOL that accesses weird hardware-specific data ports and weird OS APIs will keep that hardware around forever. Because those applications will never be rewritten. Because, when it comes time to re-write the apps (ie when you want to run them on another system) they will have decades of convoluted business logic embedded in them, making a re-write practically impossible.
From it-is-all-about-the-IO department (Score:4, Interesting)
--Scott
Partially Correct (Score:3, Informative)
All modern mainframes (since at least 2000) can run the latest Java(TM): it's a standard, no extra charge feature in z/OS (the flagship operating system among the 5 available, Linux being another). So if you're running Java on the mainframe accessing DB2 on the mainframe you're going to see a much different number. (That's typically using something called JZOS, by the way, for Java batch programs. JZOS is free with z/OS, too.)
If it's J2EE (e.g. WebSphere Application Server for z/OS) then you'd typically be
Re: (Score:2)
Your Upgrade Options (Score:5, Informative)
So why not upgrade the OS to a supported version? If your hardware is recently purchased/new, it probably cannot even run too many releases of unsupported operating systems anyway. And all the latest IBM operating system versions run on all the mainframe models stretching back to the end of 2000 (three generations). IBM always has a lot of overlap.
If you have z/OS V1.x, the upgrade to 1.8 or (soon) 1.9 is free. If you have OS/390 still -- hard to imagine on recently purchased/new hardware since it doesn't run on the z9 anyway -- the upgrade to z/OS is probably better than free (i.e. you typically save money), and you usually save money on the other software that runs on z/OS. (z/OS introduced subcapacity licensing.) And you have a full year when you can run both on the same system for no additional charge to get the migration done.
An OS upgrade is extremely unlikely to break any applications. There's 40+ year old code that's still running, right along with 64-bit Java code written an hour ago. Your 17 to 18 year old code should be perfectly happy on the new OS. And here's a radical notion: you can actually change your code if you wish. You know, add features and functions. You're allowed to do that. :-) You run code as long as it has value on the mainframe, for as long as you wish, without the vendor saying, "Sorry, that code must die this year." Just keep your OS and middleware on at least relatively recent releases, that's all -- it's backward compatible. Change your code and add code as you want, when you want.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen old crappy RPG apps, what you are reffering to (crunching 500 million unique vehicles) sounds it could have been one of those crappy 20 years old application full of spaghetti code.
Let's not mix hardware and software.
Linux and JBoss run just fine on zSeries. Rewriting an application in Java and running it on JBoss is one thing. The hardware you will run it on is another thing.
Note that I don't run zSeries, they are too expensive ;-)
I do use virtualization although to reduce the number o
Re: (Score:2)
It may have looked like nethack but it was really people improving their vi cursor navigation skills :)