4 ms·

Honestly, nothing that commodity x86 servers can't do.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
What commodity servers have Channel I/O with sustained 90+% utilization without virtual machines? And which support virtualization using software that passed pentesting with source? And which have 30+ years uptime at high volume sites? Really, because I'd love to buy them. I'd have believed you if you said VMS clusters or NonStop systems. They're not x86 either, though, although a VMS port is underway.
- coleca 11y ago
  The mainframe shops I have worked in liked to talk about the continuous uptime of the mainframe, but it was always phrased in "unplanned outages". They still IPLed (Initial Process Load - aka rebooted) the mainframe every Sunday night, to apply maintenance patches to z/OS or perform other maintenance, which would take down all the applications. So, while the mainframe was technically up, I wouldn't call it continuous uptime, since the apps were all down. Just my observations, maybe better run mainframe orgs could work around that. Mainframes are very impressive beasts. The shops I know that use them needed them to do "big data" before such a term existed. They were the only game in town in the 80s and 90s to perform operations on massive quantities of data, and run massively parallel operations. Most people worry and generate alerts when their CPU goes over 80 or 90% utilization, but on the mainframe running at 100% utilization is the ideal scenario to maximize your investment. Once you're on the mainframe though, it's a very long and difficult process to get off. And usually there is little to no business incentive to do so. Want to embark on a 18 month 7-8 figure project to migrate off the mainframe, or spend that money to build X feature our customers have been demanding? Tough sell for the CIO..
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Interesting perspective and examples. Yeah, Im sure some get planned downtime. Ours never has that I've seen. We are a 24/7 business too. They might have Sysplex or something, though, to take one node down with system still running.
- jakub_h 11y ago
  Frankly, these questions sound like a red herring. Or rather, they seem to imply that the actual question to ask is "on what other hardware can we efficiently run mainframe software?". And not, for example, how to evolve software architectures in a way that will allow them to run on contemporary and/or future hardware.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    He said mainframes were equivalent to x86 servers in capabilities. So, I started asking if they've achieved a few mainframe capabilities businesses depended on since the 1970's. Also, I already knew the answers ahead of time. Questions were more for parent to see why x86 servers != mainframes.

What commodity servers have Channel I/O with sustained 90+% utilization without virtual machines? And which support virtualization using software that passed pentesting with source? And which have 30+ years uptime at high volume sites? Really, because I'd love to buy them. I'd have believed you if you said VMS clusters or NonStop systems. They're not x86 either, though, although a VMS port is underway.

coleca 11y ago
The mainframe shops I have worked in liked to talk about the continuous uptime of the mainframe, but it was always phrased in "unplanned outages". They still IPLed (Initial Process Load - aka rebooted) the mainframe every Sunday night, to apply maintenance patches to z/OS or perform other maintenance, which would take down all the applications. So, while the mainframe was technically up, I wouldn't call it continuous uptime, since the apps were all down. Just my observations, maybe better run mainframe orgs could work around that. Mainframes are very impressive beasts. The shops I know that use them needed them to do "big data" before such a term existed. They were the only game in town in the 80s and 90s to perform operations on massive quantities of data, and run massively parallel operations. Most people worry and generate alerts when their CPU goes over 80 or 90% utilization, but on the mainframe running at 100% utilization is the ideal scenario to maximize your investment. Once you're on the mainframe though, it's a very long and difficult process to get off. And usually there is little to no business incentive to do so. Want to embark on a 18 month 7-8 figure project to migrate off the mainframe, or spend that money to build X feature our customers have been demanding? Tough sell for the CIO..
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Interesting perspective and examples. Yeah, Im sure some get planned downtime. Ours never has that I've seen. We are a 24/7 business too. They might have Sysplex or something, though, to take one node down with system still running.
jakub_h 11y ago
Frankly, these questions sound like a red herring. Or rather, they seem to imply that the actual question to ask is "on what other hardware can we efficiently run mainframe software?". And not, for example, how to evolve software architectures in a way that will allow them to run on contemporary and/or future hardware.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  He said mainframes were equivalent to x86 servers in capabilities. So, I started asking if they've achieved a few mainframe capabilities businesses depended on since the 1970's. Also, I already knew the answers ahead of time. Questions were more for parent to see why x86 servers != mainframes.