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It is really annoying that the linked article gives statistics only in completely meaningless forms: "a processor that contains 300 percent more memory than fou
by dzdt 10y ago
It is really annoying that the linked article gives statistics only in completely meaningless forms: "a processor that contains 300 percent more memory than found on most servers and 100 percent more bandwidth" ... "able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day." What is a transaction, and what is processing one? "The concept of a 'mobile transaction' is a bit of marketing-speak." And no more detailed explanation!
Of course the answer to the rhetorical title question is IBM makes them because customers buy them. I think the reasons they keep selling are (1) clients have legacy apps that are very critical and very well tested and run on mainframe environments and (2) mainframes give higher reliability than other single-box solutions.
But these points are my take; the article doesn't say anything meaningful!
- alfalfasprout 10y agoTo answer these questions for you: mainframes are perfect for transactional workflows. Wait but you haven't told me what a transaction is!!! So... by a transactional workflow, typically it's going to be some workflow where you get a request, perform some operations on a database, and then sometimes return a response. This can be a withdrawal from an ATM, a trade received by a broker, a new user registering on a website, etc. Mainframes have CPUs and hardware designed to accelerate and make these transactions more robust over commodity hardware. An example is with hardware compression and robust transactional memory when using DB2. It's not uncommon to see mainframes with decades of uptime. You just don't get that with commodity hardware. Mainframes are cheap when you really do have simple transactional workflows like this at massive scale. Financial institutions are an obvious choice as a result. Since they're so reliable and you're dealing with a simple node, the cost savings can be significant.