5 ms·

No. If you need reliability and have money, separate commodity servers running a consistent (paxos or raft, not eventually consistent) in-memory database (the m

No. If you need reliability and have money, separate commodity servers running a consistent (paxos or raft, not eventually consistent) in-memory database (the memory is a few terabytes) with logs to flash and to disaster recovery site will outperform a mainframe. A single computer with 4 sockets of xeons will outperform a mainframe but will have more downtime. The mainframe has best possible single thread performance and as much cache as possible, redundancy and parts can be replaced while it's online, but not that many cores. The cost is very high - when I looked, 1 million per year is the baby version with only 1 CPU enabled and no license to run the cryptographic accelerator and limits on software, etc. Commodity hardware you buy and use for 5 years, so the amount of good hardware you can buy for the price of owning a mainframe for 5 years is a lot. For the money, you can buy a lot more CPU, ram, network, storage, etc and hire Kyle Kingsbury to audit your distributed database.

ch_123 7y ago
>The cost is very high - when I looked, 1 million per year is the baby version with only 1 CPU enabled and no license to run the cryptographic accelerator and limits on software, etc. At one point, IBM was selling base-level mainframes for $75,000 (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/ibm-unveils-new-mainframe-for-the-rest-of-us/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/ibm-u...) It is true though that a 'realistic' configuration is likely to cost north of $1 million, and that none of these numbers include the price of the software.
- StrangeDoctor 7y ago
  It’s the support contract that’s the real cost.
- rodgerd 7y ago
  A standard IBM "gotcha" is to offer deep discounts and charge the 20% p.a. maint cost on the list price - e.g. "We'll give you this hardware for $1." then a year later "So sorry the maint is 3 x $250k x 0.2 = $150k p.a.". Another is that the software and hardware designed to turn a baby system into anything useful is astonishingly expensive to people not used to dealing with this end of the market. Enjoy finding that your hypervisor is licensed at 5 figures per core, and that your cores are six figures a pop.
chx 7y ago
You have just described VoltDB. They worked with Jepsen years ago and fixed all the problems Kyle found.
pmart123 7y ago
Interesting. Thanks for the details. I didn’t realize how few cores mainframes had.

ch_123 7y ago

>The cost is very high - when I looked, 1 million per year is the baby version with only 1 CPU enabled and no license to run the cryptographic accelerator and limits on software, etc. At one point, IBM was selling base-level mainframes for $75,000 (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/ibm-unveils-new-mainframe-for-the-rest-of-us/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/ibm-u...) It is true though that a 'realistic' configuration is likely to cost north of $1 million, and that none of these numbers include the price of the software.

StrangeDoctor 7y ago
It’s the support contract that’s the real cost.
rodgerd 7y ago
A standard IBM "gotcha" is to offer deep discounts and charge the 20% p.a. maint cost on the list price - e.g. "We'll give you this hardware for $1." then a year later "So sorry the maint is 3 x $250k x 0.2 = $150k p.a.". Another is that the software and hardware designed to turn a baby system into anything useful is astonishingly expensive to people not used to dealing with this end of the market. Enjoy finding that your hypervisor is licensed at 5 figures per core, and that your cores are six figures a pop.

chx 7y ago

You have just described VoltDB. They worked with Jepsen years ago and fixed all the problems Kyle found.

pmart123 7y ago

Interesting. Thanks for the details. I didn’t realize how few cores mainframes had.