4 ms·

If mainframes were competitive performance-wise, IBM wouldn’t prohibit publishing benchmarks.

• rbanffy 6y ago
  Performance is not the only metric. Reliability and availability are also important and, in that regard, these machines are unrivalled. Also, benchmarking these machines is not a simple thing when each machine is custom built to its owner's needs.
  • trasz 6y ago
    Except that the mainframe reliability figures apply to a sysplex (think cluster), not a single machine. And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. So, here's the thing: for mainframes we only have marketing data; the actual performance figures are secret. Which looks a bit suspicious, don't you think? As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing. You can choose the configuration, but it's all pre-made, nothing custom there.
    • rbanffy 6y ago
      > And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. At what cost? How much will you pay for a 4 socket Dell that has 8 TB of redundant memory? How much cheaper than a similarly capable z15 will it be? > As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing How many configurations are available?
    • p_l 6y ago
      Not just to sysplex - the correct comparison is not "le random Dell server with RAIM configuration", but HPE NonStop and/or carefully husbanded vmware vFT configuration - and that's for single mainframe cage. For the last decade or so IBM had been selling pretty much all mainframes with hot-swap FT cpu books, and the standard purchase model is very cloudy - you lease them (so it's all OPEX, instead of CAPEX), and in fact IBM will happily sell you "on-demand usage based pricing" for that lease. It's just that you can order that machine to be in your datacenter, but many clients simply use IBM's lesser-known cloud offering.