5 ms·
As someone who’s worked deeply on mainframe and minicomputer systems and then worked even more deeply in the cloud, there is really no point to mainframes anymo
by tristor 4y ago
As someone who’s worked deeply on mainframe and minicomputer systems and then worked even more deeply in the cloud, there is really no point to mainframes anymore unless you are doing a realtime application, which in most cases is unnecessary.
The only value proposition I see is realtime redundancies, which are physically impossible with geographically distributed systems, but par for the course on mainframes. For most non-realtime applications, though, you can achieve same or better uptime for cheaper and with better flexibility building in the cloud.
- _8j50 4y agoWhay is a mainframe's redundancy/uptime? > 5 9s?
- Tsiklon 4y agoA mainframe has 100% uptime. Redundancies are baked in by design, hardware maintenance can be performed while the system is live
- _8j50 4y agoIf that is true then that is enough of a selling point. Cloud providers with 5 9's have one or two outages a year. If you need the uptime for systems that can't have one outage in a decade, is there a competing solution?
- __d 4y agoNonStop? Originally from Tandem, then bought by .. Compaq? And then HP, now HPE. Not a mainframe, but designed and built for 100% uptime. They used to do demos where you could open the cabinet and pull out boards at random, and it'd just keep going. It migrated from custom hardware, to Itanium, to x86-64. It's a custom OS, but has a Unix-like layer on top for ease of porting stuff.
- _-david-_ 4y agoCan they update firmware without rebooting?
- rbanffy 4y agoYou rarely reboot the whole computer. You can take parts of it offline for repairs and the software will route around it. There is a PC inside it running Linux whose job is managing the various subsystems up from powering up the PSU, making sure UPS batteries are charged, that cooling is working even before the CPUs are powered up and microcode is loaded.