4 ms·

Mainframes are more energy efficient for a given level of performance than an equivalent farm of servers. Additionally, the redundancy, hot-swapping, and resour

by kitd 4y ago

Mainframes are more energy efficient for a given level of performance than an equivalent farm of servers. Additionally, the redundancy, hot-swapping, and resource utilisation is generally better. A corporation might well calculate that, for its typical workloads, mainframes make a better K8s platform in the long run than server farms.

krylon 4y ago
There was a funny ad years back where an exec walks into the data center and finds it nearly empty after the young newbie has consolidated all of their servers into VMs running on a single z990. (In retrospect I notice there are no disk drives or tape drives to be seen, though.)
dilyevsky 4y ago
I find that claim pretty hard to believe tbh. Any actual benches published? It’s like Oracle claiming they are the shit but then actually not allowing any performance benching whatsoever. The 14nm process that they use to build those kinda leads me to believe it’s all marketing
- kitd 4y ago
  Why should it be so hard to believe? A mainframe box is about the size of a rack of servers, and all the components are much more tightly integrated. Plus the utilisation on m/fs is much higher than on normal servers. I don't have benchmarks, but googling "mainframe energy efficiency" brings up a load of results, eg: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consider-a-mainframe/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consid... https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparison/ https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparis...
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    These all seems like pure marketing. I would love to see actual technical benchmark (this would also make prime HN material even today). Usually companies that actually think they have a performance edge publish those ;)

by kitd 4y ago

krylon 4y ago

There was a funny ad years back where an exec walks into the data center and finds it nearly empty after the young newbie has consolidated all of their servers into VMs running on a single z990. (In retrospect I notice there are no disk drives or tape drives to be seen, though.)

dilyevsky 4y ago

I find that claim pretty hard to believe tbh. Any actual benches published? It’s like Oracle claiming they are the shit but then actually not allowing any performance benching whatsoever. The 14nm process that they use to build those kinda leads me to believe it’s all marketing

kitd 4y ago
Why should it be so hard to believe? A mainframe box is about the size of a rack of servers, and all the components are much more tightly integrated. Plus the utilisation on m/fs is much higher than on normal servers. I don't have benchmarks, but googling "mainframe energy efficiency" brings up a load of results, eg: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consider-a-mainframe/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consid... https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparison/ https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparis...
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  These all seems like pure marketing. I would love to see actual technical benchmark (this would also make prime HN material even today). Usually companies that actually think they have a performance edge publish those ;)