[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Paul Sture]

In article <k4f7pq$nis$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> On 2012-10-02 16:32:12 +0000, JF Mezei said:
> 
> > Since I am good at asking stupid questions...
> > 
> > 
> > Assuming, for the sake of discussion that todays's x86 , Power and the
> > architecture that started as the 360 have equal CPU horsepower.
> 
> Mainframes typically excel at providing high bandwidth and low latency 
> into and out of the processors, and not strictly at raw CPU speed.   
> Though they're typically no slouches there, either.
> 
> Mainframes are centrally designed for error detection and correction; 
> what HP calls RAS.
> 
> And with the IBM boxes I've worked with, the I/O channels are gonzo fast, too.
> 
> The older IBM mainframe boxes I've used were painful to set up - you 
> had to specify everything, and in detail - but once you had the jobs 
> configured, even the small mainframes were silly-fast.  Batch was 
> screaming fast.  (Why "older"?  I haven't had to configure DASD and the 
> other related tasks in many years, and I suspect that IBM has 
> substantially improved here.)

Sorts were screaming fast too.  In a traditional batch accounting system 
for example, you could sort an input file into say customer account 
number order and validate against the customer file, then sort again 
into product number order and validate against the product file.  Repeat 
and rinse for other fields which needed to be validated against a master 
file.  Not only did this sorting mean you could work your way up each 
master file's indexes in order, but by comparing each transaction with 
the last, you only needed to validate against an index when the key 
field changed.
 
> Few folks will choose to run large-scale web servers and web sites on 
> mainframes for that matter, though it is technically possible.  Other 
> than those folks with very specific requirments or that have a 
> willingness to spend far more money on iron than the average, that is.  
>  There are other (and usually more cost-effective) ways to serve (for 
> instance) web requests, though you might well find a mainframe as a 
> back-end somewhere.

I have come across folks who claim to run a gazillion instances of Linux 
on IBM mainframes too. I gather that IBM have made some significant 
contributions to Linux as part of providing that capability.

-- 
Paul Sture