[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Fritz Wuehler wrote 2012-10-11 03:42:
> 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.
>
> They don't. IBM announced 5.5 GHz clocks on their latest box. And that's
> just the clocks. You can't judge horsepower by clock speed. There's no way
> to compare things directly, especially CICS vs. RISC, etc. x86 is a CISC
> over RISC design, POWER is RISC (don't know if there's any microcode) and
> System Z is a hybrid design sometimes called "millicoded" which is many
> instructions are native (not microcoded) and others are microcoded.
>
> Stephen's post is good/accurate. The other thing that makes mainframes
> "silly fast" is the hardware and software were designed for each other, by
> one company that does it all, including fabbing their own chips. No finger
> pointing, no portability, no problem.
>
>> 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.
>
> Yep!
>
>> 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.)
>
> You still need to know what you're doing to configure a mainframe but a lot
> of the detail has gone away, compared to yesteryear.
>
>> 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.
>
> A webserver is not a demanding application and it would be like delivering
> the mail in a Lamborghini, not talking about the reliability aspect since I
> never owned one of those! Like Stephen said, nobody does that.

Be carefull when using that "nobody" word.
One of my customer runs "CICS Web Server" (CWS) and I have been
doing COBOL programming (CGI-applications) against that one.

Realy nice and efficent to have the DB2 database, the application code
and webserver on the same box!

Everyting runs from the same MVS environment. And this is an active
environment with development today.

Jan-Erik.