Jacobi is one of 70 IBM Fellows (think IBM internal professors, free reign over a research budget, you gain the title with technical prowess plus business acumen)
at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:
> I’d say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it from the get-go.
and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article nicely goes into some details.
oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput, or real time mass financial transactions, of course.
or a web server for an online image service.
or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000 such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not containers, no,
virtual machines, in ca 2006...
The amount of throughput you can get out of AMD EPYC zen5 servers for the price of a basic mainframe is insane. Even if IBM wins in single core perf using absurd amount of cache and absurd cooling solution, the total rack throughput is definitely won by "commodity" hardware.
These comments always come up with every mainframe post. It's not only about performance. If it were it would be x86 or pSystems (AIX/POWER). The reason customers buy mainframes is RAS (reliabililty, availability, scalability). Notice that performance is not part of RAS.
CEREAL
Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack,
you score one of those Gibsons man. You know,
supercomputers they use to like, do physics,
and look for oil and stuff?
PHREAK
Ain't no way, man, security's too tight. The
big iron?
DADE
Maybe. But, if I were gonna hack some heavy
metal, I'd, uh, work my way back through some
low security, and try the back door.
Honestly mainframes sound like what on-premise aims for. You get uptime and proactive maintenance and stuff just runs. Yet the machine is on your premise and the data belongs to you.
Jacobi is one of 70 IBM Fellows (think IBM internal professors, free reign over a research budget, you gain the title with technical prowess plus business acumen)
at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:
> I’d say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it from the get-go.
and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article nicely goes into some details.
oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput, or real time mass financial transactions, of course.
or a web server for an online image service.
or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000 such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not containers, no, virtual machines, in ca 2006...
"don't trust a computer you can lift"
The amount of throughput you can get out of AMD EPYC zen5 servers for the price of a basic mainframe is insane. Even if IBM wins in single core perf using absurd amount of cache and absurd cooling solution, the total rack throughput is definitely won by "commodity" hardware.
These comments always come up with every mainframe post. It's not only about performance. If it were it would be x86 or pSystems (AIX/POWER). The reason customers buy mainframes is RAS (reliabililty, availability, scalability). Notice that performance is not part of RAS.
3 replies →
Maybe, but then you need to engineer the 99.99999% uptime yourself.
If it were actually cheaper, IBM wouldn’t be selling these machines so well.
4 replies →
Big Iron speedrun any% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRCye4JhEo&list=PL5ty576dcO...
(we need a bit of silly in our lives)
Came for the news, stayed for the Hackers.
Hack the planet!
Honestly mainframes sound like what on-premise aims for. You get uptime and proactive maintenance and stuff just runs. Yet the machine is on your premise and the data belongs to you.