IBM launches Linux-only mainframe system

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/17/us-ibm-linuxone-idUSKCN0QM09P20150817

by jeo1234 • 11 years ago

178 116 11 years ago

"IBM said LinuxONE Emperor can scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers, which would be the most for any single Linux system."

I wish article (or IBM) provided some specs. Thousands of containers is just too broad of a statement- what are these containers doing? Running just a bash script hello world program or minting bitcoins?

stonewhite• 11 years ago

Exactly. Even its official site lacks any clear explanation and solution brief pdf is 404.

I don't see how this is any different from a regular server rack.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux-one.html

kkuduk• 11 years ago

I don't see how this is any different from a regular server rack

well, the difference is that most rack cannot fit 10 TB of RAM and 140x5GHz cores: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_specs.html

but surely those are super-expensive and I doubt all that effective when it comes to performance per watt. I'm actually a bit more excited about Power8 servers, but are there any non-IBM available yet?

blackbeard4• 11 years ago

That sounds like a whole lot of eggs in one very expensive basket. Plus we can get that density with standard kit I reckon.

creshal3• 11 years ago

That's kinda the point of a mainframe, is it not?

vidarh4• 11 years ago

It may be one basket, but IBM high end kit is the nuclear fallout shelter of baskets.

E.g. we used to have an IBM Enterprise Storage System (aka the Shark) back in the day (around 2000), and it came in American fridge size, full of drawers of drives. You could just yank any drawer safe in the knowledge that all the raid volumes were distributed over multiple drawers. If a SCSI controller failed, you could yank a drawer of SCSI controllers and hotswap them safe in the knowledge they were fully redundant.

The "brains" of the thing consisted of a fully redundant pair of two AIX RS/6000 servers, and you could yank either one of them without losing data (all writes were committed to at least non-volatile memory on both servers before being acknowledged). Either server also had at least hot-swap RAM (raid-like memory controller) and may have had hot swap CPU's (tell the OS to move all threads off a CPU, swap, switch back).

On top of that, it had a phone connection and would dial out to report any early warnings of problems directly to IBM who'd send out a technician before anything even failed as long as you kept paying your support plan.

So yes, you can get that density with standard kit easily, and probably much cheaper too. Assuming you have enough skilled staff to manage it. The reason IBM still manages to sell this kind of kit, on the other hand, is because what they are really selling is peace of mind that most issues are Someone Elses Problem. For some people it makes sense to pay a lot for that.

protomyth2• 11 years ago

We have an AS/400 (excuse me, iSeries) and the damn thing is rock solid. It also alerts us and IBM when it needs maintenance. Its basically a tank with a logistics chain.

otis_inf2• 11 years ago

In an article which states "..IBM's z13 mainframe computer, which had been designed for high-volume mobile transactions.", all bets are off with respect to reality. I mean, what does 'designed for high-volume mobile transactions' even mean in the context of having Linux running on the hardware?

dublinclontarf• 11 years ago

Probably a realtime(i.e. happens within a guaranteed amount of time) system but the statement is still too vague.

ams61103• 11 years ago

Not sure if this is still correct for the z13 but in general: "System z servers offload such functions as I/O processing, cryptography, memory control, and various service functions (such as hardware configuration management and error logging) to dedicated processors."

(from Wikipedia)

LordKano• 11 years ago

I mean, what does 'designed for high-volume mobile transactions' even mean in the context of having Linux running on the hardware?

Excellent question. Statements like this, grandiose but nonspecific, are intended for managers and those who are looking for a justification to spend money.

aus_9• 11 years ago

Do you have a source on if the LinuxONE Emprorer is actually a z13 underneath? It wouldn't be surprised if the Emperor and Rockhopper are just re-branded z13s and z114s.

If true, here's your specs for the z13:

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=SP...

rodgerd11• 11 years ago

From my experience with zLinux environments I would be inclined to scrutinise any density claims very, very carefully.

Interesting they're working with Canonical on this - the Z has historically been a SuSE stronghold, with a lot of the development of Linux-on-Z happening in Germany, and Red Hat trailing behind. I'd be wary it will be another increasingly typical adware effort from them.

(I follow the main zLinux mailing lists for my day job, and I see a lot of folks from SuSE, some folks from Red Hat, a bunch of people from IBM, and basically no-one from the Ubuntu/Canonical world. Usual disclaimers apply.)

kokey• 11 years ago

I can think of two good reasons. One is if they want to offer these for virtual desktop environments (as an alternative to the VMWare on Cisco UCS setups many current IBM mainframe customers run) The other to offer an alternative platform to EC2 where Ubuntu seems to be very common. Both would indicate that they are probably aiming at the desktop/user/development side with this product.

wglb2• 11 years ago

From my experience with zLinux environments

Any specifics you can share?

rodgerd11• 11 years ago

Depends what you want to know.

slgeorge• 11 years ago

IBM's focus is on growing its alternative platforms - more users - not more tech. Tech is necessary but not sufficient. It makes sense to partner with Ubuntu if you want to focus on growing communities.

"typical adware" - heh heh! Seriously, in the consumer space everyone wants "free" so affiliate marketing is a sensible route - see the consumer internet for evidence. In the enterprise markets customers are focused on delivery outside the pure bits - open source bits are necessary but not sufficient - subscriptions such as Ubuntu Advantage with SLA's, management frameworks and consulting are viable there.

jacques_chester• 11 years ago

Interesting they're working with Canonical on this

Ubuntu's distributions are the reference root FS for Cloud Foundry, to which IBM is the second largest contributor of treasure and engineering effort.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, who are the first.

_delirium2• 11 years ago

Ubuntu also inherits quite a bit of 's390x' platform compatibility work from Debian. For a user coming from a non-mainframe Linux background who wants the normal packages to "just work", it might be further along than other Linux distros (but: I have not quantified this). Debian-on-Z doesn't have as much testing as x86, of course, but since it's one of the five officially supported Debian architectures (x86, ARM, PPC, MIPS, S390x), it gets constant autobuilds of the whole archive, a reasonable amount of debugging effort, and release-engineering attention.

dang• 11 years ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071679.

cm-t2• 11 years ago

Note: Canonical seems to be a partner to bring Ubuntu on it

See http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/ibm-teams-with-canonical-on...

cm-t2• 11 years ago

Confirmed here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/17/ibm-and-canonical-pla...

sgt• 11 years ago

When would this type of thing become cost effective? Let's say if you compare it with your typical X amounts of Dell servers also capable of running 8,000 virtual machines.

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

(The story was refiled to correct the name of the server to "Emperor" from "Empire" in paragraph 4 and names of software to "MariaDB" and "PostgreSQL" from "Maria" and "Posture" in paragraph 5)

These are the journalists specialized in IT news for a giant like Reuters?

zymhan• 11 years ago

As I read the bit about the correction, I figured Empire and Maria were understandable mistakes to make. But what in the hell is posture.

Also, I know this is a newswire/business site, but this is super skimpy on the details.

chops• 11 years ago

Autocorrect? My phone corrects postgres to "postures".

arca_vorago• 11 years ago

So for a business with a complex AS400 system still in place, would this be a replacement for that or an augmentation of that? Their page isn't very clear.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux-one.html

bluedino• 11 years ago

At the last user conference for some iSeries-based software that we run, IBM had a booth where they displayed a 2U server with dual 16-core Power7 CPUs. They bragged that it only ran Linux and would save us a ton of money. They started out at about $20,000 US.

How small is this market? You'd have to have apps that were written to take advantage of Power7. Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price.

thoughtpolice• 11 years ago

I think the horsepower on those machines shouldn't be underestimated, because they are not entirely as equivalent as you think... I was thoroughly surprised when an unoptimized (but correct!) ChaCha20/8 implementation I wrote on a 3.0GHz POWER8 little-endian machine was about as fast as the latest 3.5gHz Xeons @ AES-256 with AESNI (about 1.3cpb vs 1.0cpb IIRC, but the latter has a dedicated hardware unit for it!) On that same Xeon, the ChaCha20 code only hit somewhere around 5cpb - that's software vs silicon!

It also has 170 cores and was actually a QEMU instance (w/ hardware virtualization extensions) vs raw dedicated metal. If you're doing any kind of numerical or analytic workloads (even databases), I wouldn't throw them aside so quickly. You can even get CUDA for them these days, and certain physical addons like CAPI allow you to map and coherently share physical CPU address space with FPGAs or GPUs. If I could get those things in a reasonable workstation configuration, I'd probably go for it tbh.

(I'd be more than willing to repeat this and post some more accurate numbers if anyone cares. I also need to get around to benchmarking AESNI vs that POWER8 machines _actual_ dedicated AES unit. The benchmark above was only flexing its vector/integer unit capabilities. ;)

ajross2• 11 years ago

If you're getting a 4x difference in IPC using a crypto microbenchmark from compiled C code (i.e. it doesn't sound like you're bandwidth or I/O limited), there has to be something else at work. POWER8 is a nice core, but it's not that wide. Maybe the compiler was recognizing your operations and replacing them with AES primitives?

throwaway2048• 11 years ago

an ASM optimized chacha20 is faster than AES-NI on newer intel chips.

McGlockenshire• 11 years ago

Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price.

You're severely underestimating the cost of dual-proc 16-core Xeons (about $3500 each for the E5-2698v3), and by the time you add memory, storage, I/O, networking, and other necessities, you're easily in the $15-20k range.

Source: I work for an integrator.

ska• 11 years ago

"Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price."

That doesn't sound right to me. What are you considering an equivalent x86 machine?

aus_9• 11 years ago

Just to clarify: P-series (Power/POWER8) Linux is not the same as what is announced here. LinuxONE runs on the System z (mainframe / s390x) platform.

rodgerd11• 11 years ago

Yes, but they now share the same microarchitecture. s390x is mostly a difference in the microcode.

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

Hypervisor is built-in. Single-core up to 2x faster clock than x86 per core. Double the cache. Decimal support built-in is great for financial calculations. Security advantage in that about every malware and attack tool is written for x86 with some attention shifting to ARM.

jwildeboer• 11 years ago

I wonder if the KVM on zSeries thingy is actually open source and upstream. From what I can see they (IBM) say it's "based on open source" which is market droid speak for "actually it's not that open".

monocasa• 11 years ago

It appears to be pretty open source.

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/s390/kvm/

tristor• 11 years ago

Frankly, my experience on mainframes is that UNIX is a stronghold there for a reason. I'd be far more interested in this ecosystem opening up by having strong mainframe vendor support for running Illumos and/or FreeBSD, and less concerned with running Linux. Among other things, Zones are more useful than lxc, and in this type of environment you often need strong kernel support for specialized high-speed interconnects and real-time operations, which Linux only has experimental support for but is integrated well in the UNIX world. I love Linux and what it's done for the world, but UNIX isn't dead for a reason, there are still many things it is superior at.

the_why_of_y• 11 years ago

This is an odd remark - apparently AIX/ESA, the AIX version for mainframe hardware was discontinued "in the late 1990s", roughly the same time when IBM started to invest in Linux.

http://www.lookupmainframesoftware.com/soft_detail/dispsoft/...

There was also Amdahl UTS, which was sold to a company UTS Global around 2000 that appears defunct now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_UTS

So where is this stronghold of AT&T descendant UNIXes on mainframes then?

tolle• 11 years ago

Nowhere, but some people call System I/(A/400)/I-Series a mainframe. It's midrange, but people call it what they call it.

Anyway, IBM i and AIX run on the same hardware. They used to be called System I and System P. Now it's just Power Systems.

Maybe thats what he ment.

Or well, come to think of it. There is a UNIX side to z/OS itself.

aus_9• 11 years ago

By trade, I am a mainframe systems programmer at a large financial institution. My group is responsible for mainframe operating systems: z/OS (it may also be referred to as MVS), z/VM (the mainframe hypervisor), and z/Linux (Linux on a mainframe) and many of the software components that go along with these.

I'm really excited about this announcement. I think IBM finally realized they need to be more open if they want to grow the Linux on z community. I just hope they are not too late to the game.

There's a lot of mystery and misconception behind mainframes, so I am happy to answer any questions about mainframes that I can.

mozumder• 11 years ago

So, why use Linux instead of z/OS? Is it cheaper? Offer more tools?

noobermin• 11 years ago

I'm curious too. Of course, anyone here can quote the usual benefits of open source (no licenses, familiarity with the technical crowd in general, the "many-eyes"), but I'm curious how valid these benefits are in the mainframe space.

clord• 11 years ago

The reason from my perspective is that it is different than a traditional unix system, and what unix emulation it offers is limited (to put it in perspective, it feels like a bad vim emulation... your native skillset doesn't quite translate). Lots of issues with dealing with data formats (EBCDIC). Access to open source compilers and scripting languages was limited. Granted these were strengths of the platform as well, but it made our workload (maintaining a compiler for the target) harder than other unix-alikes for those of us not fully versed in JCL.

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

Maybe more software is supported on Linux. So it combined some of the hardware advantages of a mainframe + more recent/wide variety of packages?

aus_9• 11 years ago

It's hard to answer "z/OS vs Linux on z" generically, because there's use cases for both. But perhaps the most generic answer I can give you in favor of Linux is: familiarity.

z/OS has a long history. It's predecessor, OS/390, dates back to the 1990s. Before OS/390, there was OS/360 which dates back to the 60s. Back then, IBM was first to market on business computer processing. (That was the only computer processing.) Major industries, like financial, insurance, and airlines, poured their infrastructure into mainframes, because it was the only name in the game. IBM prides itself in assuring its customers that the COBOL code that ran your business back in the 80s will still run today on z/OS 2.1 (the current version of z/OS). Chances are, when you swipe your credit card, that transaction touches a mainframe and probably some code that was written in the 1980s. Or earlier. I know, because I've seen the timestamps.

This compatibility is really evident when you use z/OS. The green screen is perhaps the most obvious example. When you see a systems programmer (that's mainframe-talk for sysadmin) debugging a system, you'll see them page through a really archaic, unsexy TN3270 interface. Why? The same reason Unix (and thereby Linux) uses teletype. Because that's what the operating system was built on.

Sure. z/OS has Unix System Services. In fact, it's even POSIX compliant. But can you `apt-get install ruby`?. No. There's no Ruby for z/OS (unless you count JRuby). There's no package manager for USS. It's just plain, vanilla Unix. There's no new open source contributions. There's no Bash that comes with the operating system. You get a 10 year old version of Shell. There's all kinds of shenanigans with SCP/SFP and ASCII/EBCDIC. IBM has to maintain the tools. (Actually, it's been turned over to Rocket Software.) It feels very "round peg, square hole".

So z/OS has an image problem. IBM made a huge mistake back in the mid-80s. When commodity x86 PCs became available, universities realized they could teach their computer science programs on cheaper hardware instead of expensive mainframes. Compute Science is platform agnostic, right? What IBM didn't do is recognize this as a problem. They didn't give out free mainframes to universities, so schools quit teaching with them. How many people do you know under 30 that had a mainframe-based curriculum? And for the self-taught, how are you suppose to learn the basics of a platform if costs millions of dollars? Anybody can install Linux on their $100 laptop in a few hours. But mainframes?

Fast-forward a couple of decades and now you have a talent pool that's extremely saturated with x86 people. And the mainframe people? Well, they are all retiring and there aren't many replacements. Second-generation mainframers are far and few. (I'm one of them.)

So let's say you have a new workload. It's undeveloped. What platform should you choose? There's probably not many technical reasons why you could not accomplish what you want to do in z/OS. But how many people do you know that consider themselves proficient with debugging z/OS? Outside of "dead languages", your options are pretty much limited to Java. (There's a few exceptions to this, but Java is the biggest modern language player.) But that's not to say there isn't any new development happening in the z/OS space. There's plenty of new workloads coming to WebSphere on z because porting a WebSphere application could be pretty easy. There's also performance benefits when you are on the same system where all your financial records are stored. z/OS is definitely an option, but it varies by use case.

With Linux on z, you get real Linux. And the majority know Linux. The majority can debug Linux. And you get the same benefits of being on rock-solid mainframe hardware and you get memory-speed I/O against mainframe data and services through a special networking interface called Hipersockets. Mainframes are also pretty good a virtualization, because they invented it. (z/VM has it's roots dating back to the 70s.)

iheartmemcache• 11 years ago

OK, I'll start. I'm a former IBM-er (IBM Cambridge, Lotus building what up!). I worked mainly on the software side of things, and had some intermittent exposure to AIX and WebSphere which I found to be fascinating both from the historical evolutionary perspective as well as the functional perspective. I'd consider myself competent if someone were to call me in and save an iSeries POWER setup from complete meltdown. If I wanted to, I could get an old POWER5 on eBay with AIX 6L for less than a grand, or better yet rent a VM to learn on for $100/mo.

It seems like, except for "Cracking the Mainframe" or whatever, there's no easy (or even moderately accessible) way of simulating a mainframe setup to learn. Again, I love this stuff. I read Redbooks in my spare time. I have Hercules and z/OS setup, and that took a long time to setup compared to an Arduino or firing up a Linux VM. An average HNer is probably like me -- he/she might want to fire up a z/OS instance and play around with it. But he has no way of doing it though.

These are the tinkerers who end up deciding what platforms to use down the road. The high school kids playing with those free STM32 micro-controllers that TI gave out was a brilliant move. When they choose to do their semester project junior year, they might stick with TI because that's what they know. AVR was lucky Arduino took off too for the same reason. 10 years from now, those high school kids are going to be choosing what to buy 10k units of to throw into the pick'n'place machine.

There are some interesting big-data cloud IaaS/SaaS offerings you've put out to keep up with the times but outside of alliances with large incumbent vendors (say, SAP in ERP; EPIC in Healthcare) to sell large modules, you're not going to see much traction.

Offer something the tinkerers can play with. Make that the gateway drug. Amazon did it perfectly with AWS - easy to roll out, pretty predictable pricing schemes, pay for what you need, and scale up (more VM's/larger VM's) or out (other products within AWS). Every other vendor is chasing their tail trying to capture that market.

Linux on the z community offers me nothing as a decision maker. If I was already vendor-locked into you guys, then the prospect is appealing. But even with low latency (operating within the u-seconds, m-seconds and people start losing jobs/panicing), five-nines SLA (healthcare, HFT prop trading) requirements, what does the Z platform have to offer? How can I even evaluate prospective costs when pricing this out to pitch to the (hypothetical) board?

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

What about the idea of offering a mainframe experience for the cloud? Have a mainframe but instead of delivering it to a customer with a groups of consultants just offer its aspects as a service?

(Disclaimer: I have not idea what I am talking about when it comes to mainframe, just a quick thought that popped into my head).

aus_9• 11 years ago

You are preaching to the choir! I am not an IBMer, so I have the same gripes.

Mainframes gradually exited academia in the mid-80s. It was a terrible mistake by IBM, because they essentially eliminated the next generation of mainframers. They've since come to their senses with a program called the IBM Academic Initiative [0] which promotes the use of mainframes in Computer Science courses. It's only about 20 years too late.

But I think they could do a better job. Up until recently, the only way to try z/OS without accessing million dollar hardware was to break the law. You literally had to torrent a pirated copy of z/OS. And it's not easy to find. A few years ago, IBM changed this with their tool: Rational Developer and Test for System z [1]. It's essentially Hercules but you get a legal copy of z/OS. And it's $9500 per year per CPU. And there is some stupid hardware license usb key.

And regarding your questions, your points are valid. Vendor lock-in is a concern. IBM is the only player in the business, and they know it. But look at every major industry that's been around at least 30 years: all the mission critical stuff runs on a mainframe. Maybe it's because it's the only thing that runs their legacy COBOL code. But it works and it's rock solid.

The poster child of migrating to Linux on z is Nationwide. They successfully moved almost all of their x86 processing to Linux on z and saved a ton of money. There's the definitely-not-vendor-biased white paper out there. Do some googling on "Nationwide Linux on z".

[0] http://www-304.ibm.com/ibm/university/academic/pub/page/acad... [1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratideveandtesten...

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

I totally agree it's too painful to set up. That's why I didn't despite the excellent work done on Hercules. I really wanted to have a mainframe running on my PC to screw with. However, the list of steps and background knowledge to even get started were ridiculous.

That's why I broached in another comment an application, VM model like we saw for VMware, etc. They have a pre-configured VM for about everything. Could do the same for various aspects of mainframes so people could selectively use or learn each piece while slowly building up understanding. Pre-configured Hercules with some good tutorials on usage might be a start if not the other model.

nonsequ• 11 years ago

What kind of demand do you think there is for a Linux-only mainframe?

My limited understanding is that most mainframe customers are locked-in, e.g. they have legacy COBOL code running their ledger system and the expense to switch off of it is simply prohibitive. That plus the fact that the system is reliable, low-maintenance, etc. preserves the status quo, despite the fact that if you were to write the same applications today, you'd choose a newer platform because it would be more cost-effective.

As such, IBM has historically offered z/Linux and co-processors only to hold onto data and processing that was being pulled off of the mainframe because it was too expensive/too onerous to do on the mainframe using z/OS and the like. So customers, unable to completely shut down their mainframe, could kind of make the best of a bad situation and at least get some cheaper Linux cycles out of their expensive iron.

If the above is true (and correct me if it's not) what is the appeal of a Linux-only mainframe? Or is it only interesting if it is radically cheaper than a z13?

aus_9• 11 years ago

What kind of demand do you think there is for a Linux-only mainframe?

I think the answer really depends on IBM. Technically speaking, the hardware is rock-solid. There are no single points of failure in mainframe systems. But there are still some obscurities with the platform. There's a lot of packages you'd expect to be available in your s390x distribution of RedHat or SUSE that missing. And that's probably because the average open-source developer/maintainer doesn't have the means to develop/test on a mainframe.

IBM needs to realize they have an open operating system on a closed platform and the two don't mix. They are taking steps in the right direction, but time will tell if they get there. And they have to prove they can compete with the x86 guys on price.

My limited understanding is that most mainframe customers are locked-in, e.g. they have legacy COBOL code running their ledger system and the expense to switch off of it is simply prohibitive. That plus the fact that the system is reliable, low-maintenance, etc. preserves the status quo, despite the fact that if you were to write the same applications today, you'd choose a newer platform because it would be more cost-effective.

You are mostly on track there. Mainframes haven't died because of many of the reasons you listed above. But I'd have to disagree with last statement about choosing a "newer" platform. Mainframe hardware is modern hardware, in the sense they are updated every one to two years. Mainframe operating systems are modern operating systems. They also get updated every one to two years. If you look at every industry that has been around for more than 30 years, almost all of their mission critical workloads are done on System z. Cheaper isn't cheaper when you have downtime.

But for some workloads, you are right: companies are only on mainframes because migrating to a different platform would be too costly. Even over 10, 15, 20 years.

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

It's about time. This is long overdue. The combination of the mainframe architecture's strengths with Linux's API/ecosystem could be pretty awesome. Anyone wondering why buy a mainframe should focus on these areas:

1. Reliability. Some have gone 30 years without downtime. Probably strongest selling point.

2. Channel I/O [1]: dedicated I/O processors plus scheduling that lead to high utilization (80-90+%) and throughput vs commodity servers. Second strongest point in mainframe's favor. I wish my desktop & servers had this rather than a knockoff.

3. Hardware partitioning that's more robust and rated at stronger security than most virtualization. Certain cutting-edge projects in INFOSEC are doing similar things at CPU and I/O layers. Mainframe's version, although not as cool, is decent and field-proven.

4. Built-in, proven software virtualization.

5. Hardware acceleration for some things such as databases and crypto.

6. IBM's ecosystem of apps, third-party providers, and services. This might matter to existing IBM customers.

So, those are a few advantages I hear from people who use mainframes. The z/OS-based mainframes have extra benefits in terms of software reliability, security through obscurity (obfuscation), and seemingly better use of both security (eg memory key) and functional (eg decimal) aspects of mainframe processors. The z/VM product has also been doing for decades what modern virtualization systems only recently do, even self-virtualizing since 70's.

So, there's some things to ponder. Whether it makes since financially vs other setups is a whole, different discussion. However, mainframes do retain strong, technical advantages over commodity architectures. They were doing cloud in one box before it was a thing. Their reliability is still unmatched with only VMS clusters and NonStop architecture getting close. So, it's a sensible choice for a business to spend extra $$$ to get high-throughput with no downtime and strong isolation of logical partitions.

Channel I/O [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_channel

ilaksh• 11 years ago

How much does the 8000 core thing cost?

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'd really like to see that number. I bet it's so big that it's highly negotiable and still highly profitable. ;)

IBM launches Linux-only mainframe system

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