The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 23, 2015 19:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The Open Mainframe Project by Wol
Parent article: The Open Mainframe Project

No. Mainframes these days are perfect for getting money out of customers' pockets and little else. Well, also for running legacy software.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 23, 2015 19:55 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

Pronouncements that start of "nobody should ever" are almost always going to be wrong.

There are advantages and disadvantages to any hardware choices.

the same thing could be said about hardware from Cisco, HP, or Sun, but a lot of companies believe that there are enough advantages in reliability, supplier, or something else to pay 2-3x (or more) over what they could pay for equivalent processing/memory capabilities.

mainframes are expensive, but if you haven't done a cost comparison recently, you may have the wrong idea about how expensive they are.

One advantage to buying a mainframe is that they ship a box with it maxed out in processors/ram, but only charge you for what you buy. So when you need to upgrade, you just make a phone call, they give you a license key, and you have more compute power

As noted earlier, if you are doing things that have a lot of I/O, they can be a win. This includes I/O between system images running on the thing. If you are doing HPC type stuff that requires the different instances to pass data between them, a mainframe can be a very substantial win compared to a cluster of big iron linux boxes

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 3:50 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

> the same thing could be said about hardware from Cisco, HP, or Sun, but a lot of companies believe that there are enough advantages in reliability, supplier, or something else to pay 2-3x (or more) over what they could pay for equivalent processing/memory capabilities.
2-3x more? LOL. Try 20x.

And I'm not joking. We once took apart an OSA adapter for a mainframe - it contained only regular components, yet it was literally 20x their price.

At this point in time, mainframes are really just a grand theft from poor unsuspecting customers.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 3:59 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

have you priced Cisco servers?

anyway, I wasn't talking about mainframe prices, but rather simple server prices. and I was being extremely conservative with my 3x price difference.

But back to mainframes. If you need the I/O capacity they provide, 20x price difference over whitebox servers may be perfectly acceptable.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 7:39 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

Cisco networking gear is actually worth it (usually)...

> But back to mainframes. If you need the I/O capacity they provide, 20x price difference over whitebox servers may be perfectly acceptable.
Mainframes use the same hard drives and SSD drives as everybody else. It used to be that mainframes had very fast interconnects and could transfer and process data from storage blocks really fast.

Not anymore.

These days mainframes are really no different than a mid-to-high-end server. I worked in a small cellular company and we spent hundreds thousands of dollars to get a mainframe to process the billing data stream in realtime (most of our customers used pre-paid plans, so quick reaction to billing events was essential). The results were... underwhelming. We eventually scrapped it in favor of a high-end Linux server with a couple of hot spares and a replicated database.

About the only feature that is not yet widely available in the regular world of Linux server is the ability of mainframes to run the same code on multiple CPUs and check if they all produce the same result.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 7:40 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> Cisco networking gear is actually worth it (usually)...

I'm not talking Cisco networking gear, but Cisco servers

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 25, 2015 20:34 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Cisco servers are a rip-off as well. Not nearly as bad as mainframes. If you have a really small server closet or something you have to deal with then blade servers may make sense. But to try to use their systems in a large-scale capacity just means misappropriated funds.

Cisco networking equipment is still very relevant, but it's likely that white box manufacturers selling logo'd networking equipment to big OEMs will overtake Cisco gradually in the next decade or two.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 11:08 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

> About the only feature that is not yet widely available in the regular world of Linux server is the ability of mainframes to run the same code on multiple CPUs and check if they all produce the same result.

This may be not available on Linux, but this is not a feature exclusive to mainframe either: a long time ago I worked with Stratus (Unix) servers which had this feature (upgrading the CPU boards of this kind of computer is pure magic).

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 17:11 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Intel Itanium used to be one of the few chips with RAS feature. I believe the IBM Power series had it too. Now you can get Xeon's that implement it.

I think HP builds servers that do it. It appears to be their Integrity Nonstop server line.

The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 28, 2015 7:26 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

One advantage to buying a mainframe is that they ship a box with it maxed out in processors/ram, but only charge you for what you buy. So when you need to upgrade, you just make a phone call, they give you a license key, and you have more compute power

I very much doubt IBM is selling the hardware at a loss. It would be more accurate to say that you pay the hardware costs for the maximum spec of processors and RAM every time, but then you have to pay again a licensing cost if you want to use them.