The Open Mainframe Project

Posted Aug 24, 2015 7:39 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The Open Mainframe Project by dlang
Parent article: The Open Mainframe Project

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.