Comments on: Cloudy prognosis for mainframes

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:47:59 +0000

Interesting to read this post on one screen while logged on to TSO at work on the other. I’d love to see it happen, but having been at the mainframe command line for a few years and steeped in that cubicle culture I fully agree with your caveat about insurance companies and the like. Switching away from this platform is still quite a few years off for our needs.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:37:58 +0000

Maybe I’m too old. I’ve heard this all before. This is a rehash of the “Glass house” vs “Distributed” discussion circa 1976, 1984, 1989, 1993, 1999, 2011. the bottom line is everyone has the same goals:
1) Lots of computing power.
2) No IT staff to run it.
3) All the control of everything is centralized.
4) It costs near nothing.

These myths are always assumed:
1) IT staff knows best.
2) End users are the root of all trouble.
3) It takes a visionary like ????? to figure it out.(Fill in the blank with “Steve Jobs” or “Mark Shuttleworth” or “Gene Amdahl” or )

The bottom line is, if you virtualize everything (Storage, computers, networks, displays, phones etc) then you can do whatever you want.

Are mainframes dead? No!
Why? Because they virtualize everything.
Why is that important?
1) Money. Putting a lot of stuff in a small box is cheaper than putting a little in a lot of boxes at some point. Even GOOGLE is discovering this truth.
2) It’s easy to a fix virtual computer; even a computer can do it itself. Virtual errors can be programmed away.
3) You can change the hardware without changing the virtual. (Look at the AS400 of old).

As for UNITY, Check

By: IGnatius T Foobar

IGnatius T Foobar — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:38:42 +0000

Running lots of virtual Linux images on a mainframe is a form of consolidation. Running Lots of virtual Linux images on a relatively smaller number of physical hosts (call it a cloud if you want to) is another, different form of consolidation.

They really don’t have anything to do with each other. Pursuing them as an integrated strategy would be a quite foolish effort.

Another quite foolish effort is Canonical’s insistence on turning computer desktops into overgrown smartphones via the awful “Unity” UI. This major mistake which is alienating the existing user base will continue to be brought up until it is corrected.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:29:51 +0000

Not all mainframes are IBM (But most are). UNISYS has an X86 based mainframe that, with a little engineering, could work nicely for a CLOUD service provider.

By: mainframe truth

mainframe truth — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:25:39 +0000

Linux on the mainframe is a poor example of how to best exploit mainframe strengths.

MVS, VM, and TPF offer much better solutions to high volume transaction-centered
business processing on the mainframe than Linux can ever hope to achieve.

This all being said, if you do want to run linux on the mainframe, you save
tons of money in consolidation costs associated with administration, power,
physical space, and cabling. Assuming your linux workloads are not compute-bound,
a mainframe-based consolidation solution can cost considerably less for commodity
hardware to operate, provided you have tolerable performance in each virtual
instance.

Even so, the best use of a mainframe cannot happen with Linux/Unix, because
the architectural model of Linux/Unix operating systems is very far away from
mainframe strengths. Linux/Unix also proves to be very compute-bound on the
mainframe because the i/o cannot be optimized for channel-based implementation
to the same degree traditional mainframe environments encourage.

By: Claudio

Claudio — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:33:49 +0000

I know is off-topic but Mark please listen to me. A great application like Remastersys has died in the last days. I’m sure you know this application and how is easy to use. Why don’t integrate a so simple and easy application in Ubuntu repositories? I know there are clones but Remastersys remains the best. If i was you i’d contact the developer. I’m sure he would be very pleased. Sorry for my bad English and keep up the good job. Ah, i saw what is supposed to be the new iconset for Ubuntu 12.04. Yellowicon sounds familiar to you? You are great and i bet Ubuntu will be as great as you. Bye!

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:01:51 +0000

paul,

Reliability aside. what’s the power consumption usage footprint look like for a mainframe powered cloud versus commodity hardware power cloud? If we are going to talk about on going costs, power consumption has to be factored in.

-jef

By: Justin Andrusk

Justin Andrusk — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:17:03 +0000

I would be interested to know if there are plans for adopting a security architecture framework for the cloud such as SABSA.

By: paul

paul — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:02:27 +0000

Mainframes are not just useful for MVS operating types systems, but can also run up to and perhaps exceeding 1000 virtual machines running Linux and/or Unix.

With the mainframes record on reliability, redundancy, and throughput, they are actually a very good buy for large data centers.

By: I like black and white...

I like black and white... — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:25:35 +0000

I dare you to make a post about your garden. Firstly because it would be a nice to read an actual personal blog post on your personal blog again, but mostly because I’m curious how the always entertaining Jef will find a way to attack it