Shouldn't this be.......
down the side with the other ads?
Evidence from users in the real world shows that for large workloads, the mainframe offers power, security, administration licensing and management benefits – but, in an x86 world, many IT departments simply don’t consider running their Linux apps on anything but traditional servers. IBM’s system z platform offers the …
Hmm, there's something for Hyper-V and a couple of articles from EMC world on the front page at the moment. So while this is obviously a promotion for IBM, and no attempt is made to hide it, it's not singled out.
As long as there's balance, I can't see anything wrong with that.
Intel is under pressure, not only from IBM's Z-series and Power systems, but more pertinently from ARM. I expect they'll fight back, but until then the competition are going to make the most of it.
There's definitely advantages to having a whole bunch of CPUs and shared memory connected together with a speed that a pile of PCs isn't going to get anywhere near. I could think of one big example outside of finance: MMO servers. I'm sure CCP must have all kinds of fun synchronising everything with a SQL server box and whatever else is in their Carbon cluster. One or two big boxes could probably run that whole game.
And now, amusingly enough, time to shut the browser down and toddle off to the final exam for the Mainframe Computing module. Fingers crossed.
"...There's definitely advantages to having a whole bunch of CPUs and shared memory connected together with a speed that a pile of PCs isn't going to get anywhere near. ..."
Uhm, did you miss that IBM Mainframes have really slow cpus? A high end 8-socket x86 server has similar or more computing power than the biggest IBM Mainframe with 24 cpus.
Sure, IBM claim they can virtualize 1.500 of the x86 servers on a Mainframe. But if you dig a bit, it turns out that IBM assumes all x86 servers being idle at a few percent, and the Mainframe is 100% loaded. In fact, you can emulate a IBM Mainframe on a laptop using open source "TurboHercules", which allows me to fire up five idling Mainframes on my laptop. But do I claim that my laptop can virtualize five IBM Mainframes? Hell no.
The same thing when Microsoft claimed that Linux is more expensive than Windows. After I dug a bit, it turned out that MS assumes Linux is running on a small Mainframe costing $1 million, and Windows is running on a PC. No wonder that MS concluded that Linux has worse TCO than Windows.
BTW, IBM does the same trick when they claim that a POWER7 server can virtualize loads of x86 servers: all x86 servers are old, like 1GHz 256MB RAM PCs, and they all idle.
Here is the "worlds fastest cpu", according to IBM:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/06/ibm-claims-worlds-fastest-processor-with-5-2ghz-z196/
Which is actually dog slow in comparison to x86.
Here is a developer that ported Linux to IBM Mainframes so he could compare Linux workloads on x86 and on Mainframes. He concluded that 1 MIPS == 4MHz x86.
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-390@vm.marist.edu/msg18587.html
So a 10.000 MIPS Mainframe equals 40 GHz x86. But a 10 core x86 running at 2GHz, gives 20 GHz. Thus, a small 10.000 MIPS Mainframe compares to two x86 cpus with 10 cores.
I was told something by the owner of a business I worked for in the 80's and that I've heard echoed a few other times over the years: It really irks business people that they have to deal with all these different OSs on all these different platforms. Why can't there be just one OS that runs on them all?
Knowing IBM's commitment to bending technology to business needs, I wonder why they haven't jumped all over that.