[Novalug] IBM to Consolidate 3, 900 Servers onto 33 Mainframes running linux

[Ross Patterson]

At 16:41 8/1/2007, Ed James wrote:
>I started with big iron long ago, and watched them evolve.  But I gladly
>left them for desktops for 3 main reasona.

There's a reason mainframes (especially the IBM S/360 and its 
offspring) are still around after 45 years - because they keep 
changing with the times, taking for example the article that sparked 
this thread.  I expect Ed knows this, but all three of his reasons 
were *centralized IT* problems, not *mainframe* problems, and all 
three have been successfully replicated on the Intel 80386 and its 
offspring.  To wit:

>1 - I hated having to deal with the mainframe operator for simple things
>like mounting/unmounting tapes.  Not a current problem

Yeah - try to find a tape drive today that isn't dedicated to its use 
as a backup device.  Worse yet, try to find one that can reliably 
read data that it wrote!  But you can still find floppy drives (!) 
and CD-RW drives, if you can get to the front panel of the 
machine.  As Kraftwerk said, "I'm the operator of my pocket 
calculator".  At least if I can get inside the locked server room!

>2 - I REALLY hated dealing with cost accounting for CPU seconds, disk I/O,
>etc where each program run came out of some budget somewhere.  Too often
>the limits were capricious and arbitrary, but still a major hassle.

Mainframes as cost-accounted systems waxed and waned a few times, but 
small systems simply grew from being expensable to being capital 
purchases that your IT department makes out of its own budget.  There 
was one beautiful thing about cost accounting - IT could afford 
upgrades to benefit the users without begging the CFO for the funds to do it.

>3 - Getting anything new installed was so much of a pain that it wasn't
>even worth trying.  "Working around" was more the norm than "working
>smart".

Good luck getting Administrator or root access on any IT-supplied 
computer these days, and similarly getting IT to install software 
that isn't in the corporate catalog.

>Nowadays, I think I'd enjoy building and creating software on big iron.
>Trouble is, I STILL can't afford to buy one. :P

They're free for 30 days :-)  Check out 
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/partnerworld/wps/pub/systems/technical/hardware/linuxdrive!

Ross
(who wrote some S/390 assembler code in the Linux kernel :-) )