Re: Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving • The Register

On Apr 7, 2013, at 3:16 AM, MG <marcogb at xs4all.nl> wrote: *sigh* I wasn't going to jump into this but... For those that say the mainframe (specifically IBM 360/370/390/z-series architecture) is dead, I would say not. Not only are they suited to do traditional "mainframe" tasks but they're *really* good at virtual hosting. You know the virtualization stuff that's been touted by the likes of VMWare, Microsoft, etc on Intel platforms for the last few years. Well, IBM's been doing that since 370 days (early 1970's). They do virtualization better than anyone...almost no IBM shops run the OS on the "metal". They're run inside a VM. It's just that good. Linux has been ported to the z-series. As an experiment, IBM wanted to see how many Linux VM clients could be run (basically to see what it would be like for a hosting company). They stopped at 42,000 Linux clients running on a *single* z-series. They stopped not because the performance was unacceptable or because they ran into any limits...they got tired of adding VMs! It's an architecture that will soon be 50 years old. The original 360 architecture (which was not only the ISA but also how I/O was interfaced) has been surprisingly resilient. I cast suspicion on anyone who says something is "dead". Not only have I been hearing that the mainframe is dead since the late 70's, I've also been hearing that the disk drive is dead for about the same period of time. How's that going? TTFN - Guy