6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
8:11 p.m.
On 06/09/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
Liam Proven wrote:
Well, sort of. There are actually different ways of doing it, but if
memory serves, the most popular is by prcoessor-load. There's even
still a small but enthusiastic group of users who trade compute time.
I am sure you're right. I've read lots about this myself. But from
what I have read, it is not actually selling that many new mainframes.
I've read figures of single-digit sales per year.
It may be millions of US$ worth of business but it's not many actual
systems. Indeed I think a fair bit of this sort of consolidation is
happening by way of outsourcing to 3rd party datacentres - possibly on
machines still owned by IBM.
Yes, it's doing well. We are still not talking large volumes, though,
by /any/ measure.
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It's
not that there's a lot of mainframes out there, it's that they're
quite pervasive.
All right, conceded.
But I suspect that there is a user count involved somewhere for
licensing purposes! Re your point about accessing a mainframe - that
would generally be
very indirectly, though, no? They access a web server or an ATM or
something, that probably talks to another server, that talks to a
mainframe.
Yes. Definitely.
Most of the tedious IT management press that I
read seems to consider
the client/server model obsolete now and talks of at least 3-layer
models instead.
The benefit of recent mainframe software architecture is that you can
run all of the upstream layers on one machine. Run the web server on
Linux, with transaction management or application backend running on VSE
with the backend database on MVS. Run the whole rigamarole in LPARs or,
most popularly, in VM guests. Each OS doing what it does best. Without
that advance, I don't think there would be nearly as many mainframes out
there as there are.