6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
7:44 p.m.
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.
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.
Peace... Sridhar