The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[email protected] (Anne & Lynn Wheeler) writes: > lots of the financial stuff grew up in mainframe batch ... some past > references/discussions (this from linkedin greater ibm) > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#51 8 ways the American information > worker remains a Luddite > and slightly older from year ago > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008p.html#27 Father of Financial Dataprocessing re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#81 big iron mainframe vs. x86 servers ... at tandem, after leaving ibm, Jim did this study: Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It? http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf from above: An analysis of the failure statistics of a commercially available fault-tolerant system shows that administration and software are the major contributors to failure. ... snip ... also ... Fault Tolerance in Tandem Computer Systems http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.2.pdf from above: When the sources of faults are examined in detail, a surprising picture emerges: Faults come from hardware, software, operations, maintenance and environment in about equal measure. Hardware may go for two months without giving problems and software may be equally reliable. The result is a one month MTBF. When one adds in operator errors, errors during maintenance, and power failures the MTBF sinks below two-weeks. ... snip ... in the later part of the 90s, we spent some time with large financial transaction operation ... that had 100% availability so far in the decade. they attributed the 100% availability to: 1) IMS hot-standby 2) automated operator recent post about high i/o error (disk development) environment where MVS had MTBF of 15 minutes ... and I undertook to rewrite i/o supervisor to never fail ... also brought down the wrath of the MVS group for just referring to the MVS failure rate internally http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#17 Broken hardware was Re: Broken Brancher http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#31 Justice Department probing allegations of abuse by IBM in mainframe computer market other posts mentioning bldgs 14 (disk engineering) & 15 (disk product test) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
