About 18 months ago, I sent e-mail to Google suggesting that they investigate zSeries hardware as a "Google Labs" project. I never heard, one way or another, whether they looked at it or not.
Not knowing their proprietary algorithms, it's hard to tell whether clusters of z/VM-based Linux virtual servers would help them, or not. If they are CPU bound, I think it's been demonstrated that some Intel, and even some IBM RISC CPUs are actually faster than 390-architecture CPUs, so for compute-intensive tasks, they'd want to do other things. If it's just a disk space issue, then neither computing platform, of course, has an advantage - it's up to the storage vendores. If the limiting factor is I/O "bandwidth", reliability or floorspace (server consolidation thru virtualization), then I'd go for z-boxen, since in my opinion that's where mainframe advantages lie. I still think they should at least investigate the possibilities. As should some other major "hosting" sites, such as those that host blogs: when Six Apart had major problems last year due to failures, it earned them a lot of negative publicity from the "A-list" bloggers. If you're betting the business, why not bet it on hardware designed from the beginning for Reliability and Availability? Tim Hare Senior Systems Programmer Florida Department of Transportation (850) 414-4209 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
