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] (Richards, Robert B.) writes: > Most major banks that I am aware of do have parallel sysplexes in their > data centers. I suspect that we are not talking about mainframe system > availability here but rather whether their distributed servers which are > running the front-end banking applications are highly available. High > availability on IBM's System p is on the verge of becoming a real > possibility since the Power 6/AIX 6 stuff was announced, but that > infrastructure design certainly is not widespread across the banking > footprint as of yet! > > I wouldn't say we are necessarily losing the battle. Linux on System z > (among other things) has been working on leveling the playing field for > awhile now. Server consolidation on "Project Green" type initiatives, > etc. are also in vogue. The smarter shops are attempting to stop the > unrestrained proliferation of blades and racks. ha/cmp project started two decades ago http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp old post about deploying ha/cmp scaleup before the project got redirected and we were told to not work on anything more than four processors http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 misc. old email regarding ha/cmp scaleup activity http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa i've frequently commented that (much) earlier, my wife had been con'ed into going to POK to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture where she created peer-coupled shared data ... misc. past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#shareddata but, except for IMS hot-standby ... it saw very little take-up until much later with sysplex (and parallel sysplex) activity ... which contributed to her not staying very long in the position. another issue in that period was that she had constant battles with the communication division over protocols used for the infrastructure. in the early sna days ... she had co-authoried "peer-coupled networking" architecture (AWP39) ... so some in the communication division may viewed efforts as somewhat competitive. while she was in POK, they had come to a (temporary) truce ... where communication protocols had to be used for anything that crossed the boundary of the glasshouse ... but she could specify the protocols used for peer-coupled operation within the walls of the glasshouse. part of the ha/cmp not on mainframe platform was avoiding being limited by communication division. for some topic drift, other past posts mentioning conflict with communication division when we came up with 3-tier architecture and were out pitching it to customer executives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier recent ha/cmp related post (from thread mentioning tribute to Jim Gray) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#50 Microsoft versus Digital Equipment Corporation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#51 Microsoft versus Digital Equipment Corporation the first talk at the tribute was by Bruce Lindsay mentioning that Jim's formalizing of transaction semantics was the great enabler for online transactions (providing the necessary trust in computer operation to move off the manual/paper operation). now related to the meeting mentioned in this referenced post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 two of the people mentioned in the meeting, later show up in a small client/servere startup responsible for something called a commerce server. we were called in to consult because they wanted to do transactions on the server ... and they had this technology that the startup had invented called SSL which they wanted to use. As part of doing payment transactions on the server ... there was the creation of something called a "payment gateway" that servers would interact with. lots of past posts mentioning this thing called payment gateway http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway btw, we used ha/cmp for the payment gateway implementation (with some number of enhancements and compensating procedures). this is now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce". recent post related some other aspects of the period (in an information security blog) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008i.html#94 Lynn - You keep using the term "we" - who is "we"? one of the other things mentioned at the tribute, was Jim's work on analysing where the majority of outages are happening (frequently cited study that outages are rairly hardware anymore). when we were out marketing ha/cmp product, we had coined the terms "disaster survivability" and "geographic survivability" ... to differentiate from simple disaster/recovery. we were also asked to write a section for the corporate continuous availability strategy document. however, the section was removed because both rochester and POK complained that they wouldn't be able to match (what we were doing) for some number of years http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#available for other drift, recent post discussing the evolution from medusa to blades and the really major green enabler was the marrying of virutalization and blades (as part of server consolidation) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#45 How can companies decrease power consumption of their IT infrastructure? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
