--------------------------<snip>------------------------
On the one hand I hear that nothing beats the MF for reliability,
security, recoverability, and so on. Then I hear people telling me not
be so sure about that. So if these other platforms are up to MF levels,
and they are so much cheaper, why would anyone stay with a mainframe today?
What's the driving factor that gives mainframes any kind of real life
expectancy, given that Windows and xNIX are now up to MF standards?
-----------------------<unsnip>-------------------------
In my not-so-humble opinion:
Nothing will beat the MF in terms of overall performance. No business
runs on strictly compute-bound or strictly I/O bound code; the mixture
may vary but both capabilities are important to the business. While many
desktops can compute with awesome speed today, they can't do large
volumes of I/O in anything approaching a reasonable time frame. The MF
can do thusands of I/O's per second, via multiple channels, but MIGHT
not be quite as fast for a purely compute-bound program.
Wake me up, if you can, when the non-MF platforms can multi-task with
literally thousands of tasks and still get reasonable work done in a
reasonable time frame.
And whether we like it or not, the MF still has very high reliability,
excellent security and a pretty D*** high degree of recoverability. And
we've had 40+ years of practice in making improvements in all those
areas. (I've seen as many as 4,000 Virtual Machines running in a VS/CMS
environment and all were still getting sub-second terminal response time
for trivial transactions! On a single 370/168!)
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