Well... here's another one that may interest the folks on this list. Not nearly as long as the other one, and possibly a little more interesting once you manage to get past my 3 or 4 putrid paragraphs :-) . The breach between the mainframe and *nix camps is more cultural than anything else, IMHO. We tout our clusters and distributed setups, and then install a blade server to get them all in the same rack. They tout the blessings of consolidated hardware, higher throughput and ability to get everything out of a CP (they are designed to run at 100% capacity), and then install dozens of virtual machines...
IBM is looking for new customers, and they seem to be trying to work around those cultural gaps. There have been reports that IBM is considering building mainframes that are entirely based on RS6000 CPUs and that look much more like clusters than mainframes in that respect. Such a machine would be able to run just about any OS in a virtual machine or address space. I don't have the resources or knowledge to predict how the job market will change because of this. I do think that the two camps will be forced to know more about the other's technology in the future, like it or not. SOA is an example of how what we call "web services" is getting more entrenched in the world of big iron. Articles about it are ubiquitous in every mainframe rag and blog. The *nix camp though, seems to be absorbing less of the better technology from mainframes... and doing it more slowly. Xen seems to be a good example. On the other hand, there's not a whole lot else. We don't have nearly as robust facilities for scheduling batch jobs, allocating resources to specific tasks on the fly, detailed transaction logging, etc. The blog link mentioned below is a fairly good one for mainframers. I found a decent article at this address, too: http://www.redmonk.com/cote/ He seems to understand both camps from what I can see. In case you need a reminder, IFLs are specialized CPUs that are optimized for Linux. Oh.. and let me know if you think these posts are too off-topic. I don't intend to make a habit of it, just when I see a more prominent announcement. FWIW, the press release that Timothy refers to seems to be what motivated the NY Times article that /. reported on. That reporter was very biased against mainframes, and seemed to be less than knowledgeable. This at least gives the other side. ----- Forwarded message from Timothy Sipples <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 04:13:07 -0600 From: Timothy Sipples <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: IBM PR: New Software and ISV Initiatives to Handle Surge in Mainframe Transactions To: [email protected] There's another thread running re: the New York Times article about mainframe and SOA, but I thought I'd fill in some more details. IBM held a meeting with major analysts and the press last week to brief them on new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives concerning the mainframe. One analyst, James Governor, is reporting on this meeting, lead by IBM Software Chief Steve Mills, at the Mainframe Blog: http://mainframe.typepad.com I also found this press release: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19620.wss The press release contains some interesting new information: * IBM expects mainframe transactions "to easily double" within 43 months. Wow. With news like that I can forgive the split infinitive. :-) * More than 1,700 customers run Linux on mainframes. (Rumor has it there's a single customer with close to 300 IFLs!) * More than 60 percent of IBM mainframe revenues are "new workloads" (Linux, Java, SOA, etc.) * First public mention (that I've seen) of the forthcoming IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager ("FIM") for z/OS product, continuing the trend for security-conscious enterprises (all of them?) to position the mainframe as the "security hub." * The press release mentions "IBM IT architects" at least twice and something about no-cost consultations. Meaning we IBM architects may be busy. Not so often one's personal potential workload appears so explicitly in a press release, but there it is. :-) - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries IBM Japan, Ltd. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
