Wade Curry wrote:
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...
I would definitely like to learn more about mainframes and apply the
good ideas from the mainframe world to the Unix world. I understand that
mainframe hardware is of the highest quality and fault tolerant with
lots of emphasis put on IO and I hope we can carry more of that over
into the Unix/PC world. I am still trying to understand what advantages
the mainframe software world has. My biggest complaint (which I recently
voiced on slashdot) is that we have no way of learning about mainframes.
The average person can't afford one. The average (small) company can't
even afford one! And Wade is only the second person I have ever met in
my life who had any real experience with mainframes. I think mainframes
would be a lot more widespread if IBM had given the software away for
free and some minimal hardware platform on which to run it so that more
people could have access to understand the technology. I know I will
never recommend a mainframe solution to my employer until I really have
some practical experience with one. And given the amount of OLTP and
OLAP that we do around here we could probably use some of those
capabilities of a mainframe.
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.
What do you mean by "scheduling batch jobs"? I understand that "batch
jobs" are a major part of the workload for mainframes but I have no idea
what they really are. Would a batch job just be the generation of a
report or something? If so we schedule batch jobs out of cron and it
works just fine. Maybe the mainframes have a better way of doing it but
the way we are doing it is "good enough". I would like to be able to
allocate resources to specific tasks on the fly but I think we are
getting there with clustering and Xen. Detailed transaction logging is a
part of our application. Is it part of the OS in the mainframe world? If
so, why should the OS need to be aware of Alice buying a toothbrush?
The blog link mentioned below is a fairly good one for mainframers.
I will definitely be checking it out.
In case you need a reminder, IFLs are specialized CPUs that
are optimized for Linux.
If you run Linux on a mainframe don't you lose the batch processing and
other niceties that the mainframe OS provides you? Then what you have is
a very reliable Linux box on very expensive hardware. Still better than
running it on a PC, I'm sure.
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
I think these posts are very much on topic and I hope you will send us
more stuff like this.
--
Tracy R Reed
http://copilotconsulting.com
1-877-MY-COPILOT
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
