Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron
Mainframe computers have long been the province of IT druids in huge corporate data centers and goverment agencies like NASA and the CIA. Now, though, the mainframe is heading towards a much larger potential market.In IBM's latest effort to keep Big Iron relevant in a fast-changing computing world, it's retooling the technology for small- and medium-size businesses. The new z9 Business Class mainframe, released this spring, can be bought for as little as $100,000. Think of it as Little Iron. And small outfits who can't afford to buy a mainframe can pay by the drink by using IBM's on-demand services. All the things IBM mainframes can now do will surprise you. Example: As the server for Taikodom, a massively multiplayer online game being developed by Brazilian upstart Hoplon Infotainment. It's a company with just 50 employees. I don't want this to sound like an ad for mainframes (not my role or inclination) but this cool application caught my fancy.
http://blogs.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/07/not_your_dads_m.html#more While z/VM isn't explicitly mentioned in the blog entry, I do suspect that the Linux images the gamers are using are VM hosted. Who was it that first ran StarTrek on VM? I guess they were really ahead of their time. :-) DJ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
