Wesley Parish wrote:
IBM refers to all S360, S370, S390 and z900 series computers and their compatibles/clones as mainframes. The OSes they run are variants of either OS390 aka MVS (for Multiple Variable Storage - meaning it's named for its virtual memory capabilties, which were very, very new at the time it came out) aka zOS or VM/ESA aka z/VM (for Virtual Machine/Extended System Architecture).I used to program on AS/400s for a couple of years. The Linux / Java system broke the standard O/S's secureity system completely. The Linux OS was very limited. This is about 4 years ago.
They used to have water-cooling, now that's becoming commonplace; they used to take up a h*() of a lot of room (one or more rooms), now they are just bulky; they still lead the rest of the computing world in 99.999% RAS and in throughput, meaning that they can take an awful lot of IO thrown at them.
The MVS family of OSes are primarily batch-systems, meaning you set them up with a massive chunk of data and they churn through it without batting an eyelid or bowling and eyeball; the VM/??? series are a more interactive set and have a set of guest operating systems, interactive and batch, running on them 99.999%.
AS/400s are midrange, what used to be called minicomputers back in the days when DEC was still around - VaX is the another midrange, and so is Sun's SPARC and of course, the Alpha. Modern AS/400s are 64bit PowerPC machines; they used to have their own chip, which was a 48bit one; AS/400s have a virtual machine structure as well. AS/400s aren't compatible in any real sense with the S390/z900 family, though I don't doubt you can get some useful pointers from the books - IBM also runs Linux on the modern AS/400, in a separate "partition" to OS/400 - since OS/400 is a virtual machine's guest OS, all that is needed is to IPL (Initial Program Load) Linux and OS/400 in different virtual machines.
Have I bored you to tears yet? ;)
Wesley Parish
Nice boxes though. Do you use Sparc or IBM series? Do you know someone who would have a nice home for a PSarc Server 1000 series. It weighs about 80 KGs plus and stands four feet tall.
Shane
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