Re: Article on new mainframe use

MitchAlsup1 wrote:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 0:02:11 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

>
Mainframes are obsolete. The mindset of “the CPU is expensive, let’s
surround it with complex channel controllers to handle batch I/O”
stopped being relevant sometime in the 1980s, if not before.

 If one defines a mainframe computer as having the ability to remove and
replace every component without taking the computer off line--then
mainframes are still relevant. Reliability, Availability,
Serviceability.
 And when I say everything I mean everything:
power supplies, memories, disks, NICs, other devices, CPUs, cooling,
..
 Reliability may trade speed for never failing as a good trade off
Availability 100% up time 24/7/365 for a decade or longer without
outages
Serviceability replacement of any and all modules while keeping the
system "up"
 Thus a mainframe is more about how it is constructed than what parts
are used to construct it.

This is exactly why a cloud data center can be viwed as an extremely redundant virtual machine, with the unit of redundancy being whatever is located on a motherboard connected with an Ethernet plug.
Google and the others assume everything can and will fail, but all operations can fail over to some other unit, which might even be in a totally different geographic region.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"