Re: what's a mainframe, was is Vax addressing sane today

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:

Novell's System Fault Tolerant NetWare 386 (around 1990) supported two
complete servers acting like one, so that any hardware component could
fail and the system would keep running, with nothing noticed by the
clients, even those that were in the middle of an update/write
request.

late 80s, get HA/6000 project, originally for NYTimes to move their
newspaper system (ATEX) off VAXCluster to RS/6000. I then rename it
HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific scale-up with national
labs and commercial scale-up with RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase,
Informix, Ingres) that had VAXCluster support in same source base with
Unix (I do distributed lock manager that supported VAXCluster semantics
to ease ports).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing

IBM had been marketing S/88, rebranded fault tolerant. Then the S/88
product administer starts taking us around to their customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_Technologies
Also has me write a section for the corporate continuous availability
strategy document ... however, it gets pulled when both Rochester
(AS/400, I-systems) and POK (mainframe) complain that they couldn't meet
the requirements.

Early Jan92 in meeting with Oracle CEO, AWD/Hester tells Ellison that we
would have 16processor clusters by mid92 and 128processor clusters by
ye92. Within a couple weeks (end jan92), cluster scale-up is transferred
for announce as IBM Supercomputer (scientific/technical *ONLY*) and we
are told we can't work on anything with more than four processors (we
leave IBM a few months later).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970