<Reliability, Availability, Serviceability. It's a widely used term in the S/390 world, mostly because these boxes really
shine in these areas. In fact, IBM mainframes ship with hardware preinstalled (additional processing engines) that
can simply be 'turned on' when the customer needs a more powerful machine. This is done via microcode. Just one
example of many I could offer, but it might be boring <ggg>. >
Not boring .. interesting stuff.
<You can also combine 32 discrete S/390 MVS boxes
into something called a 'sysplex' that can be configured to share workload. Individual mainframes can be configured
out of the 'sysplex' for upgrades, etc. Gives an installation lots of flexibility and much more power than is available
in the Intel powered world currently>
Can and do are two different things. Maybe you can do
32 in a Parallel Sysplex but the largest Sysplex out there
today is 16 nodes, right?
RAS coming to new GS series include, the normal ones plus
CPU hot-swap and memory in-swap.. When you think about it,
mainframes are stuck.. since they can't do much with
the 32-bit model they live in other than "tricks" with cache
and what not (i.e. CF currently allows up to 16 Gigs of
data cache). GS320 (Wildfire) follow-ons are headed
places mainframes can't come. The follow-on to Wildfire
is said to accomodate 256 CPUs and a Terabyte of memory.
Mainframes can't scale like that.
Rob |
