DragonBoy, Re: "Wintel will kill
them. I mean it. Once Wintel start attack high end machine it's all over."
I'm afraid you don't know what you are talking about. Read this:
To: Mary Cluney (54715 )
From: Tony Viola
Tuesday, Apr 28 1998 8:17PM ET
Reply # of 57504
Mary (and Michelle), >>>"When does any of this stuff (Merced,
McKinley, Everest et all) start taking away
business from the mainframes and if it does how does that effect
you personally at
work?"
I should have saved it (at least twice in the past year or so, I have
put in a post saying why Merced won't impact our, or IBM's S390
business, at least not for a long, long time). Oh well, here goes
again.
1. Merced won't run MVS or VM, the main OS's of the S390
world. There is now over a trillion dollars worth of legacy
software that runs on MVS or VM. The world's largest banks,
insurance companies, car manufacturers, airlines, oil companies,
EDS types, Merril Lynch types (good customer, in spite of TK),
etc. don't want to convert these programs over to NT, so they'll
stay with S390. There are some people moving over to NT from
S390, but there are more going back to 390 because they like
having one very powerful, single image, unbreakable machine
doing their processing, instead of a fragile network of servers.
That leads to the next key feature of S390:
2. RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability). S390's have
extra hardware spent for these three cousins. For reliability, these
machines have ECC on all memory, whether cache or main,
mainstore patrol; data integrity testing for every instruction
executed (excess three gray code); cyclic redundancy (Fire Code)
testing for all I/O transactions; instruction retry, up to seven times,
redundant power supplies and fans; and much, much more. For
availability, hot swappable power supplies, hard drives and fans
and dynamic CPU upgrade, where you can add CPU's to the system
without powering down. For serviceability, well, the hot
swappable stuff again, plus the system board (mobo in PC terms)
is a FRU (field replaceable unit) so we don't mess around with
troubleshooting a lot, just throw in a new one. Also for
serviceability, AMDAC, by which a field specialist can take over
any machine in the world (over modem), and run hand loops or
diagnostics or invoke some articial intelligence software, which
looks at the symptoms of a down machine, diagnoses probably
90% of possible bugs, and even orders the spare part to be sent out
to the customer site. Intel is doing something like this (Landesk).
We've had it for over 20 years (but not with the AI software for all
that time). Oh, BTW, the MTBF of the new CMOS mainframes is
running at between four and ten years. Ten years is longer than the
lifetime of most machines. Mainframe customers upgrade just like
we do. So, most machines will never fail, unless they get
"recycled", or reused through third party people. Mainframe
people used to smugly call PC's and Macs toys. Well they're a lot
more than toys now, but still not up with big iron.
3. Security...hardware encryption.
4. Scalability...NT has a long ways to go on this one. People over
on the SUNW thread say NT flat out sucks for scalability. OTOH,
Under MVS, a twelve CPU system, with 80 MIPS per CPU,
probably comes in at about 12X80X.78 = 748.8 MIPS. Before you
say a Pentium Pro is more powerful, there are MIPS and there are
MIPS. Mainframe MIPS represent far more processing power than
PC MIPS. Back to scalability, NT 5.0 is supposed to "make it
better", but there are skeptics (many). We'll see.
5. I/O bandwidth...up to 384 fiber optic (ESCON) channels, up to
192 parallel (OEMI) channels and up to 64 one Gigabit /sec.
cluster links. I don't think even Merced will match this
(McKinley?).
Mainframes sales, now based on CMOS technology vs. the
obsolete ECL, are growing faster now in terms of MIPS shipped
per month, or year, than ever.
Enough. Hope this helps. Don't sell IBM short. The only other
S390 companies are where I sit (owned by Fujitsu now) and
Hitachi Data Systems (Japan).
Tony
Apologies to those here that have suffered through this litany before). OTOH, the diatribes, based on nothing, that Wintel will eventually run everything in the computing universe, get pretty boorish, too. Come back at me with a story about a Fortune 100 company making plans to swap out their System 390 in favor of a Wintel box, or boxes. I'll be waiting. Oh, BTW, you'll notice in my profile that INTC is my first listed stock under favorites. They'll clean up in all just about all computing areas except mainframes, IMNSHO. |
