[SunRescue] RE: mainframes in our midst...

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 11:56:53AM -0400, Jonathan Katz wrote:
> But it's so much FUN! That and when I was here yesterday he
> flat out said (to rouse suspicion?) "All your base are belong
> to us!" ... and he plays Halflife on his PC during his lunch
> break.

Get on his good side and see if you can get him to run Linux inside one of
the partitions on the mainframe!  Then run bonnie and see what kind of
performance you get!  Hoo-ah!

> Exactly-- why own a data center full of one
> machine when you can have a few dozen 4800s
> or 6800s which can each be partitioned or
> domained out into several smaller boxes which
> fit the same functionality... and they're
> faster, and suck less juice. Plus, you can't
> hot-swap an ESCON connection, can you?

To which a mainframe guy might reply that he only has to maintain one
machine, while you are busy being ssh'ed into 30 different boxes.

And he can run say one instance of Oracle rather than you needing to
maintain a cluster and having to split up tablespaces, etc.

Dunno about hot-swap, but back when a 486/DX2-66 was hot, some guy was
bragging about the 74MB/s memory transfer rate.  Then some mainframe
guy pointed out that this was the equivalent of the disk bandwidth on one of
the drives hooked up to the mainframe.

If you can't hotswap the ESCON, you could certainly hotswap the drives
connected to the ESCON.

Note:  I still prefer Sun's and Unix in general - it's a little too hard to
run even a mid-range IBM server like an AS/400 in my apartment :-)

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net