What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
Have you used…containers, VMware, distributed storage, multi CPU systems, etc?
Thank a mainframe and unix, they were doing all of those things in the 80s. It isn’t surprising you never encountered one, they are hilariously expensive but they also were designed to run without shutting off for 25 years. You can’t run a Dell R series for a year without having to reboot it. They are engineered for maximum uptime and flexibility. You can literally replace processors while the machine is running.
In a modern mainframe, and they do still sell them from IBM, you can essentially run an entire datacenter including storage in one or a couple of racks. They have some innovations that make them much more efficient at high volume compute, the processor and storage BUS is far more efficient. So if you are NASA and you are running a model of the observable universe, your crappy java application on Red Hat + an HP blade isn’t going to do anything for you.
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