Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lynn Wheeler Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Article on new mainframe use Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:37:31 -1000 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 43 Message-ID: <8734n5tfhg.fsf@localhost> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 03:37:32 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="50c8c2ba89f24b838aa8eab44c47427e"; logging-data="1233013"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18Z8WftMPfNoTqArV7dhRgjHEhC7gTaqa8=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:iAC3+drJHSAuig4D2EdF1MibRWM= sha1:F0r3/eMltIaeAJVWBUTez8CKlJ0= Bytes: 3277 mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes: > If one defines a mainframe computer as having the ability to remove and > replace every component without taking the computer off line--then > mainframes are still relevant. Reliability, Availability, > Serviceability. After Jim Gray left IBM for Tandem, he did study of service availability & outages, finding hardware reliability was getting to point where outages were becoming more people mistakes and environmental (aka earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, etc). Old overview "APPROACHES TO FAULT TOLERANCE": https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/grayft84.pdf also Tandem Technical reports http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/tandem/technical_reports/ Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It? http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/tandem/technical_reports/TR85-07_Why_Do_Computers_Stop_and_What_Can_Be_Done_About_IT_Jun85.pdf we got HA/6000 project in late 80s, originally for NYTimes to move their newspaper system (ATEX) off VAXCluster to RS/6000; I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific cluster scale-up with national labs and commecial cluster scale-up with RDBMS vendors (oracle, sybase, informix, ingres). Out marketing, I coin "disaster survivability" and "geographic survivabilty"; then the IBM S/88 Product Administrator starts taking us around to their customers and got me to write a section for the corporate continuous available strategy document (it got pulled with both Rochester/AS400 and POK/mainframe complained they couldn't meet the objectives). In early jan92 meeting with Oracle CEO, AWD/Hester told them that we would have 16processor clusters mid92 and 128processor clusters ye92, but a couple weeks later cluster scale-up is transferred for announce as IBM Supercomputer (technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we are told we can't work with anything that had more than four processors; we leave IBM a few months later (commercial AS400 & mainframe complaining they couldn't compete likely contributed). The structure of System/88, a fault-tolerant computer https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5387672 IBM High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970