Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids

OSS_ilation writes "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast. At R.L. Polk and Co., one of the oldest automobile analytics firms in the U.S., an aging mainframe couldn't cut it, so the IT staff looked elsewhere. Their search led to a grid computing environment — more specifically, a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers. The mainframe's still there, apparently, but after an internal comparison showed the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs, Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more menial tasks."

"medial" tasks?

FTFS: "Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."

Medial tasks? I think you mean menial tasks [google.com]. Although there are such things as medial equations in algebra, I believe, but I don't think you were referring to those.

I hate to go into grammar police mode, but it bugs me when people misunderstand the usage of common phrases by replacing one or more words with another. I have actually heard people say "for all intensive purposes," hahaha. (as opposed to "for all intents and purposes"). And then there are all the weird expressions we do use, that are redundant or just make no sense: hot water heater, end result, safe haven, advance warning, vin number, atm machine.

Re:"medial" tasks?

Aw come on. Isn't this really all a mute point?

Linux Niche

As an admittedly non-initiate in linux (I run osx), this seems very much what linux is
good for, rather than for a desktop os, where difficulty of setup would be a severe
handicap. I've always believed that open-source suffers from the in-house-tool
mentality, which assumes the end user is extremely sophistacted. As an engineer,
I can testify to my lack of desire to make the UI more than bare-bones.

Maxim

Re:Linux Niche

The difficulty of desktop Linux is really a myth these days. I recently set up Fedora Core 6 on a laptop. Setting up FC6 as a desktop is now trivially easy. It roughly consisted of inserting a CD-ROM, booting it, clicking OK and Next a few times then feeding it disks until it finished.

Installing extra software was equally trivial. There is a GUI to start off the Applications menu for installing more software. It downloads and installs the software all as one step. No need to download it, run a separate installer or scroll through pages of impeneterable EULA.

To add extra applications to this GUI application installer - mainly multimedia applications - all it required was clicking on a link on Livna's web page to add the Livna repository. (Like Mac OS X, you're asked for the administrative password on application install).

Installing Fedora Core and extra applications and extra application repositories is actaully easier than doing the same on Windows, and about the equivalent difficulty of doing the same on Mac OS X.

For third-party applications, there is Autopackage: http://autopackage.org/ [autopackage.org] - which provides a distro-independent method of installing applications. It's reminiscent of things like the Mac OS X application installer (for apps you can't simply drag to the Applications folder) or the InstallShield types of installers for Windows. Except unlike InstallShield installers, it has the ability to resolve and fetch dependencies (ever tried to install Microsoft BizTalk? Complex and unweildy because you must manually install several dependencies, each with their own dependencies. Autopackage does away with this dependency hell).

Re:Linux Niche

I just recently installed Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) on a brand new laptop. I found no previous testimonials or guides about the model I chose, but googling seemed to indicate that all the components had drivers. While I did have a couple of issues that made installation not quite as painless and grandparent, your post severely understates how far Linux has gotten.

And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop?

Worked with ALSA out of the box.

Okay, where do I set the wireless password? I know I saw that somewhere before.

Using Network Manager, there is a wireless icon in the top right of the window with a list of accessible networks. Selecting an encrypted one brings up a prompt for a password (the first time you use it).

Oh, the Dlink-chip-du-jour isn't supported out of the box, I have to go find some more development drivers for it, if I can.

Unfortunately, some hardware manufacturers give no Linux support at all, but in fact almost all wireless adapters work. Go with Centrino, and you will be fine.

Hmmmm, how do I suspend this and hibernate it properly?

Both worked perfectly out of the box.

Hmmm, where did my scrolling regions go on my trackpad?

They were enabled and working out of the box.

Now, time for a presentation; install openoffice, that works fine, good. Okay, now to switch to external monitor. Hmmm, Fn-Monitor doesn't work.

The hotkey for switching to external monitor worked out of the box, with all three modes (internal, external, both) working.

To this I can add (in response to others) that both my iPod and my Camera worked straight out of the box, as did Internet access over my bluetooth phone. The only thing I have run into which didn't work was an HP scanner - it turns out that scanners are a real quagmire with no uniform drivers and that HP give lousy support, a little Googling told me this and that an Epson would have worked...

What are they trying to prove ?

So a NEW system outperforms an OLD system. I fail to see how this is a news.

If they had compared a NEW mainframe with the NEW grid, then we would have been able to draw some conclusions about which one is better. But saying "We bought a new system, its better than the old one" proves nothing.

Re:What are they trying to prove ?

I agree that this isn't a good comparison of grid computing against modern mainframes... but I think that's more the fault of the post, not the article. I thought the article was still interesting though. It was interesting to learn a bit more about grid computing in a specific implementation and to see that companies are choosing alternatives to mainframes for massive processing tasks.

Actual performance numbers

We still have a 2066 in our shop. According to my power charts, the 2066 rates approximately 77 MIPS. If the Dells are giving a 70% performance increase, that means roughly 130 MIPS, or 1.1 MIPS per server.

In comparison, our standard model mainframe (a 2084) kicks up about 1600 MPS. Assuming the performance numbers for the Dell grid were to scale (the safe money says it doesn't), that translates into almost 1450 Dells. Keep in mind, that's not even a top of the line mainframe...

Let's not even start on hardware maintenance (which would you rather do: hot swap a power supply on 1 system, or 25?), network overhead, shared DASD, coupling facilities and RRS (think: Beowulf clusters).

Re:What are they trying to prove ?

Yes, you have put your finger on the glaring weakness in this story. Once you see that it was an OLD mainframe versus a PRESENT-DAY Linux grid, you realise that no useful conclusions can be drawn. (Although, as others have noted, the narrowness of the margin achieved suggests that the mainframe would win easily in a fair contest).

These "old-versus-new" comparisons are the stock-in-trade of marketing and PR departments, which are perpetually issuing press releases bragging that the latest Foowhatzit Humdinger 24-processor with thousands of GB of storage outperformed someone's 10-year old VAX or AS/400. To Slashdotters, that's a subdued "Wow!" (that they would attempt such barefaced trickery, that is) and on to something potentially interesting. But to the broad masses who know nothing about computers, it is quite impressive. PHB readers habitually skip over all the "techie details" anyway, so they probably come away with the desired message: "We need Foowhatzit Humdingers, and we need 'em now!"

People with arts degrees are big on quoting Mies van der Rohe's "God is in the details". Perhaps it's time they realised that "God is in the numbers" too.

Re:What are they trying to prove ?

Besides, performance has never been the strong point of a mainframe. In fact most mainframes performance is laughable (a while ago IBM had to ask Seti@Home to remove the results for the early Z series because they were comparable with a 386SX. The primary selling points of a mainframe are the resource control and reliability.

Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of PHB friendly resource control (CPU, IO, etc) for multiple concurrently running applications? Doubt it.

Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of reliability and reproducibility of the result? I have some doubts. Most mainframes have 2+ CPUs doing the same task and either flagging a fault on differences or deciding who is right using a "voting" system. This is done on a per instruction basis and cannot be directly simulated in a grid. At best you can do per-task/procedure result comparison which is not the same as it will flag errors considerably later and has higher probability of overall error when using the same number of components.

Someone is either comparing apples and oranges, or being a fanboy or not knowing what mainframe is for or all of these at the same time.

New grid bests 20 yo mainfraime. News at 11.

So a brand new grid beat out a 20 year old mainframe. At a computationally-intensive task. I'm shocked.

Wow, I've got to check out these mainframes

The mainframe is many years old and they only managed to beat it by up to 70% with 120 machines? Either that thing is awesome or they suck with their grid.

right tool for right job

You use the mainframe when you want error recovery at every step of the way. One of them even runs two CPU pipelines in lockstep so that a failing CPU can be safely isolated without crashing the app that was running on it.

The mainframe also gives you nice IO and super-efficient virtualization.

Workload doesn't need all that? Gee, maybe it's not a workload for the mainframe.

Re:right tool for right job

You are thinking of the old Tandem machines, I think they're called Himalaya now, or whatever. Those are failsafe machines which are supposed to have zero downtime on hardware problems.

The Mainframe discussed in the topic is an IBM one, most likely a predecessor of the current zSeries machines (OS/390).

So Linux beat it. I guess they just had tasks which weren't fit for large scale processing behemoths like mainframes anyway. I dare bet the Linux grid would be a lot slower if it had to batch processes a few hundred MB worth of data. And despite all the claims about Linux stability, mainframes boast far superious uptime (a few minutes of scheduled downtime a year and no unscheduled downtime; everything can be hotswapped, including CPU's and memory). Although the increase of real-time processing decreases the need for mainframes a bit, the ever increasing processing load still makes them invaluable to large companies.

A small 4 year old 'mainframe' is slow. Ok

a 2066-002 is midway up the 'Baby Freeway' z800 mainframe line. It has 2 CP's and benchmarks 1.0-1.2x the performance of a 9672-R36 itself a 4-5 year old model in the middle of the pack.

we don't need mainframes, but standalones may lack

what we need is "multiframes"

Consider an virual operating system, that can run on one or more other operating systems. This operating system is actually a set of nodes, one node per machine (or one node per CPU), with command nodes and worker nodes.

Command nodes distribute the workload and exist for redundancy. If one goes down, all others have a backup of it's data and state, and the next most senior node takes over.

Worker nodes then take the tasks and interface with the users via a standard shell.

Files can be distributed amongst the nodes for speed and redundancy, and if a node that needs a file doesn't have it, ant can request the file and temporarily have it locally. Each node will have a list of what files exist, and where they exist.

UI tasks are written to run solely on the machine of the user, but data crunching tasks are written to be split between nodes.

Thus, a person just goes to his or her machine, and interacts with it like a normal machine, except, rather than having a logon for his machine, he or she will have a logon for the multiframe.

Also, because of this setup, a multifram could work on top of multiple operating systems (say an office that is 50% windows for the normal users, and then 35% Linux for the devs, 10% FreeBSD for other devs, 5% HPUX/Sun for some server, and all machines coudl contribute to the multiframe.

The multifram could also have recorded statistics of uptimes and drops for various nodes, performance statistics for load balancing, etc.

The caveat to this system is that it would need some pretty heavy networking, even if optimised, and there could be latency issues. Still, I like this idea better than a mainframe.

Sounds like underperforming software

It sounds like a Linux grid is an excellent solution here - however, it also sounds like their software is not exactly performing perfectly:

This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program

Really?

Frankly that sounds like the software is in severe need of reworking! If their machines are 20 years old that's bad enough, but if they have 20 year-old software that needs to be rewritten every time a new type of car is added, it's time for a redesign.

Year of the Mainframe?

As others have pointed out, the comment left a great deal out.

For example, any mainframe that can be replaced by 120 PC compute nodes isn't well utilized and/or is completely outmoded.

I had a chat with a gentleman once who participated in a replacement of multiple PC servers with a mainframe--but it entailed replacing 7,000 servers with a relatively high-end machine.

The result was that power and real estate savings alone paid for the mainframe--which had more capacity for future expansion as needed.

As always, proper implementation of the right equipment for the job is always crucial--and a shallow analysis that doesn't cover all the variables is simply misleading at best.

nice spin...

"IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast."

IBM are also heavily investing in Grids, particularly with their support of the Globus Alliance Toolkit (see http://www.globus.org/ [globus.org])

Crazy? No, they are aiming at different targets. Mainframes are controlled by individual companies, grids are hoped to eventually be the equivalent of TCP - ubiquitous, reliable and cheaply available everywhere. That means your next Windows Vista T1000, Ubuntu Beam-me-up (TM) and self-aware toaster will seamlessly provide services to allow you to participate in grid-like problems just like any appliance. No more downloading the google toolbar to help cancer research, another app for cracking encryption, another app for predicting weather and so on...

Mainframes are not for everyone

It sounds to me like a mainframe is still probably the best fit for this organization. Few solutions can match the efficiency, streamlined-goodness of an IBM mainframe. Where I work, a city government, we run two fairly beefy iSeries (AS/400s), one that runs accounting, utility billing and operation, and income tax operations, and another that runs public safety operations. I love them. No down time - ours are brought down about once a year, and usually that is because the power is out and our generators are about to run out of juice. Hands down the most stress-free aspect of our operation. That alone is worth something. The users also love it for the most part. While IBM's client access can be intimidating for most users at first (text!?!? what is this, the 70's?), once they adjust to it they tend to love how quickly one can skate through repetitive tasks. Nevertheless, it is not for everyone. If you don't have tons of data that needs to be reliably and efficiently accessed all day everyday, then you're probably better off going elsewhere. If anything, because most users, who can barely log in to windows reliably, find client access to be something of a magic black box that they cannot begin to comprehend (my favorite help desk call: "can you flip the magic switch for me?"). At the same time, I've seen the same users who can still barely operate a mouse, open a AS/400 session and go to town like a computer virtuoso. I guess what I'm trying to say is, IBM mainframe solutions definitely have their ups and downs, but for the right applications, they are irreplaceable.

Do they mean a cluster

Forgive me if I'm not up on the latest jargon, but what's the difference between a grid and a cluster?

It's not just about speed

Mainframes are not only bought for performance, but for the whole framework they have.
Mainframes have great ways to execute batch-jobs which most Linux systems still lack.

Linux just seems to be more suitable for near realtime things like desktop computers or workstations, perhaps smaller servers like Google uses them.

So essentially it doesn't matter if there are clusters of smallers computers cheaper and more powerfull than mainframes, mainframes still will be sold.

In a prior life ...

... a long time ago, in a galaxy ...

I was a vendor SE who had occasion to visit R. L. Polk. There are customers who are "bleeding edge" customers, always looking for ways that the latest and greatest technology can give them an advantage in their business operations, and there are customers who are "junkyard" customers, who see everything as an expense, and only have the cheapest, oldest junk on the floors in their data centers.

Cost is the only metric for such customers, of whom R. L. Polk was one such (a long time ago, and it's possible that they have changed, but I doubt it, as it takes tremendous capital investment to dig oneself out of that sort of hole, and that's exactly the thing that these sort of companies will simply *not* do).

Given that as ancient hardware decays, the maintenance costs soar, I'm not surprised that a "junkyard" operation would find that aging mainframes are better replaced by a room full of PCs. But as to the performance improvements, I suspect that most of the credit there goes to the rewrite of the old mainframe apps written in COBOL, PL/I and assembler -- and if they had performed a rewrite in place, the observed performance improvements would have occurred on the mainframe as well.

This is a recurring problem with evaluating many of the mainframe-to-PC conversions. In the process of converting to run in the new environment, application programs that are several decades old benefit enormously from the rewrite necessary to operate in the new environment. The fact that they were converting assembler programs tells you something about the age of their software base. The fact that they were converting COBOL tells you something about the likely efficiency of their software.

Gahhh, again with the mainframe bashing.

Linux is an operating system. Mainframes are complete hardware solutions, which, by the way, can run Linux better than nearly any other hardware setup. I/O on a mainframe is probably the biggest advantage it has over any other solution, and will continue to have, because IBM has been refining it for 40 years.

As for the knocks on COBOL, write some non-trivial solutions with it and get back to me. You'll change your tune, I'm sure. I've written BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, Assembler for 390s and x86, Java, and a bucketful of scripting language solutions. The COBOL apps all crushed the other 3GLs simply because you can't beat an Amdahl mainframe for running through 16 million records each night during a production run. The COBOL compilers from IBM are probably the best compilers in the business, again benefiting from something like 35 years of refinement.

But hey, go out and buy 30 servers. Patch them, power them, rack them, cool them. Manage that. Meanwhile, the mainframe will stay up and running. Much more job security for me, and I'm still 15 years from retirement.

-BA

I'll set the building on fire...

Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner

Polk: Mainframe, we're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, mmm-K?

IBM 2066-002 Mainframe: Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler...

TPC-C

One objective benchmark to consider when comparing clusters vs. a server or mainframe is the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark. http://tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp? resulttype=all [tpc.org] Clusters get beat here in both absolute performance and performance/price, with the first cluster in the top ten being a cluster of 4-way HP Itanium servers. Granted this benchmark may or may not be relevant to what you care about, but it is definitely a very clear objective test for online transaction processing.

Not A Big Deal

It really depends on what your workload is and what you are trying to accomplish. I've seen Linux on the mainframe be a horrible thing and I've seen it be a pretty cool thing that worked wonderfully. If you are trying to do heavy math processing on a mainframe then it probably won't get you the bang for your money. On the other hand, heavy IO will probably work very well. You also get the benefit of being able to run hundreds (or even thousands) of Linux guests on one single server. That conserves physical space, electricity, software license costs, and the hardware is extremely reliable (which is part of the reason it is so expensive). It also makes disaster recovery much more straight forward.

Even IBM will tell you that there are some applications that you should not run on a zSeries processor. I've been in meetings where IBM has said that some types of workload will not perform well on a zSeries processor and you should consider Intel or some other platform.

There is no "one size fits all". Anyone who says there is "one size" is probably selling something.

MF backending the grid?

From the article:
And what of that old mainframe? It's still around, but Isiminger wouldn't say exactly what it was up to. It operates in a "reduced capacity," he said.

LOL... anyone else think they just created a HTTP server farm to frontend the data, using WebSphere, MQSeries, and/or DB2 Universal as the backend (all still running on the mainframe)?

This is news?

Comparing a Linux grid system with a mainframe is comparing apples and oranges. The mainframe's strength has never been raw computing power. Mainframes have practically zero downtime and massive I/O capabilities. If you can swap a Linux array in for a mainframe and have results this good, you were using the mainframe for a task to which it wasn't suited to begin with.

Power consumption

I'd like to see what the difference there is.

Wait a minnit - this is a Grid how?

I know Grid is the buzzword of the day, but this isn't a grid. It's a cluster, or perhaps a beowulf, but it is not a grid. Buying a bunch of identical boxes and installing identical software on them doesn't make a grid.

One of the key features of a grid is that it "coordinates features that are not subject to centralized control". (What Is The Grid [anl.gov], Ian Foster, ANL). Grids by definition cross organizational or management boundaries. You can't buy a grid any more than you can buy an Internet. You can buy a network. You can buy a cluster. You can't buy a grid.

(insert witty subject line here)

> "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe"

I heard vinyl albums made a comeback last year, too. Evidently people love the nostalgia of it all.

Straw Man: "IBM Year of the Mainframe"

I find no references whatsoever to 2006 as "IBM's Year of the mainframe", so where'd the OP get this idea?

I _did_ find IBM Announces Five Year March to Mainframe Simplification [ibm.com], which is quite different:

RMONK, N.Y., October 4, 2006 IBM today revealed a cross-company effort to make the IBM System z mainframe the worlds most sophisticated business computer - easier to use for a greater number of computer professionals by 2011. The goal of this five-year effort, which will include an investment of approximately $100 million, is to enable technology administrators and computer programmers to more easily program, manage and administer a mainframe system - as well as to increasingly automate the development and deployment of applications for the mainframe environment.

What people often forget: cost/benefit!!!

Everyone here talks about comparing an aging mainframe with lots of new Dells. Surely enough the Dells tend to beat the old mainframe hands down. It's not only about performance it's cost/benefit relation that is interesting.

What is wrong is saying that a new model "9999 PLUS HYPER SUPER" could beat those 120 Dells to the floor anytime. Sure they can but they cost like 1200 Dells during the same period. That's what we need to calculate before doing anything. The article says that to go to a NEW mainframe would cost so much more than the grid AND would still keep is less flexible. I'm OK with that wording, it's the reality I see.

I've seen grids like this (100+ blade PCs) swipe the floor with some very new models of the mainframes costing ridiculosuly more. I'm talking 5 to 10 times less price for the PCs to do the same job. It all depends on what you want to do but a well designed application can take a grid to the stars. A bad designed one (Polk one really looks very bad) may just work or be slower than an aging mainframe. And a 120 node grid surely can beat that aging mainframe orders of magnitude more than a 70% improvement.

That said, mainframes have their place. For big batch like jobs it's the winner hands down. It was created to be like that. I believe online/realtime processing is not their primary job but in some cases can be too. Reliability? Wins hands down too, for each processor you have a mirror one that calculates the same thing and compares the results to map out faulty processors. It's desinged to run 24/7/365 and normally suceeds doing that.

But you can achieve a similar kind of reliability with grids because of redundancy of the nodes. There is no problem that one of those nodes breaks, you always have more than one doing the same job. Performance may suffer for a while when it's a small number of nodes doing that job but you can eventually replace it and everything keeps going. A grid CAN run 24/7/365 easier than a mainframe cause you can selectively stop some nodes, replace or repair it and restart it without affecting the entire system. Using this strategy you can even replace everything from the hardware to the software without stop (stop half of the nodes, change everythind needed, restart them, stop other half and do the same). It's more difficult to do that on a mainframe.

I still need to be show that the cost/benefit of a mainframe surpasses a grid except in very limited cases. Maybe I'm just misinformed. I would like to learn more.

Seems like a press release to me.

No real substance.

Could even be a failure being spun to look like a success- I mean look at this:

"And what of that old mainframe? It's still around, but Isiminger wouldn't say exactly what it was up to. It operates in a "reduced capacity," he said"

"reduced capacity", that smells like BS talk. Does that mean it's still doing some of its old tasks, or most of its old tasks?

Of course they might not want to get rid of the mainframe that they paid so much money for (though there is a market for 2nd hand mainframes), but basically you can't always believe these Press Releases.

I also find it hard to get impressed that a cluster of 49 _new_ machines with 118 processors is only 70% faster and 65% cheaper than a mainframe that was available in early 2002. Plus that mainframe might even still be used to help the cluster to achieve those rates!

Next thing - how much more reliable and available is that cluster?

From the bullshit that was printed, I'm actually less inclined to think it was that huge a success.

But more details would be needed before I'd be sure whether they actually screwed up majorly, or did passably, or it was actually a big success (yeah right).

Another Animal Allegory

I have kinda been following the whole Mainframe thing for a while, and the best way I can summarize the presented dichotomy is to ask you to consider an IBM Z-series (as opposed to other "mainframe" hardware) as an Elephant. Note that IBM marketing once revered to the IBM Z-990 as the T-Rex, another good animal allegory, yet I digress...

What is interesting is the I/O capability of that damn Elephant. The sucker is built to process data and never forget a thing. For years the Elephant only spoke Elephant language. A few years ago the boys at IBM Boeblingen taught the Elephant to speak Penguin. That makes the whole story interesting...

Now out in the Data Processing Jungle they are two types of animals, the fast and the dead. The good news is that all the real fast animals all speak Penguin. To make the fastest creatures in the Jungle, St. Don Becker and his buddies at NASA built a flock of Super Penguins. These are the mightiest beasts in Data Processing, but they have sort of horrible I/O limits (if you want to consider FIOS data rates horrible :^).

So I have always wondered why not harness the Elephant to do what is does best; plod along in the I/O and never forget.

Finally, the Elephants by their philosophy and architecture have one VERY important quality, they are not typically hacked. IMHO, the Elephant is a mighty beast capable of great I/O and when correctly bred and reared, flawless security. Why not use this large Elephant (or Dinosaur as per IBM) to protect, feed and water your precious flock?

Just a thought....

Flint

The year of the Mainframe was 1995!

This was the year of the mainframe... [mac.com]

misleading reduction of costs

There is no reference to the increased floorspace, and increased cooling requirements of their new setup. Raised floor space and the cooling requirements of many indivdual servers would increase much more than the reduced hardware costs...do the reduced hardware costs include the additional air conditioners? lol

I used to admin 500 linux servers on a single mainframe LPAR. There were two other people involved in VM and Network configuration. There was ONE refrigerator sized piece of hardware. Kind of curious what the 43% of IT group they trimmed out were doing...

Sounds like the real problem was the initial environment was designed poorly....but its hard to tell because its so short on info. How many CP's did their mainframe have? Was the mainframe 20 years old? What model? This just stinks of FUD...

Granted Mainframes aren't cheap...but they are as reliable as hell...you get what you pay for...the reduced footprint and cooling costs are a bonus

Sounds like they had the wrong arch. for the job

It sounds like R.L Polk had the wrong architecture for the job. It doesn't sound like they dealt with lots of transactions. It sounds like they were doing some analytics on a large database (I could be wrong about this, but that's the impression I got from the article). If the latter is they case they need large quantities of bulk processing power. That's where clusters are much better. I'm surprised, however, that it takes fewer people to administer the Linux boxes than the mainframe. They must have laid off a bunch coders after squeezing the life out of them in a technology backwater. (Refering to the assembler code - not the fact it was a mainframe). I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the performance improvement also came from the code re-write. After many years of patching and layering code you wind up with some pretty ugly stuff.

niether can outperform my PS3!

because I don't have one (but I had to say it)

Very effective Press Release

If you didn't know better, you'd swear it was an actual news article. It is actually a cleverly crafted press release.

For one thing, they are comparing an aging mainframe running aging software to a new grid running new software. The capabilities of the mainframe system are cast as representative of the mainframe against a backdrop of IBM declaring 2006 "The Year of the Mainframe".

For another thing, they can't get past their anti-mainframe (possibly anti-IBM) bias. Honestly, if they have the mainframe sitting in a back room somewhere doing little, they're wasting capacity. It might not be as fast, but it could contribute several Linux partitions to the grid.

But...

a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers

But did they got their 120 windows licenses money back?

Don't know how many articles I've read saying this

"the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs"

I've seen tons of articles saying the same thing for the last five years - running a mainframe is BRAINDEAD if you don't have at least 15 or 20 different applications running on it that can take advantage of the multiple virtual machines.

Years ago I read where a major oil company dumped a mainframe for a cluster of Intel boxes and got four or five times better performance on their apps while the cost of the whole thing equaled the MAINTENANCE charges alone for the mainframe.

In other words, you can run your apps on Intel servers with several times more performance for about 10-20% of the cost of a mainframe.

That is what I call a no-brainer in architecture decision making.

Re:The dirty litle secret about Mainframes

"Update you skill set and get out of the way of progress"

Update your brain and start to understand that replacing one unique computer with 30 of them is not progress....it's just because it cost less....