Wonder how this will affect the licensing for the Comic Book area at Universal Orlando long term. It's ALL Marvel, including the "Hulk" roller coaster.

I suppose it'll just continue for a while though, the whole thing is pretty incestous.

There are, IBM runs one. It's their current way of getting new users into zSeries, but as I said, there aren't a lot of new workloads going onto zSeries, other than Linux. People write software for the platform they know and have access to. When I was in college, there were only mainframes, and that's what they taught. Colleges reduced costs by going to smaller computers as they became more powerful, and to UNIX since it was "free". DOS and Windows became ubiquitous. That's where development moved to. The idea that mainframes were "obsolete" came out of that.

It's sort of funny that you can run the current versions of zOS and zVM in less memory than you need for Windows. MVS used to be considered a horrendous pig, but compared to current OS's, it's relatively lean.

Actually, they do. Or they did, at least. It used to be called "IBM eServer, zSeries, or something like that. The current marketing calls it "System z". Any way you cut it, it's a big "application server". That's the terminology in vogue these days.

I went from UNIX in the late 1970's to mainframe zOS (MVS/OS) to VM and Linux on the mainframe. Anything you can do on an Intel box (or a room full of them), you can do on a mainframe, cheaper and more reliably, once you get past the first big financial hit. I've seen the so-called cost studies that supposedly show the room full of Intel white boxes are cheaper. Once you factor in the "unseen" costs, like the article says, and get past the startup, the mainframe looks VERY good.

Current mainframes aren't what people remember from the past. They're (physically) small, agile, and well suited to certain workloads (can you do 256 concurrent DMA transfers on an Intel box?). The problem is, the only companies that seem to be able to justify them for new workloads are ones that already have them for legacy work. IBM hasn't shown much interest in the low-end of the market (sell small boxen, then discontinue them, push licensed emulation, then kill it, etc).

Our biggest problem is finding people who know the technologies. I give classes to our Linux SA's on this, and they're usually surprised at what the current zSeries boxes can do.

Don't misunderstand, there are plenty of applications where Intel boxes make sense, I work both sides of the fence. I just hate to see mainframes maligned as "obsolete" by people who don't understand what they are now.

How about doing this the week before Christmas, with the flu and 104 fever, debugging assembler code, on the customer's machine, with a printer that took an hour to generate a listing?

Fortunately, the customer was very understanding, but I probably gave everyone in the office the flu. Not to mention their families, since I was invited to their Christmas party the morning I left.

This is a good point, but more relevant to what we do: Run Linux built for the zSeries architecture under zVM. The differences are minimal, nearly
every Linux package runs fine when recompiled, and we've done two full processor replacements totally transparently to the users.

Try that with an ESX cluster.

I've seen reports of people trying this using QEMU under zSeries Linux, under zVM. Wouldn't surprise me if that's about all the Mantissa product is:
Something like QEMU natively compiled under CMS.

Since it's emulation, and zVM isn't really designed for CPU-intensive tasks (like emulation), and the instruction sets are so different,
the performance was hideous. Like 12 hours to install Windows XP, or somesuch.

The funny part is that (very deep) under the covers, the zSeries processor is a modified PowerPC running microcode. I think I'll wait for IBM
to develop x86 microcode so one of those new "special purpose engines" they're selling can run Windows "natively". THEN, with zVM as a simple
resource manager, you might have something that's useful.