US House Decommissions Its Last Mainframe

coondoggie writes "The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of an era in Washington, DC computing. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed 'quasi-celebrity status' within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House's inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support."

Re:12 Year Old Mainframe = 20+ Other Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

But here's a more profound question: why is the House of Representatives running its own, separate data centers (primary and disaster)? Couldn't they at least consolidate with, oh I don't know, the Senate?!?!

I'm pretty sure there's something in the constitution about separation of data centres...

Re:Change all IT geeks can believe in.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I don't care what part of the political spectrum you fall under, that's change we can all get behind.

Congratulations! You may pick up your IT Peace Prize at the door!

Unless your job was supporting old, proprietary big iron.

Um, on second thought, never mind.

Re:Change all IT geeks can believe in.

[martin-boundary]

Either that, or the IBM salespeople forgot to tell the politicians that a mainframe is too big to fail!

Re:$700K/yr not out of line

[Hognoxious]

The punch cards. Especially filling in the holes so they can be reused.

Re:Someone updated computer hardware! Film at 11.

[sakdoctor]

Government 0.9.8

We would like your help in testing and improving the pre-release version, but we don't yet recommend its use in production environments.

Re:Change all IT geeks can believe in.

[Metalloy]

How old are you ? I think you're 18'ish ? Huh ? You seem so far off this planet ! You're like a kid who still believes that the US government is striving to reach the moon to build lovely rose gardens and ball pitches and parks to relieve humanity from a crowded and poluted Earth !!! Umphh Umphh He He He ... If you really pull year head out of wherever it is now (uhm!) and understand some real-life shit - please consider that corporates run the show - the politics show, the industry show, the commerce show, and definetly (as a natural consequence) the PEOPLE show, and not only in the US by the way. It is corporates that were fighting tooth and nail for the 'huge' IT and networking multi-hundred-billion dollar market - which eventually yielded the "distributed processing" concept in the early 90's to overshadow the mainframes, simply because if it were mainframes only, then the larger piece of the pie would have been swallowed by IBM with a proud relentless burp following it. The ass-holes in IBM simply joined the same bandwagon that knocked them down (some say that this is smart !). Now eveything is coming back to a model which is again a-la mainframe (call it Mainframe V2) - CLOUD shit. If you dont believe me ask someone who worked with mainframes : was there an OS used in IBM mainframes called VM (VIRTUAL Machine) and which DYNAMICALLY allocated resources to applications/users ON-DEMAND ? Note the caps are identical to those you hear today. You know that he will answer you that these have been around since the 70-80's !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I will not address the financial game that has been played - DISTRIBUTED processing = DISTRIBUTED profit (versus mainframe = IBM centirc profit). You get DISTRIBUTED everything : maintenance, deployment fees, security, installation, licences, administration, backup/restore ... OHHHHHH - leave me alone .... its such a big story .... (puffing cigarette and went to the window)

Re:Change all IT geeks can believe in.

[fishdan]

At least they're getting some money back by selling the disks on ebay :)

Keep the Mainframe

[Sponge Bath]

Decommission the representatives. Then put the mainframe in charge. I'm sure it is much more efficient at processing bribes, though it probably lacks sex scandal capabilities.

Re:$700K/yr not out of line

[corbettw]

The worst thing is, going from $700k a year to $350k a year doesn't just halve your uptime, it takes it from 99.999% to 99.99%. Or from 52 minutes to eight hours and 45 minutes. The first time they can't access their records for an entire work day, maybe they'll realize what they were paying for before.

Re:12 Year Old Mainframe = 20+ Other Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's separation of power supplies, so VMs were right out.