Isn't Mainframe just powerful Servers? At least I thought the term meant ( or used to ) mission critical and massively powerful. Nowadays I could get 2S EPYC 2 with 128 Core and 4TB of Memory. What makes a IBM Server with POWER10 any more reliable than a powerful x86 Server? After all many SuperComputer are now running on x86 as well.
Or are we now using the word Mainframe specifically for IBM products? Rather than a category of its own?
Can you change physically change CPU, Memory, and internal components without any stop/delay?
Not only the Mainframe is Very robust it was made not to stop.
I used to work on a Data Center with Sparcs, Intel, Blades servers, and Mainframe.
The only time I saw the Operator with Fear was when he had to turn off the Mainframe because of electrical maintenance. The last time he did shutdown the Mainframe was 15 years ago.
VMs? The mainframe has it since the '60s.
IO? The mainframe is a BEAST on IO
Backward Compat? IBM guarantees that your code from the '40s will run today.
The whole research in mainframe is to Be a powerful beast with high availability and safety.
If you may check more about it, it is a part of Tech that is very beautiful yet.
I hope this is exaggeration, because I don’t think you’ll be running Colossus “code” (from the first programmable digital electronic computer) on your z15 :)
Your point still stands. They’re in a different class from x86 machines.
Mainframes have spectacular capabilities, like running a compute on multiple CPUs in multiple data centers to ensure integrity and survivability built in so that any software can take advantage of it. They have the lowest transaction processing costs of any machine. They detect hardware issues and phone home to order repairs without user intervention. And on and on and on.
Quite frankly, a lot more companies should be using IBM mainframes than trying to build a reliable infrastructure on the cloud.
Today, servers are adding redundancy where it matters most, but they still have a different philosophy where you should think about adding or removing servers, instead of components.
Commodity x86 and mainframes are both computers. But are as different as T and Civic.