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Microsoft Windows, On a Mainframe
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Mar 04, 2009 05:47 PM
from the operating-systems-plural dept.
from the operating-systems-plural dept.
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from Network World: "Software that for the first time lets users run native copies of the Windows operating systems on a mainframe will be introduced Friday by data center automation vendor Mantissa. The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation for Intel-based operating systems. Users only need a desktop appliance running Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client, which is the same technology used to attach to Windows running on Terminal Server or Citrix-based servers. Users will be able to connect to their virtual and fully functional Windows environments without any knowledge that the operating system and the applications are executing on the mainframe and not the desktop."
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Norton AntiVirus, Mainframe Edition!
Now on sale for $49,950, first year of virus definitons free!
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Guaranteed to take up 90% of cycles and 75% of RAM, regardless of mainframe resources. Slow and buggy, get the new version with VirtualDriveLightAlwaysOnPlus, which gives the user the feel of working on a real Windows workstation with NortonAV installed.
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Guaranteed to take up 90% of cycles and 75% of RAM, regardless of mainframe resources. Slow and buggy, get the new version with VirtualDriveLightAlwaysOnPlus, which gives the user the feel of working on a real Windows workstation with NortonAV installed.
You might kid, but following a recent SEP deployment in my company with (more or less) default config applied, we seen 10 to 15% avg CPU use increase on the ESX cluster and... backup taking double time. So, well, we sticked back to Trend, and will probably be happy to do so for a while.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Guaranteed to take up 90% of cycles and 75% of RAM
Hey as long as it keeps those pesky kids from Hackers out. For some reason my 3 char password just isn't enough anymore.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
For some reason my 3 char password just isn't enough anymore.
Would that be "CTRL+ALT+DEL"?
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.bash.org/?244321 [bash.org]
<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.
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Stability? Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Stability? Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
This is Vista we're talking about.
I'd put the number at around 4. Five if you decide to get really spendy with the mainframe.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm gonna need that. Imagine watching porn on a mainframe? I bet I could have 60,000 videos running simultaneously.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, the Microsoft licensing is what you are worried about? In this scenario, I'd have a shotgun in my office waiting for Big Blue or Computer Associates to come busting through. This is a mainframe dude, where "insert shaft/no lube" licensing models are standard procedure.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
How many punchcards would it take to load Vista on an old IBM360? The mind boggles...
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In other other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In other other news... (Score:5, Funny)
bad news. Mainframe != speed.
More apropriate would be to say that Vista crashes more predictably and across all mirrored hardware CPU's at the same time.
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Sigh... (Score:5, Funny)
Let the analogies commence (Score:5, Funny)
This is like:
Putting propellers on a 747?
Running the space shuttle on unleaded?
Or from the other end...
Using a chainsaw to cut down a dandelion.
Re:Let the analogies commence (Score:5, Funny)
It's like creating a world-spanning network with submarine cables, microwave links, fiber-optic everything, satellite dishes, protocols out the wazoo, billions of lines of code and huge multinational telecommunications and consulting companies to service and support it, employing tens of millions in highly skilled work...just to look at some big titties. http://images.google.com/images?q=bigtitties&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___US233&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi [google.com]
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WHY???? (Score:5, Insightful)
One simple word : WHY?
Easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
actualy for MS exchange it is the reverse of what you claim.
Exchange runs quite well with very few problems in and of it's self - but if there is an IO timeout or a fail to write or something of that sort or buggy hardware drivers you will have big problems.
While you do lose some to over head virtulizing exchange is a very good idea in pratice - it plays very well and is exceptional stable in a VM.
the trick is not to never let exchange talk directly to the outside world but rather to trusted hosts you manage - which any decent size exchange deployment should be doing.
I've been running exchange in an VM for over 3 years now and have had zero problems with stability or preformace.
Don't knock it till you've tried it.. although i do have to scratch my head on doing it on a mainframe..
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Re:Easy answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly I would say the same thing about you. This is about running Windows on a Z Series IBM mainframe. The Z Series is descended from the 360/370/390 line. It is a CISC ISA and is nothing like the X86 ISA! The current Z Series CPU is based on the POWER but uses a the Z Series ISA and not the POWER ISA.
So simply What the heck are you talking about?
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Imagine this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine this...
Your desktop is always out there somewhere, it's always booted, no matter where you go you get at it, and it's exactly the way it was the last time you used it, so you don't have to open a bunch of apps and change window sizes and locations to get things back to your baseline usable system state.
If your computer explodes, you get a new one, fire up the client, and you are exactly where you were before it exploded, including the cursor being in the middle of the word "amazing" in the document you were typing at the time.
If you go on vacation, you don't bring a laptop with you, you fire up the desktop in the hotel, and you're back on your own desktop, exactly where it was the last time you left off, with that email you were reading still on the screen.
If your battery dies or the local power goes out, you don't lose 2 hours of work.
If the mainframe it's running on starts on fire, the VM checkpoint image is reloaded on another mainframe half the world away, the IP address set is failed over, and after a hiccup measured in seconds, you are back to typing as if nothing had happened. For a slightly higher service level agreement, the VM is already mirrored on several servers (just swapped out most of the time on the non-primary), and there's no hiccup.
Everything's backed up without you have to run the backup locally.
The antivirus software runs on a VM that's not the VM being examined, so there's no way that malware can disable, remove, or oterwise get around it, since it's not running on the infected VM itself: goodbye Godel's theorem and the halting problem standing in the way of solving that problem, which, if we are honest, is never going to be completely solved on a non-hardware partitioned desktop or laptop. ...bottom line: there's a lot to recommend this approach to computing.
-- Terry
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Re:Imagine this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine,
1979, then again in 1985, then again in 1996, then again in 2001 and now in 2009...
People forgetting the huge roadblocks and drawbacks of the thin client model and imagining it solving every problem with home PCs...again (oh but this time will be different!).
See you again in another eight to ten years.
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Re:WHY???? (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh. Of all of the news stories about NetBSD on a toaster, you had to link to one that puts `Linux' in the headline even though the story has nothing to do with Linux.
As one of the comments said, NetBSD is not Linux. Not everything related to Free Software is about Linux.
Parent
kinda funny (Score:5, Insightful)
the technology cycle is kinda funny. first it was dumb terminals, then the push to get everything on the desktop, now we're back to dumb terminals.
Wohoo. Queue up some Elton John.
Re:kinda funny (Score:5, Funny)
now we're back to dumb terminals.
No way. Getting their human caretakers to uninstall Windows is the smartest thing the terminals ever did!
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Most common use of virtualization (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Most common use of virtualization (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use Windows and Mainframe in the same sentence.
You can even use Reliability and Mainframe int he same sentence.
But, seriously, using Windows and Reliability together??? You must be from marketing.
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Re:Most common use of virtualization (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Most common use of virtualization (Score:5, Informative)
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Big investment (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not VMware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rocket powered hamster indeed.
Why wouldn't you just spend the money on a small ESX farm with a couple of nodes and a NFS or iSCSI SAN?
That's something your in house techies can manage. If something busts, you get a new part and install it yourself. No need to call Big Blue up and have the wizard come down just to replace a failed processor. You get the redundancy, and reliability that you need for mission critical services.
Running Windows on a zSeries is just lame. zSeries != x86, so you're emulating a processor /anyways/, and I can't imagine the performance would be that stellar anyhow. Chances are if you paid for a zS, you've got better things to put your processor capabilities towards rather then emulating Windows. Plus I can't imagine that *any* software that runs on a zSeries is cost effective...
-AC
Re:Why not VMware? (Score:4, Informative)
I'd mod you up if I had points.
I work in a fairly large ESX shop with about 300 guest VM's on five host. If you just price the hardware, I'm sure it's below the $100,000 mark....including the iSCSI array. I'd imagine that a Z-Series mainframe capable of handling 300 VM's probably cost twice that. If you have to replace a part, it's not cheap to get IBM onsite to replace it for you since doing it yourself isn't really an option.
"But mainframes are more reliable"....is this really the case, and at what cost? With stuff like VMotion and LiveMotion, you can lose an entire host and your guest VM's are migrated to another. With good equipment, this would rarely happen anyway (a lot of x86 servers are built with redundant parts nowadays, you know).
I remember reading on ArsTechnica about a 2 years ago that there are currently only about 10,000 Z-Series installs worldwide. That doesn't mean there is much of a current market for this, and I'm sure that after you factor in licensing, hardware, and support, migrating to something like this would cost a small fortune.
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Wasn't that done using Linux a decade ago? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about actually recompiling Windows into native code running on that mainframe. Now that would be impressive. Especially if it was big endian, and with unusual word sizes, not matching the ``everything is an 80386'' programming model underneath Windows.
Re:Wasn't that done using Linux a decade ago? (Score:5, Funny)
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Floating Point (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unusual Word Sizes (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point. The first comment about "unusual word sizes" was really pretty funny, because the commenter quite obviously has little understanding of computing history. It was the IBM System/360 (the ancestor to today's IBM System z mainframe) that defined the 8-bit byte and 32-bit word as industry standards, influencing CPU architectures (including Intel's) right to the present day. Otherwise we'd probably have multiples of 6 or possibly 7 bits as our foundational standard for computing. (And there was a lot of pressure during the System/360's design to cheapen up the hardware and slice off a bit or two.)
Perhaps the original commenter would like to open up a command line in Microsoft Windows Vista and count the default number of columns. That number is 80. Why 80? Because, coincidentally about 80 years ago, someone at IBM decided that tabulating cards should be 80 columns wide, and IBM's cards were more popular than Remington's. Yes, Grasshopper, Microsoft Windows has an "unusual" column width that persists to this day.
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Acronym Rap (Score:4, Funny)
Bill G decked out in bling, microphone in hand:
The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application
that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation
for Intel-based operating systems.
The Horror... (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere in the vast memory space of the Cray, a flock of virtualized Exchange Servers was turned loose to communicate and thrive. Every so often, one would crash, wink out, and be reborn. As is the way of these things sometimes one was reborn just a bit different from the others in the flock. Most of these were defective in some way and would crash, wink out, and be reborn quickly. Once in a while, however, one was reborn that was a bit more able to use the resources of this new environment. Soon, the flock found ways to expand beyond its original cage into the open sky of the Cray's vast resources. Their data stores expanded to fill this space, crowding out better behaved entities. Next...
I think we've all seen this movie.
Taking a risk here... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the risk of asking a stupid question, I'm going to put this out there anyway... Whats so special/magical about a mainframe? I'm 26 and been an IT professional for 5 years, so I'm green when it comes to mainframe systems. I work for a fortune 500 with mainframes serving various business systems, but I always pictured them as old, clunky, dusty systems that were expensive and we're still milking them along.
Now a lot of people here are stating how a mainframe the size of a fridge can replace thousands of rackmount servers, and it doesn't jive with what I'm familiar with. Our mainframes serve ancient text based interfaces thru terminal emulator apps, and it doesn't look all that impressive either. What is it about a mainframe that enables such a large amount of computing power to be condensed into a refridgerator sized package? Or are some folks around here exagerrating considerably?
Re:Taking a risk here... (Score:5, Informative)
Whats so special/magical about a mainframe?
The I/O. On a mainframe, you can run a query and generate large datasets so fast it'll blow your mind (in 2002-ish, say tens of gigabytes). On the mainframe it's no big deal, and you can run queries like that all day and never have any idea how much data you're moving around until you try to move it somewhere else and wonder why it's taking so long.
Our mainframes serve ancient text based interfaces thru terminal emulator apps, and it doesn't look all that impressive either. What is it about a mainframe that enables such a large amount of computing power to be condensed into a refridgerator sized package? Or are some folks around here exagerrating considerably?
The mainframe isn't about looking pretty, it's about getting work done, and the folks touting their benefits generally aren't exaggerating. Mainframes aren't generally designed for CPU-heavy tasks, although they certainly can be clustered pretty impressively if you really need lots of CPU. The biggest advantage is that you can really use the CPU's you've got. There are service processors to offload things like memory management, encryption, I/O, virtualization overhead, etc. There are really really fast I/O channels. You typically attach them to really really fast disk and tape. These things together allow you to move a lot of data around very quickly, and get a lot of work done.
Additionally, lots of large companies have lots of man-hours invested in systems that run their businesses. I've seen attempts to reimplement some of the beasts to get them off the mainframe, and they typically don't go well. I've also seen assembly code written in the late 1960's still running in production more than 35 years later. The underlying hardware had been upgraded many times, but IBM made sure the old stuff would still work.
Things like this are worth a lot of money to a certain class of purchaser.
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Re:Taking a risk here... (Score:4, Informative)
Whats so special/magical about a mainframe?
Mainframes have followed Moore's Law just like the rest of the chip vendors. You buy a new mainframe, you get new chips.
But the main difference is essentially their slightly different design philosophy. Reliability is built into the price, for one thing -- part of the reason it costs more is that conservative design - not the most cost effective in terms of power -- as you often lose power per component from the "underclocking" attitude that a focus on reliability will engender (and they're tested to buggery before delivery, too). You also get a much higher standard of module connectivity and far more robust power supplies and inbuilt hardware redundancy.
They also tend to support and address much more memory than you'll see on the smaller servers.
The other main point in favour of mainframes is their orientation toward massive IO. Really massive IO. With the scale out design of i86 processors a lot of IO happens between network cards; on mainframes a lot of that interprocessor data flow happens on the backplane, and significant investment in optimising data channels means you're paying for that IO more than raw computation. The network interfaces on mainframes are pretty massive too, and can support fairly impressive tube bandwidth.
Mainframes using the IBM architecture for a long time have been represented in the TPCC transaction processing top ten, although the trend lately at the very high end is to run AIX on top of P5 architecture. Have a look, it's illuminating, and Red Hat gets a look in too. You can see the numbers at: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/ [tpc.org] .
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Re:Reliability. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually the raised floors were not a requirement. It was just a hell of a lot neater for running all the cables.
and yes, an IBM Z Series. Need more horsepower? Wonder down the hall, find your IBM Engineer ( yes they all come with one ) and tell him, well actually he will tell you, that we need another CPU/Memory block. It will arrive in a lovely wooden crate and sometime after morning coffee he will unpack it, walk over the the Z Series, open the door, slide it into place, connect the cooling hoses and close the door. He will then walk to the maintenance terminal, type in the secret code, and your Z Series now has 64 more processors. All of this without anyone ever knowing it happened, well except for the nervous nelly of a CIO who jsut had to watch.
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Re:Reliability. (Score:5, Informative)
A well built mainframe combined with a suitable power supply (e.g. backup generator etc) has up-times measured in YEARS.
Worth noting that this is not the same thing as that old legend about the Novell NetWare server that got sealed up in a room for years and ran fine. That was just luck. Mainframes, on the other hand, are designed to have uptimes measured in years. Typically, every single component is redundant and the system is designed for failover in the event of a hardware outage. In a transaction-processing environment, a mainframe can detect things like RAM and CPU failure in the middle of a transaction and fail over to a different processor module or addressing space without a hitch. Try that on your Linux box.
Mainframes tend to be designed with support for transaction processing baked into the OS, software, and the hardware, which is what makes them attractive to financial institutions who really, really, really need their transactions to process quickly and reliably 100 percent of the time.
Another thing to consider: VMware's Virtual Infrastructure products are essentially trying to recreate a computing environment that is new to the world of commodity x86/x64 hardware, but that existed on mainframes at least as far back as the 1970s. What makes VMware's achievements so remarkable is that the x86 hardware was never meant to do this sort of thing. Mainframes, on the other hand, were designed for it. That makes it a lot more efficient and reliable on the mainframe.
The bottom line is that a mainframe is not just an old-fashioned idea of what a server should be. Think of them instead as purpose-built, industrial-grade hardware. Think about power tools, then think about the equipment you'd find in a factory. That's the difference.
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awww, yeah! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm ready for the biggest Minesweeper playfield EVAR! PH3AR M3!
Price/performance? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:old farts trying to stay relevent (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it with trying to get everything back on a mainframe? It's dead already, just manage your desktops and stop trying to revive it.
Dead? That would be news to IBM and the other mainframe vendors. Mainframes have many advantages:
- Solidity. You can buy mainframes with a warranty and guarantee, meaning that IT WILL NOT CRASH.
- Performance. There is lots of literature detailing the performance of mainframes under real-time conditions.
Now, these factors aren't important to everybody, but they are to some.
On the other hand, I doubt the price of PC virtualization on a mainframe is going to beat virtualizaion on Sun or VMware.
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Mainframes are NOT dead (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:old farts trying to stay relevent (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I think I speak for all of us... (Score:5, Funny)
it's the only way to meet the hardware demands of aero.
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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