Yeah, the mainframe is obsolete... riiiight... Gee, that hasn't been said
before in the last 30 years has it? Sure, maybe the role of the mainframe
has diminished to a large degree, but they still are useful and powerful
machines. If you want to run a huge website without it crashing, and have
thousands and thousands of people accessing it, buy a mainframe. There was
recently an article in VARBusiness I believe about .com businesses replacing
Suns and the like with mainframes because of the need for reliability and
the fact that they went from many many boxes to only one.. An example that I
remember was a company that replaced around 500 NT servers with a single
System/390.. And while I haven't seen the newest IBM mainframes in person, I
have seen a fairly recent System/390, and the whole thing is only about 5' x
5' or so, and not all that tall either... Compared to my 4381, that's a huge
shrinkage, since just the processor takes up more space than that almost!
And mainframes now use standard disk drives, instead of things like my IBM
3880, which is, like the 4381, 6' tall, 6' wide, and 4' deep, and weighs in
at around 1000 or more pounds.
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Received on Fri Dec 15 2000 - 14:43:20 GMT