Collections of (physically) small computers

[Jules Richardson]

Adrian Graham wrote:
> On 30/10/06 23:05, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> 
>> Anent this business of mainframe iron, a rather surprising story
>> about modern trends:
>>
>> http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/biztech/10/30/reviving.mainframes.ap/inde
>> x.html
> 
> Heh, I said just as much to people at work last week while they were
> processing an order for 42 servers for one customer :) Of course, 42 HP
> boxes are much cheaper than an enterprise class mainframe, but it's the
> thought that counts eh.

Although working out the cost of those HP servers in terms of power, 
reliability, security, systems management and user time wasted due to bad 
software - then rinsing and repeating every couple of years due to the upgrade 
cycle - might make for some interesting numbers.

But as I said in a message to the Bletchley list just now, if we all wanted a 
centralised, thin-client way of working, we'd all be doing it already because 
the technology has never gone away. OK, so that's typically based around a 
handful of core servers rather than a single giant mainframe, but from a user 
and managerial perspective it looks the same - but hasn't been adopted in wide 
numbers.

Aside:

Anyone here have experience of mainframe design? I mean, sure they're reliable 
  and fast and everything - but how much of the cost is due to design effort 
and how much is purely due to the fact that they don't sell many and need to 
pay the bills?

(I just had this vision of an IBM engineer seeing how many buses, CPUs and I/O 
interfaces they could draw on a napkin, then adding in a few redundant power 
supplies and calling it done ;-)

cheers

Jules