Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

Re:Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap by jazzyjackson on Thursday September 13, 2018 @02:47PM (#17981241)

You want a mainframe if you want your system designed by engineers and not web developers.

The IBM mainframe system is called "Z" for zero downtime.

Banks and Airlines use systems that haven't needed to be rebooted in decades.

(This is a little oversold, but that's the selling point.)

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Re:Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap by acomjean on Thursday September 13, 2018 @03:50PM (#17981850)

I think in actuality they go for what is known as "five-nines" reliability. Up 99.999% of the time. Or down about 5 minutes/year.

When I worked on "big iron" (Not sure if the old hp superdomes counts mainframes..), the solution proposed for redundancy was to have two and be able to switch from one to the other..

Our development machines had to be rebooted from time to time as we turned off interrupts for some processes (quasi-realtime) and when under development some bugs could cause the processes to fail and be uninterruptible. Things stabilized quickly though.

(edit: apparently there is 4 nines, 6 nines....) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability

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Re:Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap by tambourine_man on Thursday September 13, 2018 @06:03PM (#17983068)

Banks and Airline systems go offline all the freaking time.

Just the other day I told the post office attendant their system was back online, as the cursor started blinking again. Telltale sign of mainframe style computing.

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Re:Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap by dsr_ on Thursday September 13, 2018 @06:32PM (#17983282)

When you turn off your laptop, does Google go down?

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