Re:IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transa...
by bri3d on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @12:37AM
(#4447114)
A not-so-modern but fun anecdote:
My father worked on a product called SnapVantage in the late 90s and early 2000s, which basically used the copy-on-write abilities of the virtualized mainframe disk in a StorageTek disk array combined with z/Linux and z/VM as a hypervisor to instantly provision and boot Linux machines.
It looked like a very, very toned down version of the AWS management console, with a near-identical ability to select a distribution, upload SSH keys, find an IP, and have a full, running VM in seconds... but this was in 1999, when watching a Linux box "copy," provision, and come up in just a few seconds was mind-blowing.
I used my nascent Perl skills (as a ten-year-old) to write the installer for the host software, which I believe actually shipped to customers nearly unmodified!
The zSeries still supports a lot of battle-hardened HA features like lock-step execution, hot CPU fail-over, and hot-swap memory and IO which are very rare, esoteric, and hence hard to support in the x86 world (and rare, esoteric, and untested is not what you want in your HA system).
Plus, the number of VMs that can run well on a z/Linux and z/VM environment is amazing - we had hundreds and hundreds of instances running on one zSeries.
There's a very full-featured zSeries emulator called Hercules which will allow you to run z/OS and z/VM (if you can find them, of course). There's also a distribution of MVS 3.8j, the 1980s System 370 / System 390 precursor to z/OS, available for Hercules for free if you want to get a taste of what administering such a system is like. A lot of obscure job-scripting languages like JCL and early scripting languages like REXX were developed for early mainframes and still live on today.
My father worked on a product called SnapVantage in the late 90s and early 2000s, which basically used the copy-on-write abilities of the virtualized mainframe disk in a StorageTek disk array combined with z/Linux and z/VM as a hypervisor to instantly provision and boot Linux machines.
It looked like a very, very toned down version of the AWS management console, with a near-identical ability to select a distribution, upload SSH keys, find an IP, and have a full, running VM in seconds... but this was in 1999, when watching a Linux box "copy," provision, and come up in just a few seconds was mind-blowing.
I used my nascent Perl skills (as a ten-year-old) to write the installer for the host software, which I believe actually shipped to customers nearly unmodified!
The zSeries still supports a lot of battle-hardened HA features like lock-step execution, hot CPU fail-over, and hot-swap memory and IO which are very rare, esoteric, and hence hard to support in the x86 world (and rare, esoteric, and untested is not what you want in your HA system).
Plus, the number of VMs that can run well on a z/Linux and z/VM environment is amazing - we had hundreds and hundreds of instances running on one zSeries.
There's a very full-featured zSeries emulator called Hercules which will allow you to run z/OS and z/VM (if you can find them, of course). There's also a distribution of MVS 3.8j, the 1980s System 370 / System 390 precursor to z/OS, available for Hercules for free if you want to get a taste of what administering such a system is like. A lot of obscure job-scripting languages like JCL and early scripting languages like REXX were developed for early mainframes and still live on today.