scott a écrit :
>> What do you mean non-standard?  Every single bank, every single 
>> insurance company, every single government tax agency/ministry/dept., 
>> most airline, universities, and large companies with more than a 1000 
>> employees worldwide has one or more IBM mainframes.
> 
> And they also have 1000 or more x86 machines each :-) 

That's a recent development.  Most banks, up to 10 years ago, had 3278 
terminals hooked up to 3174 cluster controllers in their branches, not 
PCs.  The loan officer probably had a portable (which she used to access 
the host-based financial applications anyway, plus a little Excel and 
Word here and there), but that's it.


> That's what I 
> meant, that way more x86/x64 CPUs are manufactured, so obviously they 
> are cheaper. I just wondered if you worked it out on a performance per $ 
> metric (eg how many $ equipment do you need to print 30 million bills in 
> 24 hours), would using the IBM mainframe be cheaper than using a room 
> full of x86 machines?
> 
> 

Mainframes do way more than overnight batch jobs.  A typical mainframe 
environment will allow for 99.999% uptime.  Handle millions of 
transactions per day with response times below 5 secs.  A similar 
environment made out of x86 or x64 hardware, with the required 
redundancy, clustering and load-balancers required to achieve five-9s 
uptime (That's less than 25 secs of downtime PER MONTH!) as well has 
handle the number of transactions at the same speed will probably be as 
expensive, if not more.

That's the main reason banks and airlines (the two industries I'm 
familiar with) don't change their systems.

Anyway, by "standard" I didn't mean "Most. Popular. Ever.", I meant that 
for its intended use it IS still the de facto standard.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

Post a reply to this message