Posted on 06/21/2011 10:36:40 AM PDT by ShadowAce
“no one has ever hacked the mainframe”
I suppose that’s true for some very narrow definitions of “hacked”.
Making all the terminals attached to a mainframe suddenly start scrolling “The Call of Cthulhu” from start to finish is not a hack, apparently.
Who is running mainframes anymore? A few select places perhaps but all the best have been buried.
Who is left? IBM and HP. Anyone else?
And HP killed the best version of UNIX, OSF/1, choosing their own HP-SUX.
Not really. Basic deployments, for smaller shops just looking for server consolidation, they pretty much give it away. Now, if you're looking for Enterprise level reliability/redundancy(and multiple physical processors per box), then it starts to cost serious $$$,$$$.
Fujitsu and Hitachi I believe.
Almost all large banks are running mainframes.
Sorry but the users will always go for for a “Shrink Wrap Solution” if at all possible over a big iron commitment
hand winding core memory bump.
The Government~! Of Course....
Go to any local city or county central officess and you will find a nice old multi-million dollar mainframe that does 1/10th of the work they need to do at 10 times the cost~!
I worked in one such place- The mainframe did nothing useful, there were AT LEAST 4 full-time people to keep it running day and night. One guys full-time job was to print this months reports, then shred and burn last months. No one ever look at these reports.
Their usuall topic of conversation each day? How to manipulate the rules and overtimes to maximize their retirement -last calculated at 78K per year- before they 'retired' and were re-hired as contractors, to do the same 'work' at $75K per year.
Banks, insurance companies, payroll providers, airlines reservations, financial management concerns, telecommunications services, subscription billing vendors, governments, the military ...
Yep. Mainframes are dinosaurs. /s
and Unisys as well
Hospitals! I’m a DC engineer for a hospital system, and the new mainframes are very slick, sleek and quick to deploy. They’re still working out the bugs, but we recently integrated a newly-purchase Z10 with our SAN. Going on just short of a few weeks from unpack to power-up was pretty impressive.
I’ll go back to the mainframe when they bring back punch cards. /s
BFL. The folks who keep calling for the death of the mainframe really just don’t understand their place in the computing ecosystem.
What do you call a JCL specialist that takes care of procs?
A Proc-tologist!How do you keep a DB2 DBA in suspense?
I'll tell you tomorrowMainframe Acronyms:
- IBM - I've Been Misled
- MVS - Man VS System
- TSO - Terrible System Overhead
- SMS - System Mangled Storage
Many big corporations with global operations run multiple “mainframes”.
I did some work at the 3rd largest electronics distributor in the world. Overnight their mainframes - in USA, Asia and Europe - are keeping all their global databases number-crunched, up-to-date and backed up; and during the day the same equipment - world wide - looks like a bunch of “networks” comprising their entire global Intranet, simultaneously running some old “green-screen” and up-to-date “X86” file-server and client-server apps.
IBM has reinvented what a “mainframe” can do, so that it can do just about anything through virtualization of the supposed non-mainframe world, on the mainframe.
I know one outfit that runs a small “server farm” on a mainframe.
Lately I think “flash” memory is getting the bragging rights - for now.
Someday, maybe “nano” technology will be used to create a “massive capacity” “disk drive”, at the molecular level, requiring infinitesimally little power to change a "0" to a "1".
As a former Cobol Cowboy I regret the day I left the Mainframe world.
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