[Bush2000]

For years I've been seening folks come out with these "death of the mainframe" claims, and yet they continue to be wrong.

Where did I say that?

There are applications that neither minicomputers, PeeCees, nor Beowulf clusters of commodity hardware can touch for any amount of money. If you need real 99999+ availability on a box with massive disk bandwidth among other things, you're just not going to get it with anything but systems designed from the ground up to meet the desired requirements.

Yeah, and as I pointed out, most of 'em are expensive legacy systems (travel reservations, IRS, air traffic control, etc).

[zeugma]

You say "legacy system" like it's some kind of put-down or something. Do you really think something as huge and complex as Sabre is going to run on anything else? What I'm saying is that mainframes have a place in the computing world, and will continue to have one for as far as the eye can see technologically.

I wouldn't use a mainframe to model tubulence inside jet engines, but I sure as hell wouldn't want my bank using anything else. They are mature, robust systems. Of course they are expensive. Some things are simply expensive to do. Building a system to do some of these large tasks out of some cheap off the shelf hardware is just asking for all kinds of ungodly headaches and failures. Building a system with redundant backplanes, power, processors, memory, I/O subsystems, and disks in such a way as to eliminate any unplanned downtime is not something easily done in someone's garage as a hobby. It takes engineering, and experience to produce a reliable workhorse that will run for a decade without being powered off.

As a side note, I've seen what happens when you drop power to one of those big 3090's without a proper shutdown. It ain't pretty!

Stick with what you know B2k.