

Mainframe Revival - msredmond
http://esj.com/articles/2011/09/26/mainframe-revival-has-legs.aspx

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russell
I'm curious, why? I havent worked with mainframes for a couple of decades. Is
it because they are running legacy apps in Cobol? Or havent they figured out
how to parallelize the apps to run distributed? (Going from serial Cobol to
Erlang would reduce the hardiest HNer to tears.) Or are they conservative
enough to not to want to risk $B if they screw up? I suppose all the govt.
failures would be a cautionary tale.

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zmonkeyz
Why distribute apps and deal with network latency when you can use
Hipersockets to run at memory speeds. Even if it's been a couple of decades
you should know that there are certain workloads that the mainframe excels at.
Check out the z196 sometime. :)

I'm a Unix/Linux Sysadmin with 10 years experience and recently took the
plunge as a mainframe software system programmer. It's taking some getting
used to but I really like the platform. I had no idea how much tech that is
old hat on a mainframe is thought to be so new in the distributed world.

