The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
steve_thomp...@stercomm.com (Thompson, Steve) writes: > This is the level of machine IBM killed when they pulled the plug on the > FLEX/ES boxes. > > And those boxes (FLEX/ES) were upgradeable (as I understand it) to be > able to connect to the "standard" RAID boxes, and even have CTCA between > them (once they had ESCON capability), so that you could grow into a > "sysplex". > > And what did such a box cost compared to the z10-BC? > > That would have been a drop, plug and play environment (pretty much a > turn-key system). this is flex presentation done at mar2005 baybunch meeting (5 yrs ago) http://www.baybunch.org/prezos/zbb.pdf a major FLEX platform was sequent (before ibm bought sequent). we did some consulting for Steve Chen when he was CTO at sequent ... and there were customers that had escon attachments (ibm connectivity) for sequent (numa) box (up to 256 intel shared memory multiprocessor). I know of at least one sequent numa customer (in 90s, before sequent bought by ibm) had escon and 3990 tape drives. sequent numa supported shared disk, raid, cluster, FCS (FCS "open systems" from early 90s flavor of ibm's proprietary ficon), etc ... all in 90s before being bought by ibm. 2000 competitive analysis of (unix) clusters http://h30097.www3.hp.com/dhba_ras.pdf above includes discussion sequent's cluster implementation (some number of loosely-coupled/clustered 256 processor tightly-coupled machines, say 4*256-way for 1024 processor complex). above ranking/comparion also includes our ha/cmp that we started in late 80s http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp this old post discusses jan92 meeting regarding ha/cmp 128-way cluster operation (using FCS) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 just a couple weeks before project was transferred and we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors. related email on ha/cmp scaleup and fcs: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa sequent had specialized in commercial unix markets. (after departing) we were called in to consult with small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their server ... the startup had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use (the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce"). one of the things happening during this period was lots of servers were starting to experience heavy processor overload with web operation. the small client/server startup was growing and having to add increasing numbers of servers to handle their various kinds of web traffic. finally they installed a sequent system ... and things settled down. in turned out that sequent had fixed the networking implementation that was absorbing majority of server processing on other platforms. sequent explained that they had encountered the specific problem with commercial accounts supporting 20,000 (terminal) telnet sessions ... long before other platforms started experiencing the same networking problem with large number of HTTP/HTTPS connections (94/95 timeframe). Somewhat later, other platforms started distributing fixes for the tcp/ip processor overhead problem. for other topic drift ... part of the effort for electronic commerce was deploying something called a "payment gateway" ... that took payment transactions tunneled thru SSL, from webservers on the internet and passed tham to acquiring processor. misc. past posts mentioning payment gateway http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
