>Also (and you alluded to it, Steve), has anyone visited a data center >lately? Think about those 1980s narratives: "Years ago, the computer >was so >big, it filled an entire room...." Well, nowadays it's worse: "The racks of >servers are so numerous, they fill football fields, consume prodigious >amounts of electricity, and run so hot it's getting impossible to cool >them...." Progress! :-) The smallest, coolest running server in most >data >centers is the System z10. It's the *answer* to server sprawl. And >perhaps >you'd be surprised how many small businesses suffer from server >sprawl. Actually a previous client, a large Wall St investment house that survived the recent crisis, has sooooooooo many blade servers in its data center they can't fit anymore in. So they have a pilot project to bring them up on LINUX under z/VM.
Hurray for server consolidation, finally, a software solution beating a hardware solution. Amen On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <l...@garlic.com>wrote: > The following message is a courtesy copy of an article > that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as > well. > > > timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com (Timothy Sipples) writes: > > Agreed. There are a lot of similarities, but one difference is the > ubiquity > > of the Internet. It's really an accident of history (telco monopolies) > that > > the price-per-carried bit collapsed *after* the prices of CPU and storage > > did. So we went through (suffered?) an intermediate phase when computing > > architectures were principally constrained by high priced long distance > > networking (the "PC revolution" and then "Client/Server"). It's > interesting > > viewing those phases through the rear view mirror. In many ways it's back > > to the future now. > > re: > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#78 Entry point for a Mainframe? > > recent post/thread in tcp/ip n.g. > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#73 NSF to Fund Future Internet > Architecture (FIA) > and similar comments in this (mainframe) post/thread > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#64 LPARs: More or Less? > > about telcos having very high fixed costs/expenses and significant > increase in available bandwdith with all the dark fiber in the ground > represented difficult chicken/egg obstacle (disruptive technology). The > bandwidth hungry applications wouldn't appear w/o significant drop in > use charges (but could still take a decade or more) ... and until the > bandwidth hungry applications appeared, any significant drop in the > useage charges would mean that they would operate deeply in the red > during the transition. > > in the mid-80s, the hsdt project had a very interesting datapoint with > communication group ... where we were deploying and supporting T1 and > faster links. > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt > > The communication group then did a corporate study that claimed that > there wouldn't be customer use of T1 until mid-90s (aka since they > didn't have product that supported T1, the study supported customers not > needing T1 for another decade). > > The problem was that 37x5 boxes didn't have T1 support ... and so what > the communication group studied was "fat pipes" ... support for being > able to operate multiple 56kbit links as single unit. For their T1 > conclusions they plotted the number of "fat pipes" with 2, 3, 4, ..., > etc 56kbit links. They found that number of "fat pipes" dropped off > significantly at four or five 56kbit links and there were none above > six. > > There is always the phrase about statistics lie ... well, what the > communication group didn't appear to realize was that most telcos had > tariff cross-over about five or six 56kbit links being about the same as > a single T1 link. What they were seeing, was when customer requirement > reached five 56kbit links ... the customers were moving to single T1 > link supported by other vendors products (which was the reason for no > "fat pipes" above six). > > The communication groups products were very oriented towards to the > legacy dumb terminal paradigm ... and not the emerging peer-to-peer > networking operation. In any case, a very quick, trivial survey by HSDT > turned up 200 customers with T1 links (as counter to the communication > group survey that customers wouldn't be using T1s until mid-90s > ... because they couldn't find any "fat pipes" with more than six 56kbit > links). > > this is analogous to communication group defining T1 as "very high > speed" in the same period (in part because their products didn't support > T1) ... mentioned in this post: > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#11 Crazed idea: SDSF for z/Linux > > the various internal politics all contributed to not letting us bid on > the NSFNET backbone RFP ... even when the director of NSF wrote a letter > to corporation ... and there were observations that what we already had > running was at least five years ahead of RFP bid responses (to build > something new). misc. old NSFNET related email from the period > http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet > > -- > 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 > -- George Henke (C) 845 401 5614 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
