st...@trainersfriend.com (Steve Comstock) writes: > But I am curious as to why the mainframe doesn't just go > away: there must be one or more z/OS applications that the > Windows folks just can't beat. Can you describe what applications > are keeping the mainframe around? And why Windows folks can't > make it go away?
lots of online/real-time stuff in the 70s & 80s was adding frontend that started an operation ... but left it to (existing, frequently cobol) legacy batch operation to complete (/settle) ... moved to "overnight batch window". in the 90s, the "overnight batch window" was becoming major bottleneck ... globalization both increasing workload ... as well as pressure to significantly decrease length of the "overnight batch window". in this period, some number of institutions spent billions on business process reengineering that would leverage massive parallelization and "killer micros" to implement "straight through processing" (running each operation straight through to completion & eliminating need for overnight batch window). however, it turned out that they used some technology that wasn't adequately vetted ... and going into deployment they found that it had overhead 100 times that of the cobol batch (and wouldn't scale) ... totally swamping anticipated (parallel) throughput improvements. the resulting failures left huge scars on the industry and stalled reengineering efforts for possibly decades. I was involved in taking a whole new generation of parallelization to some industry bodies a couple years ago ... and while it initially met very positive acceptance ... as it moved up individual institutions ... it met quite a bit of resistance ... apparently even nearly a decade later ... the scars from the failures were still fresh. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, 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
