Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron
Mainframe computers have long been the province of IT druids in huge
corporate data centers and goverment agencies like NASA and the CIA.
Now, though, the mainframe is heading towards a much larger potential
market.In IBM's latest effort to keep Big Iron relevant in a
fast-changing computing world, it's retooling the technology for
small- and medium-size businesses. The new z9 Business Class
mainframe, released this spring, can be bought for as little as
$100,000. Think of it as Little Iron. And small outfits who can't
afford to buy a mainframe can pay by the drink by using IBM's
on-demand services. All the things IBM mainframes can now do will
surprise you. Example: As the server for Taikodom, a massively
multiplayer online game being developed by Brazilian upstart Hoplon
Infotainment. It's a company with just 50 employees. I don't want
this to sound like an ad for mainframes (not my role or inclination)
but this cool application caught my fancy.
http://blogs.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/07/not_your_dads_m.html#more
While z/VM isn't explicitly mentioned in the blog entry, I do suspect
that the Linux images the gamers are using are VM hosted. Who was it
that first ran StarTrek on VM? I guess they were really ahead of their
time. :-)
DJ
