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Burying a Mainframe In Style
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Dec 19, 2007 05:24 AM
from the 10-bit-words dept.
from the 10-bit-words dept.
coondoggie writes "Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse. In case you were wondering what an IBM 650's specifications were, according to this Columbia University site, the 650's CPU was 5ft by 3ft by 6ft and weighed 1,966 lbs, and rented for $3200 per month. The power unit was 5x3x6 and weighed 2,972 pounds. The card reader/punch weighed 1,295 pounds and rented for $550/month. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum with 2000-word capacity (10 digits and sign) and random access time of 2.496 ms. For an additional $1,500/month you could add magnetic core memory of 60 words with access time of .096ms. Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes, making it one of the first successfully mass-produced computers."
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IT: IBM Leaks Details on New Mainframe 185 comments
Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"
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Why recycle it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so disappointed. I thought this was going to be about makeovers...
Re:Why recycle it? (Score:5, Funny)
Not to worry, just say it's name three times, and it will come back to life!!
"Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse" [wikipedia.org]
Parent
and in its place... (Score:5, Funny)
> to run these systems
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
changes...
25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
vendors.
25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
25 servers that will be decommissioned in three years at
``end of life''.
This is progress.
Re:and in its place... (Score:5, Informative)
Typically a datacentre will have 1 admin person on shift for every 800-1200 PC type servers, as opposed to the specialised staff that a mainframe needs.
The servers need the same quality of power, cooling, maintenance, security and monitoring that a mainframe does, so there's very little difference - except you can place the servers in a single rack, using a fraction of the floorspace.
Also, mainframes too are usually replaced on a 3 - 5 year cycle in most places simply for economic reasons. New tech is faster, cheaper, more reliable and supportable. The story gives the impression that the university got rid of a 47 year old mainframe - they didn't. The box they "buried" was less than 10 years old and the nonsense about card readers and monthly rental costs is completely irrelevant to the removal of the Amdahl - it would never have any of these attributes.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:and in its place... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: Said one to the other (Score:3, Insightful)
Care for some dessert instead?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Noooooooo! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely, 25 servers with one down = most of them broken, because the one that failed was providing DNS or external network connectivity or NFS serving or Kerberos authentication or the database or...
You can't assume that just splitting services across different machines will make them more reliable. Most of the time it makes them less reliable, because instead of a single point of failure you now have several poin
Re:and in its place... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is called "no single point of failure". 25 servers with one down= 24 still working...
There's really no "single point of failure" in most mainframe systems either. I don't know about this particular one, but most mainframes have redundant processors, mainboards, storage, power supplies, etc. In many modern mainframes you can swap out a motherboard or a power supply with no downtime. Mainframes typically run 24x7 with very minimal maintenance compared to to 25 servers. Forget "three 9's", mainframes typically have 100% uptime for years on end.
That being said, I think the debate in server
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No. But you might find it is more economic to do so. If you can consolidate 4U of servers into 1U (for example), then it may be cheaper to do so rather than continue to rent the 4U of space (and it'll save power and generate less heat too).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's an old story, possibly apocryphal, about a mainframe (a Vax, IIRC) in an upper-floor data center. There was an earthquake, and the building was heavily damaged. When they went in afterwards, they discovered that the mainframe was still running and still respondi
Sad news. (Score:2, Funny)
Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, i know it's only a machine, and it has no feelings. But this is a respectful send off, and 'job well done, thank you' to all people who were involved in designing, maintaining and producing this mainframe.
Plus...it's a very cool..and sounds like fun.
Re:Kudos (Score:5, Informative)
" in its final incarnation as an Amdahl Millienium 1050.."
There is a lot of mention of IMS which wasnt available till the 1970s so all in all
this is a pretty standard history for any mainframe site. (apart from actually replacing the
mainframe which hardly ever happens).
Parent
Re:Kudos (Score:4, Informative)
I dug around the article and links in it a little more, came to the server timeline/history
1960 IBM 650 / IBM 1401 (Punched cards)
1965 IBM 360/50 / IBM 1401 (funded by NRC)
1970 IBM 360/65 / IBM 360/40 (first IMS applications)
1975 IBM 370/168
1980 Amdahl V7
1985 Amdahl 580 and V7
1990 IBM 3090-600
1995 Amdahl 5890-300
2000 Amdahl Millennium 415
2005 Amdahl Millennium 1015
Still a nice gesture, once again, mostly cause of the people who worked with it, than the machine itself.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Amdahls Are Obsolete (Score:3, Informative)
I think there's a lot of misleading information in the original article, so I'm glad you dug up the truth. To expand on what you discovered, in 2000 (7 years ago this month) IBM began shipping its 64-bit z900 model. At virtually the same time you could boot the operating system into 64-bit mode, and you got a substantial subcapacity software discount as soon as you did that. The same year, the University of Manitoba bought the now-obsolete 31-bit [sic] Amdahl 415, probably with full knowledge that the 64-bi
MUH! (Score:4, Interesting)
But how do you know this?
And do you think that you are not a machine and that you have feelings? And if so how do you know this?
How can you be so sure that the mathematical entities inside your beige box computer are not self-aware? How can you know that they don't scream when you shut the computer off and are not reborn when you grant them electrical current the next morning?
Do you really know that you are anything different than a little sim in a simulated [wikipedia.org] world, or a self-aware mathematical entity [arxiv.org] in a mathematical universe [wikipedia.org]?
You don't really know this for absolutely sure, do you? Then how can you claim so easily that something is only a machine and has no feelings when you don't even known whether you are a machine, and whether what you call your feelings are nothing more than simulated or mathematical constructs that you perceive as feelings?
Parent
Re:MUH! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know anything for sure, nobody does. However it IS very impractical and redundant to start every sentence with 'As far as I know' or with 'I might be wrong here'.
That's understood, everything I type and know is relative to the information I have and the way I perceive it. For all we know you could be a figment of my imagination, or I could be the figment of yours, or we could be a figments of someone else's. While metaphysics are fun and seemingly profound and deep, they are ultimately pointless
Reduce, reuse, refuse? (Score:2, Insightful)
But hey, that wouldn't get kitchy national media attention.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But now we must lay you under the flora, because we have to go deal with this bloody Aurora. So we commit your parts to be recycled.
Perhaps its parts were indeed recycled. So they got the money and kitchy media attention.
Death of the 486 Party (Score:2)
This was when Intel decided to focus on the Pentium chips.
We couldn't afford to sacrifice a 486 at the time, they were still too expensive but we did hold a sacrifice of a 286.
We had a ceremony, bon fire and tossed the hardware in the fire.
Flamed by alcohol and good times, it was an absolute riot!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh (Score:4, Funny)
Just wondering.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just wondering.... (Score:5, Funny)
It's probably still accurate to say it was operated by cranks though.
Parent
"Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes..." (Score:2)
How can you abstract an article - denominating the lease rates and conclude that, "Big Blue sold some 2,000 of the mainframes.."?
respect for the machine (Score:2)
a bit of accurate reporting would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact a Millenium 1015 is quite a recent mainframe - introduced in 2000, (hence the name) although the 1015 is the bottom of the range unit with just a single processor.
It would be nice if reporters actually researched this story instead of merely cat'n'pasting the whimsical and completely inaccurate press release.
#9, Cray-1 in Stockholm (Score:5, Interesting)
While not as old as the IBM machine, Cray always had a special aura of super-duper-power-ueber-performance to me. -
And in it's place (Score:3, Informative)
Welcome to the modern mainframe.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Metric System (Score:5, Funny)
Manitoba is in Canada. As in the rest of the civilized world, we use the metric system over here.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm fed up about these brain dead measurement units used by only a minority of only three unimportant countries [wikipedia.org] around the world. Time to wake up.
The prices should be in Canadian Dollars as well, then it's a little cheaper than what TFA says. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The metric system is not any more "logical" than the imperial system or any other. There is no "logic" in a meter, an inch or a stonetoss. The whole point is that it *is* more practical.
Days gone by (Score:3, Interesting)
Aah - mainframes (Score:5, Insightful)
"Best so far is about £2000" said the man.
"You can only get £2000 for all that equipment!?" said the astonished IT Director.
"No", came the reply, "That's the cheapest to pay someone to strip it out and take it away!"
Completely wrong: the story she is (Score:4, Informative)
As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.
There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.
personal hw burial anecdote (Score:5, Funny)
Hey! Show a little sensitivity, Slashdot. (Score:3, Funny)
Ceremonial Value and Valuing Ceremonies (Score:3, Insightful)
My first thought was that if we personalized computers more, perhaps we wouldn't waste as many of them. We have become very much a disposable society, in which the strangest part of this is that anyone bats an eye about the loss of a computer. Yet I remember when we used to mourn the passing of many of them. A lot of our waste problem in the world is caused by our willingness to assume that disposing of something does not require ceremony and can be done as casually as exhaling a breath of air... except no one is recycling the air and it's getting a little stuffy in here.
It's one reason people have big weddings... to make it so expensive that you think twice before throwing it away on a mere argument. If throwing away a machine were more expensive, maybe we'd think twice about doing it... or better still, about buying one in the first place.
Yes, it would hold back progess. But where is progress leading us right now? With luck, we'll have computers powerful enough to solve the problems we created by having computers. And without luck, we may poison our world and all die. Ah, yes, the smell of progress is all around us.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Philosopher's Axe (Score:3, Interesting)
Some more discussion about it here. [livejournal.com] It's also called the Ship of Theseus Paradox, which the discussion references.
There's a mention of Pratchett's Scone of Stone in "The Fifth Element." Is that what you're thinking of?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)