New computer...

[Gryphin]

Geo,
don't they have a Windows emulator for it?

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
IBM eServer zSeries 990

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/announce/z990/?ca=zseries&me=W&met=f rom_ibm_home

Suggested retail price, 1 Million dollars

But if you order now they'll throw in a free monitor and keyboard.

I wonder if we could put PBW on one of those.

Yes we could, but then it would fail and you would have to spend another billion dollars to get tech support to help you get it back on line only to find out that it is not compatible with windows/linux/uniux/other operating systems. And that in order to get it to work you will have to call HP and MS technical support. HP, having no idea why you are calling them will undoutably give you a customer number and promise to get back to you but never will. While you will play phone tag on the MS system until you finally get some help and to have them recommend that you re-install Windows OS with a promise that that will fix all your problems.

In the end game, IBM will send you a new system, but you will have to pay for shipping.

[cholerajoe]

That z990 would easily replace a couple of hundred stan-alone servers. Add the cost savings of maintenance of at LEAST 1 person person per 50 servers. Industry standard is closer to 1 per 20. Its easy to see why even small companies are switching back to IBM mainframes.Also:
Almost zero down time--
Limitless ram capacity(100'S of tera-bytes)--
Transparent hardware IE seen as one computer not thousands--
The Z990 is Linux native and if used as a web server it comes with any app you want(probably Apache).
It WORKS -- IE it never goes down, EVER.

We have quite a few Ancient IBM mainframes and I don't think they have had any down time in 8 years. I think they use 500Mhz 64 bit Alpha chips.
But we had to write all of the code ourselves to use it (them).
This is THEE computer to get for any companies back end computer operations.

Also: All new IBM mainframes come with support included. 5 years I think.

It wouldnt be the computer to get to replace a render-farm though. Being that a render farm doesnt communicate with the world and instead relies on raw CPU power

[Thermodyne]

Perhaps I should get a couple of them for the Thermolian Data Center