[vidarh]

It may be one basket, but IBM high end kit is the nuclear fallout shelter of baskets.

E.g. we used to have an IBM Enterprise Storage System (aka the Shark) back in the day (around 2000), and it came in American fridge size, full of drawers of drives. You could just yank any drawer safe in the knowledge that all the raid volumes were distributed over multiple drawers. If a SCSI controller failed, you could yank a drawer of SCSI controllers and hotswap them safe in the knowledge they were fully redundant.

The "brains" of the thing consisted of a fully redundant pair of two AIX RS/6000 servers, and you could yank either one of them without losing data (all writes were committed to at least non-volatile memory on both servers before being acknowledged). Either server also had at least hot-swap RAM (raid-like memory controller) and may have had hot swap CPU's (tell the OS to move all threads off a CPU, swap, switch back).

On top of that, it had a phone connection and would dial out to report any early warnings of problems directly to IBM who'd send out a technician before anything even failed as long as you kept paying your support plan.

So yes, you can get that density with standard kit easily, and probably much cheaper too. Assuming you have enough skilled staff to manage it. The reason IBM still manages to sell this kind of kit, on the other hand, is because what they are really selling is peace of mind that most issues are Someone Elses Problem. For some people it makes sense to pay a lot for that.

[blackbeard]

I wish I had that much confidence.

Back in the late 1990s I was involved in provisioning a large Sun e15k. Not indestructable but nearly.

It broke. You know what happened? The factory roof leaked and poured water onto the DC sub-building which the roof then collapsed onto the e15k which promptly blew up and caused a spectacular fire, halon dump and about a month of work arguing with insurance companies and guys with shovels.

In that circumstance, it doesn't matter what promises the vendor make. That's still all your eggs in one basket.

Buy two and keep one somewhere else didn't help either as the network termination, switching and routing layers were down and all the people using it were about 300 miles away from the backup location anyway. So some poor fucker had to dismantle the backup e15k and disk arrays, bring them in a large truck[1] to the original location and erect a temp DC in a portakabin outside the building.

Edit: We would have been better served with two smaller DCs with off the shelf kit on the same site but different buildings running a mirrored arrangement. All for pocket change compared to a zSeries...

That's what the company I work for now do. We have off the shelf kit,SAN replication, ESX, redundant routing and multiple peers in different locations.

[1] imagine the shit if that truck crashed.

[vidarh]

That's why you never deploy to just one location no matter how reliable the actual kit is.

You'd be in exactly the same situation if you had off the shelf "normal" servers in a rack. The point is one IBM mainframe is generally going to be more reliable than the vast majority of "homegrown" setups in a single location.

If you're comparing against a setup in multiple locations, then you should compare against two or more of these.

And there too these kind of solutions are far more reliable if you are willing to pay the money. E.g. IBM provides a range of options up to full synchronous mirroring of mainframe setups over up to about 200km where both systems can be administered as one identical unit (distance is down to latency). They also provide a range of other options for various performance vs. amount of data you can potentially lose vs. cost tradeoffs.

> Buy two and keep one somewhere else didn't help either as the network termination, switching and routing layers were down and all the people using it were about 300 miles away from the backup location anyway.

And this wouldn't have been any better if you had two racks of kit instead of two mainframes.

> All for pocket change compared to a zSeries...

There we agree. I'll likely never buy or recommend one of these, for the reason that I tend to work on cost sensitive projects.

[makomk]

Except that you're going to pay a lot more than you would for those off the shelf "normal" servers in a rack. Probably enough that you can afford doubly-redundant normal servers for the cost of a non-redundant IBM mainframe, with quite a bit of cash left over.

[ams6110]

Yes but when that system falls over, your boss is yelling at you, and you're on the hook. With IBM, you can all yell at IBM. And that's why big enterprise companies buy IBM.

[ZoeZoeBee]

Its also why, IBM has seen decreasing revenue for 13 straight quarters

[zmonkeyz]

Until its time to build that new datacenter.

[atomicUpdate]

This story is obviously a bit ridiculous nowadays, since no one that can afford an ESS is buying a single site. In fact, most can't due to legal regulations about having data redundancy. These regulations typically lead to having a secondary site across town and a tertiary site across the country.