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July 11, 2002
Anarchy and Infrastructure
Doc Searls has an absolutely fantastic slide show on his site from his talk at the June JabberConf. Very compelling...11:17 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Mainframe Linux
Jon Udell writes:
IBM's mainframe Linux hosting service. A few months back I researched and wrote a story on mainframe Linux. ... I continue to find this technology alliance fascinating. Moving parts are the enemy, in my mind. The fewer the better. Provisioning a server farm in software, rather than as a collection of physical blades, seems like a great idea. The mainframe always had the raw virtualization capability, now in Linux it has something that's really worth virtualizing. One outcome, as this story notes, is a new kind of competition for the RackSpaces of the world: ... [Jon's Radio]
We have 4 large mainframes in our primary data center and the disaster recovery site. Jim Calloway and his team have been playing around with Linux on them for about a year now. So far, I've yet to see an ROI that makes sense, but then again, I've yet to see an ROI that takes into account total cost of ownership (TCO) including the reliability and availibility costs. We run a tiered support model to provide reliability and the impact on the tiered support system of using the mainframe to run Linux would be interesting to analyze.
As an aside to Jon's comments, we do run Oracle on the mainframes. In my previous life, we ran Veritas on paired Sun 4500's to provide the required databse reliability and that was just a flat out pain in the neck. There's a big question in my mind as to whether Veritas was any help at all. Often it made simple failures into bigger ones. Running Oracle on a mainframe is the only way to go, if you can afford the mainframe or happen to have two or four laying around.
08:51 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Google! DayPop! This is my
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Salt Lake, Lindon, Phil, Male, 41-45!04:32 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Darwin John Gets a New Job
The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that the FBI has hired Darwin John, CIO for the LDS Church, as the new CIO for the FBI. I think Darwin will do a great job there. Working for the two organizations will probably be similar in a number of ways. FBI CIO sounds like a very fun job. Best of luck Darwin!
Update: Here's a CNET interview with Darwin.