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Why were the IBM mainframes so successful?
Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 7:55 pm
by Sanjoy Rao
Hi,
I'm novice in mainframes and going through some of its history. Around 70s IBM mainframes were so popular. Was it because their architecture was superior compared to the contemporary computers or it was something else? If we can have a x86 server with roughly same number of cores/processors as mainframe, which one would be good?
Re: Why were the IBM mainframes so successful?
Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 8:59 pm
by Robert Sample
My opinion is that IBM mainframes were so successful due to the marketing and sales teams IBM used. There used to be many mainframe manufacturers (Burroughs, Sperry Rand -- earlier Remington Rand, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric, NCR, and RCA were called the 7 dwarves for a while in the late 60's and early 70's). Someone around in those days once told me that one of the 7 dwarves had a better computer but you could not get a sales person to talk to you about buying one; IBM in the meantime didn't have as good a computer but their sales people would talk to you any time and work with you on deals.
If we can have a x86 server with roughly same number of cores/processors as mainframe, which one would be good?
What do you call "good"? The answer depends largely upon how you want to define that term. Since a mainframe has specialized I/O processing, the I/O throughput is likely to be higher for the mainframe. IBM uses their own architecture so their machines can run 100% busy for days at a time -- something you typically cannot do with a Unix or Windows server (response time issues start showing up with as little as 20% CPU utilization). Many mainframes support 10,000 plus simultaneous users, if that is what you mean by "good". Benchmarks can be helpful, but the question really boils down to what you mean by "good".