On Fri, 2005-Jun-17 23:42:08 +0200, Wilko Bulte wrote: >On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 02:26:48PM -0700, Javier Henderson wrote.. >> Wilko Bulte wrote: >> >Yes. Go and visit the London City and check their computer rooms. >> >You will be surprised about the number of UNIX boxes. You don't >> >think IBM, HP, Sun etc sell their UNIX machines just to ISPs or..? >> >> But are those Unix servers actually processing bank transactions and >> holding customer accounts?
Unix and mainframes are not mutually exclusive - the major mainframe vendors will be happy to supply Unix on their mainframes. The big benefit of mainframes is data integrity - your typical mainframe will have error detection and/or correction on _all_ data paths, including through the ALU, all levels of cache and all I/O paths. The other benefit of mainframes is massive I/O bandwidth and the ability to usefully use the available bandwidth. >Why not? As an aside: what do you think telecom operators run their >main billing systems on? UNIX... Any idea what downtime costs per hour >on those systems? Not just billing systems. My employer sells Unix systems used for call processing (intelligent networks) as well as PABX's built on Unix kernels. And downtime at the call processing end is more expensive than the billing end - customers won't notice if the bill is ½hr late (or a call is undercharged) but they do notice if they can't ring the home-delivery pizza shop when they're hungry. I think this is getting somewhat off-topic: I don't think any banks or telcos have business critical systems running on FreeBSD or Linux with MySQL databases. And the FreeBSD-S/390 port is nowhere near Tier-1 status yet. -- Peter Jeremy _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
