Re: [ProgSoc] Transaction Server

[daedalus <daedalus@nospam.its.maynick.com.au>]

On Wed, 19 May 1999, gleNN wrote:

>I was wondering if any of you guys had any thoughts about the suitability
>of changing the mainframe to a beefy Unix machine. Obviously it would have
>to have pretty efficient hardware I/O and have a bit of grunt.
>
>The current config has a few limitations .. choice of languages ..
>security (fkn hard-coded passwords =)) .. specialised hardware .. pretty
>much the whole shebang.

This is a big question.. and one not easily answered. You're talking about
a pretty major shift here.

For starters, you'll have applications written for your mainframe. These
will need to be re-written if you want to use them, or maybe ported IF
they were originally written in a portable way. My experience with
mainframes is that this is rarely the case. It's that or you'll need to
develop new unix based applications from scratch.

Note that neither of these options are cheap or easy and probably
represent the biggest hurdles.

The benefits of unix are possibly significant, depending on what you do
with your mainframe. Mainframes are good for high-reliability minimal
purpose boxes. Unix is good for pretty high reliability single or
multipurpose machines, and is a damn site cheaper. You have almost every
tool you could possibly desire and can do things you can't do on a
mainframe. The tools on unix are probably not quite as good as those on
the mainframe though.. depending on the brand. I hate solaris adminsuite
for example. HP-UX SAM is much better.

Then there's the re-training of your staff onto the unix platform.
Something like a Sun E10k box (which is probably the sort of size you'll
need) requires significant unix admin skills and some specialised courses.
The E10k platform is not really mature yet though, so I wouldn't move to
it from a mainframe just yet. Don't get me wrong, it's a beast of a
machine, but there are some dumb things in the setup/maintenance of the
hardware itself and some bits that are incomplete (mostly tcl/tk bits).

It's also Solaris2.6 or higher that you'll need, which is still buggy. lp
for example.

>How would a free OS handle the task?? Would it handle it as well as a
>commercial version of Unix??

Not on this size of machine. An E10k can have up to (umm.. thinks back to
the E10k course) 64 UltraSPARC processors. Linux, for example, supports at
best 8 processors via SMP, and probably really only 4 well. 64 requires
a significantly different kernel than 2-4 processors. That and very few
linux kernel hackers have access to E10k machines they can play on. It'll
be a while before a free OS can support this sort of hardware as well or
better than the commercial entity that sells it.

A thought does spring to mind though.. multiple domains with say 4
processors each, clustered together. That'd be 16 nodes with 4 processors
each inside a fully spec'd E10k. Then there's disk drivers and memory
subsystems and fun stuff like that though.. We're talking _WAY_ out there
on the bleeding edge.

>Basically I'm asking if there would be any brick walls I'd hit with Unix.

Lots. Think pessimistically and essentially wait until you _have_ to move
to unix rather than doing it because it'd be nice. It's a big task with
many headaches.

>Any suggested architecture/platform/OS?

All the big unix makers have their problems, which are usually different.
Avoid the ones you have to and go with the vendor who has their bugs in
places you can live with.

HP has good support and makes robust stuff but are relatively more
expensive than other vendors.

Sun are large also and make pretty good hardware and have pretty good
support. They are a little cheaper than HP. (They also get my
do-a-course-and-get-a-free-t-shirt/cap/coffee-mug-vendor award. :)

I don't know anything about AIX. I don't think I want to either.

DEC Unix (or whatever it's called now) isn't really mature enough yet.

All of the above is my personal opinion of course. I'm sure any of these
vendors would be more than happy to tell you how wonderful their
particular solution is.

-- 
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------------+
|      Justin Warren        | justin.warren@nospam.its.maynick.com.au        |
|   Systems Administrator   | daedalus@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au             |
| Mayne Nickless Express IT | http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~daedalus |
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| Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you...  |
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