Re: mainframe career advice

HeyBub <heybubNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mirlitone wrote:
> >
> > Do you think mainframe is a good option to start my career with ?
> > Don't you think i might be trapped in by working with these dying
> > technologies?
>
> It may surprise you to learn that mainframes are alive and well.
>
> How many PCs does it take to print the payroll checks for all government
> workers? For Air France?
>

Using standard software a single PC can typeset about thousend pages
per second. A PC database can easily deliver 20 thousend rows per
second. So, a single PC can generate content for millions of checks
per hour. It looks that the bottleneck is actual printing: you need
a sizeable printer farm to handle that load.

Granted, mainframes have bigger IO capacity that desktop PC. But you
just have to size things correctly, if not desktop then server machines.
For highest load it looks that IBM Power serwers are the best -- from
data sheets it looks that top Power machines offer 2-10 times better
performance (depending of the load) then top Z architecture machines.

--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.