A Semi New Approach to 1970 Timesharing
May 29, 2012
IBM seems to be reversing the old saying, ‘out with the old and in with the new’ according to the article IBM to park mainframes on the cloud. The basis behind their approach plays a familiar song to those that were computer savvy back in the 70’s.
Perhaps this is a new marketing tactic rather than a new system as:
“IBM is also promising to park its System z mainframe servers on the cloud, which is ironic considering the time-sharing, rental base ancient history of System/360 mainframes from the dawn of the computing age. (It’s even funnier if you think of a mainframe, which has had logical partitioning, multi-tenancy, and application frameworks of a sort for more than two decades now, as a kind of private cloud.)”
This diagram provides a visual for what is to come:
According to IBM, they currently have over a million users running applications on the SmartCloud processing 4.5 million transactions per day. They hope to increase that with this new, yet familiar software stack which will include; a basic processor, tape capacity with virtual tape, a disc, flash copy and mirroring services for disks. IBM plans to have their mainframes added to the SmartCloud in the United States and United Kingdom later on in 2012. We thought this was the 1970s approach to time sharing, but according to IBM, it is now it a “new” approach?
Jennifer Shockley, May 29, 2012
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