Unisys soups up mainframe engines

With the US Memorial Day holiday behind us, IT vendors can get down to business for a month or two before everyone prepares to go on summer holiday and try to forget the economic downturn for a while. Server maker Unisys is the first out of the chute with new iron today, launching three new ClearPath mainframes that offer more …

[Christopher Ahrens]

Launching in Second Life

Oh, and while you are there you can continue to live in the vendors fantasy land were servers never fail, make coffee and watch the kids and cure cancer before you even get it out of the box. The land where code will transfer without a single issue and IT admins will be treated like human beings...

Back in reality, this will only cause the MBA suits to constantly pester me with 'I say this product the other day on second life and I think we should buy it!' after I just finished fixing tha goddamn mainframe that will never go away, that I think the components are older than I am and the business requires 5 9s on frickin' thing.....

Fine, I'll return to my cage in the Data center and lament the time that I was ever able to see my family and and that the rest of the IT department was actual citizens that knew what they were doing....

[Steve Mann]

Unix. Right.

Laugh it up, but if you want an O/S with outstanding recovery characteristics, where things actually work and there are NO "known bugs" in the system utilities, OS2200 is your bunny.

I remember it with fondness every time I trip over another "feature" of our particular brand of Unix or (shudder) Linux.

And the merger of Sperry with Burroughs happened almost three decades ago. Time to start using the past tense when referring to it.

[Tim]

WoW

Yes yes all very nice and powerfull but the important question is "Will it run WoW?".

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares

unless it can run Mapper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Broth-based dishes are NOT involved

> Unisys soups up mainframe engines

The proper expression is "supes up", not soups. It comes from the practice of hot-rodding cars, where you bolt on a SUPERcharger to gain horsepower. No soup is, or ever was, involved.

From here on out, I declare total war on articles that "soup" anything up.

[blaine gaither]

Why the strange memory sizes?

WRT

"Each Libra 780/790 mainframe cell board sports from 4 GB to 128 GB of DDR2 main memory, which is formatted down to 3 GB to 96 GB of addressable memory for MCP workloads. (Presumably there is some memory sparing magic going on)"

This is likely due to the fact that the original MCP uses a 48bit word with in memory tags to inicate the type of operand that was stored at that location.