Don’t Outsource Your Thinking: Low Integrity is at an All-Time High

by Bill Carico
April 1, 2006

Some things may work on a small scale, but it’s a different ballgame in a large enterprise. Since 1992, IT planners have debated whether client/server is a hardware or a software architecture, when in fact it’s neither. It’s simply a high-level concept of how computers relate to one another. An architecture goes beyond nuances and notions; it provides the specifications for formats, layers, protocols, and processes.

Ironically, the most successful server-farm virtualizer to date has been the mainframe’s venerable Virtual Machine (VM) operating system, where virtual client machines access virtual server machines. One reason VM thrives is because the network between all the clients and all the servers is main memory, allowing inter-system communication to occur at memory speed, which is thousands of times faster than the fastest physical network connection. VM’s ability to support thousands of concurrent Linux images is also a nice plus. Otherwise, it costs a bundle to maintain server farms.

Another top-performing, server-farm virtualizer is the parallel sysplex, where a cluster of z/OS images are tied together with a hardware coupling facility. It took more than 20 patented innovations to create a coupling system that performed and scaled in a manner appropriate to the types and volumes of work mainframes process.

Though Josh Billings (1818-1885) was a humorist from another era, his quote rings true today for the IT industry: “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

Grace and peace.