Objective: Build the most reliable and cost effective computing infrastructure with commodity X86 equipment
Start Date: October 2006
End Date: Still Active
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The first production mainframe was deployed in May 2007 in San Francisco. Thanks to Sun, Network Appliance, VMWare and the entire team of Pillsbury network and application engineers for making this possible.
The X86 Mainframe is primarily a combination of three technologies:
X86 Compatible Processing
- n+1 Processing Engines (servers)
- the largest available PCI bus
- the largest number of available processors
- multi-gigabit redundant network connections
- multi-gigabit redundant fibre storage connections
- virtual processor facilities
- virtual storage
- virtual networking
- interprocess communications via shared bus and shared memory connections
- migrate processes without downtime
- clustered cached controllers
- physical storage groups with hundreds of disks supporting I/O
- migrate storage without downtime
Deep Dive Materials:
- X86 Mainframe Blog Entries
- X86 Mainframe defined
The Forward to the Mainframe? series
- Part 1: Revisiting the Mainframe Utility Computing Model
- Part 2: WinTel, the Luddite Revolution
- Part 3: A New Model - the X86 Mainframe
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