I wonder how this mainframe compares with a similarly priced x86-based server rack running Linux.
IBM sells it with moniker "Pervasive Encryption" but if you look under the hood, it is actually impressive and very detailed.
Build in security at the hardware level. Especially the Crypto Express6S card. There is hardware acceleration for everything cryptography (including SHA-3 and SHAKE), tamper sensing, true random number generation. Encrypted paging in z/vm, etc. SSL/TLS can run fast. Security auditing is not an afterthought.
Of course you can add all this in special cards for x86 server racks but the cost is probably the same with lower IO throughput and less integration. Getting the same uptime in production would be significantly more expensive if not impossible.
The z14 has a ton of cache and does everything it can for single threaded performance, but for the money you could buy a ton of cores (Intel Xeons or AMD chips) and trounce the mainframe on benchmarks that can use the parallelism.
For the money, you would be able to buy the gear to have a lot of bandwidth between nodes and to the storage.
Single-thread performance is also pretty high, so it'd only lose in the aggregate CPU benchmarks.
Not true. If you view the network as the computer, then the network is now forever winning.
What is Google's or Facebooks uptime? Their computer is their cluster. Those clusters are never going to be powered off ever. They can upgrade and replace the entire cluster without being down. If you have a cluster of 10,000 nodes, turning off 100 or 1000 is not downtime, so longer as it's up and serving. No mainframe ever will run for the next 100 years. It's a possibility that a cluster built today could be running for the next 100yrs.
It's harder to get mainframe like uptimes for OLTP simultaneously with mainframe like IOPS.
99.9 percent. Cloud services from Microsoft, Google, Amazon typically have only three nines or less for paying customers. They also seem to have same level of uptime in their own services.
But these are not "firm guarantees". For example Amazon just gives service credits after downtime exceeds what is promised. They "undergo unscheduled outages" from time to time. Whole regions are down at once.
Remember Amazon's Prime Day outages? It's not good for business when tings go down.
And I bet all that costs much more than an IBM. Not a computer, the company.
One thing that has been learned is, software will sometimes do interesting things if presented with so much memory. For example: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7275
The SGI Altix line, which used Itanium 2, could go up to 1024 cores with a single system image, which is just insane. We had one of those at Goddard a decade or so ago, but I didn't have access to it.