It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more. They just provision more cloud hardware. I saved telcos millions upon millions in my early career. I’d jump straight into it again if a job came up, so much fun.
Telephone Exchanges / Central Offices have to be in the centre of the lines they serve, meaning some very expensive real estate, and datacenter-level HVAC in the middle of cities is very, very expensive.
They loved nothing more than to replace old 1980s switches with ones that took up a quarter to a tenth of the floorspace, used less than half the electricity, and had fabrics that could switch fibre optics directly.
It's hard to get as excited about performance when the typical family sedan has >250HP. Or when a Raspberry Pi 5 can outrun a maxxed-E10k on almost everything.
...(yah, less RAM, but you need fewer client connections when you can get rid of them quickly enough).
The Starfire started at around $800K. Our Linux servers started at around $1K. The Sun box was not 800x faster at anything than a single x86 box.
It was an impressive example of what I considered the wrong road. I think history backs me on this one.
> It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more.
Everyone gives a shit about performance at some point, but the answer is horizontal scaling. You can’t vertically scale a single machine to run a FAANG. At a certain vertical scale, it starts to look a helluva lot like horizontal scaling (“how many CPUs for this container? How many drives?”), except in a single box with finite and small limits.
You don't buy enterprise gear because it's economical for bulk number-crunching... You buy enterprise gear when you have a critical SPOF application (typically the database) that has to be super-reliable, or that requires greater resources than you can get in commodity boxes.
RAS is an expensive proposition. Commodity servers often don't have it, or have much less of it than enterprise gear. Proprietary Unix systems offered RAS as a major selling point. IBM mainframes still have a strong market today.
It wasn't until the late 2000's when x86 went to 64-bit, so if your application wanted to gobble more than 2GB/4GB of RAM, you had to go with something proprietary.
It was even more recently that the world collectively put a huge amount of effort in, and figured out how to parallelize a large amount of number-crunching problems that were previously limited to single-threaded.
There have been many situations like these through the history of computing... Going commodity is always cheaper, but if you have needs commodity systems don't meet, you pay the premium for proprietary systems that do.
I don’t think that approach is inherently better than what you described. Each has its own tradeoffs and there’s a time and place for both of them. I absolutely did see a lot of Big Iron companies marketing their giant boxes as the “real, proven” alternative to a small cluster of LAMP servers, though. I don’t blame them for wanting to be big players in that market, too, but that wasn’t a good reason to use them (unless you already had their stuff installed and wanted to add a web service next to your existing programs).
I wouldn’t run a bank on an EC2 instance, but neither would I ever buy a mainframe to host Wordpress at any scale.
People still used the big mainframe-y UNIX servers but their usage shrunk and you could see the writing on the wall. I was already replacing Sparc database servers with Opterons in 2004. The hardware wasn’t as gold-plated but they were fast and workloads were already outgrowing the biggest mainframe-y servers.
TBH, a lot of the gold-plated “enterprise” hardware failed far more often in practice than you would expect, including unrecoverable hard failures. That was a common enough experience that it probably detracted from the sales pitch for that extremely expensive hardware.
As a dev it isn’t your problem if the company you work for just happily provisions and sucks it up.
At the other one, we jumped from 2 25k to 2 M9000-64 for the same reasons...
written in an interpreted language.
You might be surprised about how many companies think they're FAANG (but aren't) though.
The e10k didn't have applications like that. Just about everything you could do on it could be made to work on commodity x86 with Linux (after some years, for 64-bit).
https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/tuxedo.html
It came from AT&T, via BEA.
How many other platforms will run IMS?