[vox] NT on the mainframe?

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Thu 08 May 03,  6:32 PM, Mike Simons <msimons@moria.simons-clan.com> opined:
> On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 11:48:47AM -0700, epierce@surewest.net wrote:
> > Peter Jay Salzman scribbled with alacrity:
> > >for most applications, a powerful PC or a cluster of PC's are
> > > simply more cost effective.
> > 
> > The presenter at the meeting said that IBM is selling billions of dollars
> > of "big iron" that run NT/Linux on OS partitions. I've heard old mainframe
> > sysadmns that talk about running 25+ NT/Linux OS instances/partitions on
> > one mainframe.
> 
>   I don't remember him saying anything about Windows NT OS partitions on 
> the mainframe or any of the slides hinting it was possible.
> 
> - Did any one else catch this part of the presentation?
> 
> I would be shocked to hear there is a port of NT to that platform... 
> 
>   News that you can run many thousands of Linux OS partitions on the
> main frame have been around for a years.  Maybe as much as two years ago 
> IBM started selling CPU units for a discounted price if you agreed to 
> only use it to run Linux... then they started coming out which market
> studies that show conversion a hundreds of PCs servers into a single 
> mainframe saves alot of money... but I always thought this conversion 
> meant no Windows in the end (which is a major cost savings in itself :).
> 
>     TTFN,
>       Mike

i did a few minutes of googling, and here's a summary of what i found:

windows NT 3.5x was written on x86 (of course) but was ported to the DEC
alpha, SGI mips and powerpc.  however, the ports worked so poorly on the
non-intel architectures that microsoft quietly dropped all support for
the non-x86 ports of NT 3.5x.  it was supposed to have been an
embarrasment, since they touted the fact that one of the benefits of NT
was that hardware independent code was compartmentalized, which was not
true of any microsoft OS's before NT 3.5.

windows NT server edition (that's the $4000 version which i believe was
given the version 4.0) was written on x86 (of course) and ported to the
DEC alpha (compaq alpha?!?).   however, this port also worked so poorly
that microsoft dropped all support for it.  i don't think you can even
buy it anymore.

right now, NT is officially supported on one architecture: x86.
however, it works so poorly, that microsoft is quietly dropping support
of NT altogether in favor of XP, judging by the fact that there are
known bugs and vulnerabilities on NT which microsoft is officially not
patching.  i believe a few of these articles should be on the "why not
MS page" if bill is still updating that thing.

pete

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