[vox] NT on the mainframe?

[Eric D. Pierce]

On 8 May 2003 at 18:32, Mike Simons wrote:

> 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 :).

(I'm looking forward to the IBM guy's slide show getting on 
the LUGOD web site.)

His comments were mostly about virtual mainframe OS 
partitions for Linux, but he did make a very brief 
reference to how it was the same for NT. And I've heard it 
from senior IBM mainframe sysadmns.

I'm not saying that NT would run natively on IBM mainframe
hardware.

If an IBM mainframe can run a Linux kernel that was written 
for x86 in a virtual mainframe OS partition (or whatever 
they call it), why couldn't it also run an NT kernel for 
x86?

Wouldn't their abstraction layer be basically the same for
any OS on x86?

regards,
ep