Mainframe computer ....are there any still around

[Power Lunch Club]

I bumped into an old friend of my mine the other day....we both used to work in Standard Life...in a place called the Data Centre.

It was a fairly big building....offices all upstair....but the basement contained the massive mainframe systems....covered the whole floor. In fact they were so big, the buidling desingers have used them to heat the building.

When I left....some 10 years ago now, the main frame was half the size it was, but with absolutly loads more power.

But we were chatting...and we both wondered do big companies like Standard Life still use large mainframe systems or are they starting to be killed off with something smaller and just as powerful?

 

[IainKay]

Gordon,
No one is able to purchase servers like this anymore but I'm sure they are still in use in some organisations. The term "if it aint broke don't fix it" comes to mind

You can purchase super computers these days from large manufacturers like HP that contain 128-256 processors, this could be considered like a mainframe but it still takes up nowhere near as much space as an employees desk area.
These days if you require a lot of power you can just cluster many servers together and allocate tasks across them however you like, there's not even a reason they need to be at the same facility.

 

[Power Lunch Club]

The beasts I remember,....whenever they shut the thing down....the hard disk would rattle an bang and it sounded like a train coming to a halt....(hey my laptop does that now!!)

 

[Idea15]

Slightly OT but my Christmas reading was the book "A Computer Called Leo", about Britain's first mainframe in the 1950s. A very enjoyable read from both a business and a computing perspective.