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Both. Mainframes though are incredibly good for both I/O and uptime.

Yeah, Linux/Unix are way better on both than they used to be, but on a mainframe, it's just a totally different level.

discuss

leeter|10 months ago

Not just that. Most operating systems lie about when an IO transaction completes for performance reasons. So if you lose power or the IO device dies you still think it succeeded. A mainframe doesn't do that... it also multiplexes the IO so it happens more than once so if one adapter fails it keeps going. The resiliency is the main use case in many situations. That said IME 99.995% of use cases don't need a mainframe. They just don't need to be that reliable if they can fail gracefully.

dralley|10 months ago

You can run Linux on mainframes fine. RHEL has first-class support for s390x / Z.

dardeaup|10 months ago

Yes! I had the good fortune of working with z/VM for Linux guests. It was a lot of fun and it worked quite well.