You are not talking about Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplexes, I suppose <g>?

Robert

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]Im Auftrag von Alan Churchill Gesendet: Montag, 18. September 2006 15:41 An: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Betreff: Re: PC SAS vs. Mainframe SAS

I read that a Sony Playstation 3 would have more processing power than a Cray supercomputer did in 1999. Astounding growth rates of hardware.

Now think in terms of the PC evolution. By this Christmas, processing power on a PC is probably in the range of 8x what it was last Christmas and it was damn fast then. The problem with the mainframe architecture is that by the time it is in place, it is way obsolete.

The biggest business processing happening today (I would argue) is in EBay, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. There are over 1 million servers between them and they are growing at an outstanding rate. The biggest issue they are facing, in fact, is power hence all are buying property near major power stations such as dams. With web services, it will. again push the boundaries of what is possible and thereby increase the computing load. By this time next year, SAS users will also be able to tap into this power with web services.

With such high growth rates, the need to be able to swap out components wholesale is critical. A mainframe is a concept that made a lot of sense at one point but now it comes down to massive clusters of machines all operating in a grid like fashion. Cells actually.

Alan

Alan Churchill Savian "Bridging SAS and Microsoft Technologies" www.savian.net