What are the advantages of mainframes?

Posted by Scott Weinstein on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Scott Weinstein
Published on 2012-04-10T16:56:08Z Indexed on 2012/04/10 23:43 UTC
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legacy

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mainframe

The downsides of Mainframes is well trodden ground; expensive, legacy, dwindling community, etc.

I'm not particularly interested in the downsides, but I am curious if there are any benefits to mainframe hardware/software over the current Intel/AMD & Linux/Windows environment.

I've been told that MFs are particularly good (and better than current servers) at heavy I/O loads. Is this still true?

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