I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?
Modern systems do a lot more work per second than these old machines, while drawing less power. If you were to collect a large enough collection of mainframes to equal the performance of a modern rack server, you would need 10-1000 times the power to run the old stuff, depending on how far back you want to go - even 10 year old hardware can cost 4-10 times more in electric bill compared to a modern server with the same total performance level.
Definitely power hogs. Modern switch mode power supplies are incredibly efficient.
I never really administered anything like that myself but I had a friend who took care of some old servers ~20 years ago in college. Multiple power drops in that small room went to fuse panels rated for several hundred amps each.
Unfortunately all I know were that they were VAX mainframes and were already considered obsolete in the late 90’s ;-)
Newer systems are way more power efficient than those of yester-year. Systems design and engineering, while built on the principles of the past, have very much changed just in the last decade alone. Older mainframe systems are really no better than museum pieces and technological curiosities today.
Are those older systems largely virtualized now? When you hear about some old system at a government office not being able to keep up, is it the same hardware?
