On Tuesday - while flying - I was reading the new edition of "Informatik Spektrum", the journal of the German Computer Science Association "Gesellschaft für Informatik", GI. One of the articles was meant as discussion starter and was about why and how to lecture mainframe skills at German universities. It described the key benefits of using a System z or mainframe and was showing how mainframes are spearheading technology evolution.
I was reminded of that article this morning again when reading this press release from last month, IBM validates Obsidian's Longbow for DB2 pureScale Stretch Clusters. I had written about a pureScale stretch cluster before, it is a geographically dispersed cluster with parts of the cluster at different locations. In the press release they talk about that the Longbows, the technology to bridge distances for Infiniband, has been developed for the military. We all know that geographically dispersed clusters have been available for years on the mainframe only (GD Parallel Sysplex).
The point I wanted to make is that it is interesting to see what technology trickles down the chain and eventually reaches "the regular guy". In this case it was high-end cluster and networking technology that became available in the "distributed database world". What will be next? Watch the mainframe or the stars...