at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:

> I’d say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it from the get-go.

and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article nicely goes into some details.

oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput, or real time mass financial transactions, of course.

or a web server for an online image service.

or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000 such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not containers, no, virtual machines, in ca 2006...

"don't trust a computer you can lift"

(we need a bit of silly in our lives)

                           CEREAL
                    Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack,
                    you score one of those Gibsons man. You know,
                    supercomputers they use to like, do physics,
                    and look for oil and stuff?

                                PHREAK
                    Ain't no way, man, security's too tight. The
                    big iron?

                                DADE
                    Maybe. But, if I were gonna hack some heavy
                    metal, I'd, uh, work my way back through some
                    low security, and try the back door.