J. Rhoads Research / formerly MobyApp

So I thought LPARS started back in the 1980's. Apparently they started back in the 1960's, who knew :) Here is an email I recieved from a reader of my blog: Jerry, Here’s the response I got back from the mainframe folks at IBM. Pretty interesting history…virtualization/lpar’s can be traced back to 1960! In early 1960, IBM used an internal tool call CP-67 to create virtual systems to test S/370, a predecessor of z/OS. The tool eventually became a commercial product in 1972, VM/370. After many iterations of VM/370, in the early 1980s, Poughkeepsie baked the assembler code of VM into "machine code" (we now call it microcode) such that it ran much closer to the hardware. This was to reduce the already single digit overhead of VM and create LPARs at the machine level as opposed to create LPARs at the OS level. So the LPAR code in z and p today can trace their genealogy to CP-67. If I equate virtual machines to LPARs, then the use of "LPAR" really started in

I have often spoken of how I love the green screen! Nostalgia aside, a mainframe computer was (and still is) a scalable solution, if you needed to run more programs you cut out another logical partition also known as a LPAR. LPARs were first used on old systems like the IBM ESA/390 circa mid 1980’s. Eventually you had to add more processors, memory, and disk space to your mainframe –alas buy it by the drink! I often hear this phase; buy it by the drink. I often wonder what it really means. In looking to the past, I know this task was accomplished with mainframes. Every CIO that I know of wants to employ the “buy the drink” idea. Question is how do their direct reports develop a solution and execute that solution? I think this is going to require some thinking out of the box. Cloud computing or grid computing is a solution for a "buy it by the drink" requirement. The boundary of a system should be the datacenter, inside it is chuck full of storage, processors, and memory. Goog