I seriously doubt there's a POWER mainframe in the back of Costco to handle the 3 UPC barcode scans per second. It's possible that every Costco store funnels its orders to a single mainframe somewhere.

I think a more realistic case is the visa and MasterCard credit card networks that have almost 0% downtime.

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robotnikman 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can provide some insight into this. Most stores will have a server which handles the barcodes, pricing, etc, locally. Then all transactions are usually sent in a batch everyday from the store server to a central server/servers somewhere for processing, usually around that time reports are also generated and stats made available for BI analysis.

Payments processed by the payment terminals handle the authorization of the payments separately from any store servers, usually through a service such as Connected Payments.

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dardeaup a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No such thing as a POWER mainframe. IBM's POWER lines (i and p) are different from their mainframe line (z).

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CursedSilicon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not a POWER Mainframe, no. But AS/400's come in many sizes. The smallest ones are roughly the size of a standard workstation

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pjmlp a day ago | parent [-]

Back in 1994, they were small enough like a big PC tower, I used to seat on one occasionally, that was out of order.

One of my Summer intern jobs was to run backups every few days on a AS/400 system.

That "seat" was the old one that was yet to be collected.

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RaftPeople a day ago | parent [-]

> Back in 1994, they were small enough like a big PC tower,

Back then their model lineup ranged from the small size like you mention to approx 3 or 4 refrigerator size at the high end.

When I did some system work out at Costco in the 90's they had 4 of the largest models connected together in one system image (sysplex I think).

	▲	pjmlp a day ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, never saw other sizes in real, only on magazine ads.

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gt0 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mainframes are not POWER, they are z/Architecture.

For AS/400 (IBM i), they're POWER, but come in pretty small models like IBM Power S1012, it's available as "deskside", i.e. a big tower.

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chiffre01 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's more likely they have a rack of IBM iSeries servers in the back someplace, or maybe in a colo data center.