Connor Krukosky, an 18 year old college student, has installed an IBM z890 mainframe in his parents’ basement in Maryland. He posted some photos of his personal mainframe, and at last report (on IBM-MAIN) he has successfully booted Linux on z and can connect. His next task is to get some disk storage attached and working. You can follow his progress on the IBM-MAIN list.
Connor reports that he paid $237 for his mainframe, a capacity model 320 (approximately 120 PCIs according to IBM’s LSPR table). That means that Connor’s z890 has 3 of its 4 main processor cores configured as CPs, and CPs are technically capable of running any workloads, including Linux. It’s possible the 4th core is configured as some other engine type, though that’s unclear at this point. The z890 was available with anywhere from 8GB to 32GB of main memory, so Connor should have plenty of memory to support his personal mainframe workloads. It’s unclear exactly what I/O adapters he has installed in his particular machine, but the z890 was available with 2Gbps FICON/FCP and 10Gbps Ethernet.
IBM introduced the z890 in 2004 and halted new z890 sales in 2007. The z800 was its predecessor, and the z9BC was its successor. One of the reasons Connor likely got a great price on his used z890 is because z/OS 1.13 is the last release of z/OS compatible with this model. There are still some Linux distributions compatible with the z890, however.
Originally posted on Millennial Mainframer.