Slang for large, expensive, ultra-fast computers or systems. Associated with
number-crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but also include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes and high-end servers for large companies or organizations with deep pockets or computation-intensive needs. Term of approval; compare
heavy metal, oppose
dinosaur.
While speed and I/O throughput is a major concern with
BigIron, these days the main concern with machines of this type seem to revolve around ultra-high availability and reliability. For high-performance number-crunching, large farms of cheap computers clustered together seem to be the way to go these days, rather than a big freon-cooled box that sucks more electricity than an aluminum smelter...
Also see
BigIronAintCheap,
BigIronDatabase,
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/big-iron.html
CategoryJargon,
CategoryEnterpriseComputingConcerns