71–80 of 163 posts
As a mainframer: IBM should make the z/OS available for free experimentation! That's the biggest obstacle and reason why people do not know it. Even the long dead Solaris has more hackers on it than z/OS. Also, millenials will also want job security and pensions, eventually. Just wait when they have kids.
Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?
I'm still not seeing what mainframes give you that a well-designed pc cluster couldn't, other than marketing BS and opportunity for grift.
Waitaminute...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment made me curious and I ended up finding a great article on the story behind the layoffs at SS&C. https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-story/article/210195...
That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining successful companies like DST.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?
Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.
Other relevant answers might include "true fault tolerance". More than half of your mainframe can be burned to a crisp, or being chewed on by a dinosaur - doesn't matter, it will keep working. The closest bad analogy I can think of...is a mainframe is like the NASA space missions of yesteryear. Every component has three or four duplicates, just waiting for a primary component to fail so they can take over. They aren't cost effective, but they are operationally effective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try this: Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am {...}.... Question: what is a house and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, tent. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to just get multiple tents instead? A mainframe is the kind of computer you can buy and set up, turn on, and run for two decades (or more, if you like) non-stop. It doesn't need reboots, it most often doesn't ev…
Except when they do go down it can be a catastrophic business interrupting event. Which is why the cloud model of assume everything is going to break and all your hardware is disposable works much better (IMO).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non mainframe programmer I found your anecdote about windows reliability contrary to the experience I have had over the past few decades so I am not sure how accurate the rest of your post is.
Here's my favorite: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2553549/all-the-tcp... article about it: https://blog.ctm-it.com/it-support/blogs/matt-cannon/2013/49... edit: If you want to be especially cynical, you can note that this wasn't discovered for a while because everyone running Windows reboots it regularly because of its notorious instability issues (the bug was found in 2013 and dates back to at least Vista…
I reboot monthly because getting owned by 0 days sucks, and at this point in life, every platform (except for OpenBSD) is having new exploits found against it at a rather fair rate. Same reason my phone gets rebooted once a month.
Aside from that, I have had uptime on Windows boxes in excess of 6 months.
Laptops on the other hand, those are more problematic, but it isn't Windows' fault if a WiFi card hard locks itself, has a dysfunctional watchdog timer on board, and needs to be power cycled to get it working again.
OSes that can hot swap or live patch kernels can brag about uptimes. The rest of us should stay humble. (And AFAIK no modern consumer based OSes distributions do that)
My first professional job was to write RPG for an AS/400 mainframe (or whatever it's called these days), and even I don't know what the word "mainframe" is supposed to suggest to the modern user. As far as I could tell, it was just a single bog-standard server rack (amusingly sitting alone in a room that was far, far too big for it; a reminder of the massive bank of computers that used to do the same job) whose only…
You have it go the other way, as well. We were running some accounting software on an System i (AS/400, iSeries, like you said whatever IBM calls it this decade), and recently switched to something that runs commodity hardware. Another company that I knew from our user group meeting also switched - the batch processing was so slow, they had to go back to the IBM. Their shipping process just wasn't fast enough otherwi…
This does ring a bell, I think I did discover this eventually ("wide mode", they called it?). And I'm not sure if this is damning with faint praise, but I will admit that the 5250 monospace font kinda grew on me.
Interesting to hear that I could have been using Eclipse for RPG; for the PHP side (which was still running on the mainframe via AIX, so I had at least a few Unix tools at my disposal (not git though... I had to expose the PHP source directory via a fileshare and mount it via NFS on Windows so that I could leverage msysgit (it's as ridiculous and slow as it sounds, running VCS in a Unix emulation layer on Windows performing filesystem operations over the network to a virtual filesystem in a Unix emulation layer on an IBM mainframe (but I digress)))), I got the company to shell out for WebSphere, which I thought being an IBM product might have some RPG support, but alas.
My recommendations: - Give lots of young people the opportunity to learn the necessary mainframe skills (ideally by themselves). Lots of today's great programmers learned their programming skills on their own. This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them. - Pay really good salaries and advertise it. Money nearly always has a huge attractive force.
> This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them. Bingo. I work in an AS/400 shop. I simply can't invest myself personally in the work because I know my access to that environment is predicated on working for this particular company. I can hone my Linux skills and even my Windows Server skills any time. I can bring it home. I can use it myself. I can own it. I can't do that with the AS/400. Just spi…
Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?
A lot of the responses to this question could have been copy/pasted from Erlang marketing copy. I'm still not seeing what mainframes give you that a well-designed pc cluster couldn't, other than marketing BS and opportunity for grift. Waitaminute...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_hexadecimal_floating_poi...
Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?
Besides the (purported) reliability reasons other commenters have brought up, because "vertical" [0] scalability is, often enough, more efficient in terms of money and (human/engineering) time.
This can hold true even if paying a premium for both the hardware and the humans (which, presumably, are more expensive due to their scarcity, as implied by the article).
The promise of "horizontal" scalability is being able to achieve arbitrary performance just by adding more units (e.g. servers), but not at any particular efficiency (slope or shape of the curve). Even that promise is suspect in the face of Amdahl's Law [1] and USL [2]. In reality, the Fallacies [3] matter, so the most general-purpose supercomputers are still bespoke and expensive, even if they're assembled from (a selection of) commodity parts.
Even just in the realm of commodity hardware, I/O-heavy loads are going to benefit from keeping everything as close together as possible, on as fat pipes as possible. Distributed databases or any distributed data handling (that doesn't involve heavy processor use, such as compression or transcoding) is what I've personally seen suffer from this issue. 20-60 "inexpensive" ($3k-4k) servers instead of 2-3 "expensive" ($20k-$60k) ones.
Cloud infrastructure further confounds any calculation, since, with the most popular provider, AWS, you'd pay 2x-10x what you would buying and operating your own hardware. That, multiplied by the inefficiency of scaling a distributed system, especially on a network you don't control, may well be higher than the price premium of a mainframe.
OTOH, if "you" are like Google, and are paying commodity (or below) prices and have had operating your own hardware, as cheaply as possible, as part of your strategy all along, including investing in experts/specialists to keep it cheap, then mainframes wouldn't make much sense. Amusingly, it seems popular to emulate only part of the big players' distributed systems, the software, while ignoring the context that made it so useful for those players, the cheapness of the hardware.
[0] I'm using quotes because the terms are a bit imprecise in comparing mainframes, which, even traditionally, involved distributed processing. IIUC, the reason there's a "C" in CPU is from mainframes, which routinely relied on processing units that were not central. Other commenters have asserted that mainframes are horizontally scalable without detailing what that means.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
[2] http://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...