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The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

arstechnica.com

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Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#81

Post by mberning »

justapassenger wrote: post #55
mberning wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may assume that a lot of this mainframe software is "running just fine" but nothing could be farther from the truth. Often you will find that this software was fine when it was written 40-50 years ago, but now it has a lot of deferred maintenance and upgrades which are now a "big problem". Is it a problem that an application that can move millions of dollars is only secured by a strictly 8 character alphanumer…

Updating the software to support stronger passwords or rewrite it from scratch, on a totally different platform? I don’t think you’re making argument think you’re making.

You have no idea. This is not some database field that you can just alter with one statement and update a field on a screen. Things like this get hardcoded into hundreds of thousands of lines of assembler and cobol and need to be changed and tested everywhere. With no automated testing or other tools to mitigate the risk. It is an absolute nightmare. And 5 or 10 years from now it will be way worse because working on a mainframe is a deadend career and very few people are learning it.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#82

Post by elric »

grishka wrote: post #66

> Communication is through Kafka events or Java Messaging Services, and new server instances can be spun up in seconds in AWS or Azure clouds to provide additional capacity, which is needed for high-volume processing. I'm honestly surprised that a bank would agree to run anything even remotely serious on someone else's infrastructure.

Many banks, including very large ones, already have some amount of stuff running on public (& private) cloud infrastructure. Many other banks are preparing migrations. I, too, was surprised by this, considering only a few years ago they were very reluctant to even buy software from anyone who wasn't on a very short whitelist.

In the end, I guess it's all about the money ... and that includes the money it takes to find and train mainframe devs.

Source: spent a significant part of my career in fintech.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#83

Post by justapassenger »

mberning wrote: post #81
justapassenger wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updating the software to support stronger passwords or rewrite it from scratch, on a totally different platform? I don’t think you’re making argument think you’re making.

You have no idea. This is not some database field that you can just alter with one statement and update a field on a screen. Things like this get hardcoded into hundreds of thousands of lines of assembler and cobol and need to be changed and tested everywhere. With no automated testing or other tools to mitigate the risk. It is an absolute nightmare. And 5 or 10 years from now it will be way worse because working on…

I’m not saying it’ll be easy. But what’s even harder is rewriting 50 year old software, with all the bugs that others relay on now (both people and software), wanky and complex business logic, etc, etc.

I’m not saying that you should stick to mainframe. But rewriting it because you need to support strong password is not a reason to do it.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#84

Post by Scubabear68 »

One of the reasons Mainframes continue to be used is depreciation. I know a few companies who love their mainframes because they are fully paid for and from a budget perspective they are seen as “free”.

This can be very attractive compared to the never ending OpEx for running cloud computing.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#85

Post by hinkley »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #4

The reason mainframe persists is it's a pretty slick development and deployment environment. A lot things you might cobble together as dependencies - like maybe a database or a message queue, or observability facilities or even deployment strategies like hot-hot deployments - they're all just built in to the platform. That means they're trivial to consume and they're fully supported by one vendor. It's like the world…

Most of this Cloud technology we like to go all atwitter about is a retread or a redesign of software that's been on mainframes for thirty years. The old farts must laugh themselves silly looking at us acting like we discovered a large white object orbiting the earth.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#86

Post by edelsohn »

js8 wrote: post #38
redandblack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to be great for vector processing for numerical analysis, although not sure anymore

Since z13 vector instructions are supported again. But I doubt anybody uses them.

The original vector facility is gone, but the Z Vector Extension (VX) is utilized by AI/ML software, such as NumPy, OpenBLAS, etc.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#87

Post by mxuribe »

larrik wrote: post #79

I never worked on z/OS, but I did work on AS400 (Series I, or whatever it's called now). I think the main things missing is how much IBM really brings to the table here. > If one crashes or has to go down for maintenance, the other partitions are unaffected. Effectively, IBM often does that for you. The machine detects an issue, and calls IBM, who sends someone out (in my day it was immediately), and they fix it. The…

Throughout my career, the term i heard most often for this type of scenario was: "Which neck to choke when stuff fails...", or something like "...the least number of necks to choke when stuff fails...", etc. lol :-D

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#88

Post by hinkley »

larrik wrote: post #79

I never worked on z/OS, but I did work on AS400 (Series I, or whatever it's called now). I think the main things missing is how much IBM really brings to the table here. > If one crashes or has to go down for maintenance, the other partitions are unaffected. Effectively, IBM often does that for you. The machine detects an issue, and calls IBM, who sends someone out (in my day it was immediately), and they fix it. The…

Oxide seems to be trying to build a similar arrangement with customers. That's half their motivation for switching to open firmware for the little computers hidden in your machine. There's a big game of fingerpointing these days where you call your vendor and they blame one of their vendors and can't/won't hunt down the issue for you.

The ways I've heard that explained sound exhausting. Paying anyone who you can say, "your machine broke come fix it" and they actually do, is probably worth the money. Right now Cloud providers and IBM are the only ones really providing that service. I suspect history will say that people were not running to the Cloud so much as running away from bullshit hardware vendors.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#89

Post by neverartful »

larrik wrote: post #79

I never worked on z/OS, but I did work on AS400 (Series I, or whatever it's called now). I think the main things missing is how much IBM really brings to the table here. > If one crashes or has to go down for maintenance, the other partitions are unaffected. Effectively, IBM often does that for you. The machine detects an issue, and calls IBM, who sends someone out (in my day it was immediately), and they fix it. The…

"using a dedicated stack of hardware and software owned by one company"

advantage - one throat to choke

disadvantage - they've got you by the balls when it comes time to pay the licensing and maintenance fees

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#90

Post by neverartful »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #84

One of the reasons Mainframes continue to be used is depreciation. I know a few companies who love their mainframes because they are fully paid for and from a budget perspective they are seen as “free”. This can be very attractive compared to the never ending OpEx for running cloud computing.

Doesn't make sense to me. I believe that IBM has found the forced upgrade path for hardware/software like Apple has perfected. You may not be able to run old versions of IBM's software and still have it be supported by them. Same for the hardware. I don't think you would commonly find and old mainframe (the hardware) in operation. At the last place I worked that had mainframes, they would upgrade to new models every 2-3 years.
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