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The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

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

#111

Post by dbcurtis »

hinkley wrote: post #85
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.

Oh yeah, in a past life I was a CPU logic designer for walk-in, refrigerated mainframes. I was always amused by youngsters thinking they had invented things like pipelines and branch prediction. Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl were prolific inventors.

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

#112

Post by dbcurtis »

dbcurtis wrote: post #111
hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, in a past life I was a CPU logic designer for walk-in, refrigerated mainframes. I was always amused by youngsters thinking they had invented things like pipelines and branch prediction. Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl were prolific inventors.

And Bob Barton deserves mention for being extremely far-sighted.

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

#113

Post by Melatonic »

josho wrote: post #67
zitterbewegung wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greatest hurdle for a project to be replaced is that if its works. I assure you that the users of IBM mainframes would be looking at at least a multi million dollar project to perform a decommission and if even approved it would be first on the chopping block to pause / eliminate the project.

You are correct. There was a time when companies ran projects to replace their mainframes. They all largely failed. The trend now is to integrate around the mainframe. Build new functionality on modern systems and leverage the mainframe where it makes sense. I worked at one company that is trying to replace their mainframe. The project is now in its second decade. The company has the burden of supporting the mainfram…

Exactly. Java layer written on top of COBOL.

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

#114

Post by bob1029 »

Yasuraka wrote: post #98
neverartful wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

One has to wonder if the most optimal throat-choking to ball-holding ratio can be modeled

I have a really hard time with the game theory around this.

Every time I run the numbers, I arrive at: I would much rather be in a situation where I can place blame at the feet of one party, especially if they are under some contract to provide a certain level of service. There are things that I absolutely cannot control and I'd rather push as much of this as possible into one bucket.

What I can control is how we actually use the technology relative to the business. If our sole vendor doubles the price on a certain service, then we will explore alternative services (within the same vendor) or ways to use that service less (maybe we send emails instead).

I know the vendor is going to try to turn the economic screws. That I can work with. Business as usual. What I don't enjoy are those "unknown unknowns".

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

#115

Post by Melatonic »

hinkley wrote: post #88
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,…

Not always true - there are lots of hardware vendors that do have pretty decent support and automatically call home and a part is same day shipped.

That being said usually I am the one replacing that part on my own infrastructure which is usually a 30 minute drive an hour to maybe 3 of my time

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

#116

Post by Melatonic »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #27

My partner does very technical systems hacking on z/OS. They have a huge problem hiring new programmers. His colleagues are all well over 65 and are inevitably retiring (or worse). It seems like a real problem for the future of the platform.

Lot of people in Taiwan are learning COBOL and mainframe programming specifically for this reason. Surprisingly big (or small, depending on how you look at it) popular of young people learning it.

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

#117

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

filereaper wrote: post #73

The mainframe exists because IBM and the devs respect the time and investments made by its customers. There are efforts made to make sure code doesn't break and migrations are put in place. Sadly only Microsoft and a few others share this attitude, and its likely why these companies and their products will be around forever.

> Sadly only Microsoft and a few others share this attitude…

Since the introduction of Windows 10, this is no longer true. For example, games that supported Microsoft's "Games for Windows – Live" often do not not work out of the box anymore, as required DLLs are no longer installed. And on the 2017 Microsoft Answers thread about what to do to work around this[0], users are reporting the steps no longer work.

[0]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/guide-...

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

#118

Post by bcantrill »

hinkley wrote: post #88
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,…

Yes! There are lots of ways in which we are nothing like these big IBM systems (we are, for example, entirely open -- like POWER, but very unlike AS/400 or Z series machines), but we definitely admire the robustness of these machines! Indeed, arguably to a fault, as I likened us to the AS/400 in a VC pitch[0] -- which (despite the potential accuracy of the historical analogue) is as ill-advised as it sounds...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2216s

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

#119

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #11
mberning wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It persists in many places due to the deeply ingrained belief that, for one reason or another, it would be technically, practically, or economically impossible to migrate functionality off the mainframe. Somehow the people in charge of these systems have managed to convince large enterprises of this for decades . And now we are in a situation where their long held beliefs have become true because nobody is around tha…

> It persists in many places due to the deeply ingrained belief that, for one reason or another, it would be technically, practically, or economically impossible to migrate functionality off the mainframe. It is never technical or pratical reasons, always economic reasons. To use contemporary vocabulary, you "just" need to replicate a "multi tenant HA cloud environment" to migrate from a mainframe at great cost. > An…

>> It persists in many places due to the deeply ingrained belief that, for one reason or another, it would be technically, practically, or economically impossible to migrate functionality off the mainframe.

> It is never technical or pratical reasons, always economic reasons. To use contemporary vocabulary, you "just" need to replicate a "multi tenant HA cloud environment" to migrate from a mainframe at great cost.

When your business processes are so ossified by a mainframe that you have, say, groups preparing Excel spreadsheets -- with data formatted from one mainframe screen in 3 columns -- for use by another group to input back into the mainframe -- with the data reformatted in 4 columns -- you know you're never escaping the gravity well of the black hole at the center of IT that is "The Mainframe." This is just how it's going to be until the company is so technically irrelevant that the remains are picked up in a fire sale by some PE to sell off to some other, tangentially-related company, solely for the IP assets.

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

#120

Post by toast0 »

lizknope wrote: post #34

I've never used or even seen a mainframe in 26 years in the tech industry. My brother in law works for a bank and basically the business runs on it. The hardware and software are certainly impressive but does anyone use a mainframe for a new project and not just upgrading or expanding an existing system? I'm in integrated circuit design and we have compute clusters with thousands of CPUs. For some jobs we use a singl…

I started my tech career as a student worker at my school district's office. They had a Unisys mainframe managing student and employee records; around 1998, they replaced the old system which was about 3 feet tall and maybe 20 feet long, with a 4U dual processor Pentium Pro running NT 4 with a Unisys emulator. Seemed to work just about as well, but the operator console seemed a lot less fun. Still interfaced with the giant impact printer to print out grades and payroll.
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