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Is it just for the fun or is there actually a legit use case for having a mainframe at home apart from accelerating climate change?
I'm not even sure if there are still use cases where companies use main frames for newly developed systems. Even core banking systems can be build without using a main frame.
Is it just for the fun or is there actually a legit use case for having a mainframe at home apart from accelerating climate change?
He lists 'Datacenter setup' in his bill of materials at the end so it likely won't be kept at home.
Is it just for the fun or is there actually a legit use case for having a mainframe at home apart from accelerating climate change?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you Google around a bit, mainframes are pretty expensive, but have very high up times and other benefits.
Can't you get to that uptime with a well-configured cluster? I tried to find more information but couldn't find any other reasons why mainframes would still be the best option for a newly designed system?
The TL;DR is that some might want to rather run 1 or 2 systems (mainframe) instead of 100 physical machines (conventional distributed cattle system).
Now, IBM does make it quite expensive but the mainframe has some pretty cool features like pay-for-what-you-use (which you of course get with the cloud, but not so much if you also want your data in-house).
Anyway, it is a fun beer topic if nothing else :-)
This was an insanely cool read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun and learning. I doubt there’s a legit use-case for a mainframe even in business environments. All the “reliability” it gives you can be re-implemented on commodity hardware and still come out ahead compared to the costs of buying & maintaining a mainframe.
I wonder how much cheaper it is to implement software for one, huge machine that „just works”, vs the usual way of implementing for a network of distributed machines. Distributed programming is NOT easy, and, even if the hard parts are supposedly implemented by various protocols/frameworks, these solutions constrain the way you can program and also have a ton of „interesting” failure states - just take a look at logs…
CICS and IMS definitely made it easy to create scalable software decades ago. It is not that different from the frameworks we have invented to make distributed systems viable that you mention, which I find insanely cool.
One of the cool things of running e.g. Ceph is that it exposes a familiar API (POSIX filesystem) which makes things easy to integrate with. The mainframe is like that but for hardware. VMware has similar things to some degree where your VM can be kept alive across hardware failure, but not really on the same level.
Anyway, I will stop here but I could go on for hours :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you Google around a bit, mainframes are pretty expensive, but have very high up times and other benefits.
Can't you get to that uptime with a well-configured cluster? I tried to find more information but couldn't find any other reasons why mainframes would still be the best option for a newly designed system?
He dropped over $23,000 on a mainframe just to "play with and learn how it works"? Finally he can run a personal Minecraft server.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even sure if there are still use cases where companies use main frames for newly developed systems. Even core banking systems can be build without using a main frame.
Do you have a source on that new banks do not use mainframes? I'd love to learn what new banks use to talk to older banks.
Internationally also “MT” messages are used, which is also a file with specified format.
So it doesn’t really matter what stack you run, as long as it can create files and send them out :-)
It's not the same, but if you'd like to have a go at mainframe technologies you can do it with a Pi Zero: https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/my-raspberry-pi-thinks... Once you have the basic emulator setup working, check out the Turnkey system below. It's MVS 3.8 so not current Z/OS. If you google around for z/os ADCD, you might find an actual Z/OS CD to try next. http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/
Bit of an understatement, MVS 3.8j was released in 1981.