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IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

theregister.com

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Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#31

Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions. And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. Young people are smarter than going aboard a sinking ship.

> And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years.

I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means.

Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME.

GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amdahl in the US. In the 1980s thru the first half of the 1990s, Fujitsu's Japanese clones were popular in some countries outside Japan (e.g. Australia), and Amdahl's clones enjoyed a lot of popularity in the US. However, while IBM's own mainframes went from 31-bit to 64-bit in 2000, Fujitsu's GS21 line got stuck on 31-bit. AFAIK, nobody uses it anymore except in Japan, non-Japanese customers either migrated off the mainframe or switched to IBM. In Japan, it clings on in government and some large corporations, but is deeply legacy.

BS2000 has a very different heritage. RCA used to sell mainframes in the US. One of their (several incompatible) mainframe lines was partially compatible with IBM S/360, having the same assembly language in user space. However, kernel mode instructions and the software were incompatible. Siemens in Germany bought the rights to it. It ended up surviving in Europe even after it died in the US. Eventually Siemens sold it to Fujitsu.

VME was originally the British mainframe manufacturer ICL, which Fujitsu ended up buying. The British government is (I believe) the only people still using it, and they've been trying to get rid of it.

Both VME and BS2000 haven't had their own physical hardware for years now – they are just software emulators running under Linux or Windows. As such, they are easy to "migrate to the Cloud". Fujitsu is likely to keep on supporting them (to some degree) as long as there remains at least one customer willing to pay enough $$$ to sustain it. Given that, any timeframes for phasing either out should be taken with a large grain of salt, since their future really depends on how long it takes the remaining customers to get off them.

Coming to this GS21 announcement – I understand Fujitsu wants to stop manufacturing and selling physical mainframes in Japan. They can just switch to software emulation like they do for BS2000 and VME. Like both of those, it can run fine in the cloud, and I expect they'll keep it running as long as there is customer demand. Promised future support timelines are very notional, if there is a big enough customer paying for an extension, the extension will happen. Plausibly, it could still be supported in 20 years time – maybe it is used by some essential Japanese government system, and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to migrate to a more modern platform end in failure (not an uncommon story for government IT projects)

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#32

Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions. And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. Young people are smarter than going aboard a sinking ship.

> And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means. Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME. GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amda…

I haven't kept touch with the mainframe industry, but yes, you captured it succinctly, last I knew, a lot of IBM mainframe stuff was running on emulators. Albeit on highly available hardware.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#33

In around 2015 or so, prior to social media, etc, there used to be a mainframe forum or two (perhaps they still exist) where a whole bunch of newbies from India used to hang out, to learn and grow their mainframe skills. It is the same time when there were stories floating around of mainframe veterans being let go. People have short term memory issues.

2015 is prior to social media?

Well, the comment ends by saying "People have ... memory issues", so it checks out.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no, the paywalled IBM Cloud LPARs are a joke. The mainframe is not a special thing anymore, hasn't been since the late 90s. It's just a server box. I work at a shop with a z/14. I would love it if we finished the last COBOL retirements and go back to the mainframe but this time to run container farms, fresh Go code, and use thr power to run way deeper matrices of tests that take days to run locally and cannot aff…

IBM could sell the future of the on premises z/xxx boxes as "datacenter in one rack" Running x86 in z/VM has been a discussion for 25 years. Just fucking do it. Let people run whatever they want. Just as people are excited about ARM for low-watt computing, make s390x just as exciting for people who want insane vertical resources but using the same dev tools that are used now for easy x86/ARM crossover. But IBM cultur…

Performance per dollar and per watt of IBM machines are wholly out of step with the market. As such, there's no motivation to re-use those machines after migration off z/OS or other IBM solutions anyway...

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#35
Open up the learning paths then. Trailhead.com from salesforce is an excellent learning platform they can copy.

And open up the technology. Open the microcode generators, open up the operating systems.

Civilians must be able to learn it. Not only enployees of banks, insurance and telcos.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why they bought RedHat.

And now that they’re McKinsey-izing Redhat, one can see the IBM footgun is still firing away.

IBM: Footgunning before the XT and before the Republican conformity dress code when it was cool to enable genocidal regimes for money. IBM is the quintessential big, dumb company that innovates in spurts and then is a perpetual loser because of all of its corporate bs.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#37

All the Pain an unclear future of the mainframe is IBM's fault. Its insanely closed ecosystem, from hardwar do software. No one other than IBM has access to it. Seems to me that going further not even IBM team will know how to manage. Once market builds an interesting compelling offer to mainframe, enterprises will leave IBM as fast as possible.

I find it strange that no one has reverse engineered and or cracked the platform and made key generators.

The microcode

The oses

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why they bought RedHat.

And now that they bought RedHat, they're eagerly dropping support for all linux distros that are not RedHat, and they're attempting to lock out anyone who wants a personally affordable RedHat-like system (CentOS...). If they succeed, it may even be hard to find decent RedHat sysadmins in the future. It's hard to keep up a trained workforce when they lock the doors so tight.

Yep. In the greedy drive to monetize the Meta's and Motorola's running Cent to force them onto RHEL, they're pulling a grenade pin and daring people to stay in the boat. Instead, they're alienating most of their future business of potential users and decision makers by attempting to emulate a worse than Oracle while disrespecting their users.

The value in something like Cent/RHEL is LTS stability. Really, the only valuable part of Cent/RHEL is the stable kernel because the userland rapidly becomes old and useless. Something like Ubuntu with a RHEL quality kernel with a 10 yr support lifecycle but without a separate foss/commercial version would be superior to either RHEL or Ubuntu. Canonical went full shark-jumping mickeymouse with their "Pro" subscription and non patching model unless you pay $.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#39
post #18

If IBM weren't hostile to the Hercules project and allowed local licensing to run z/OS, CICS, IMS and DB2 on it, perhaps more hobbyists would want to careerpath themselves on to the s390 architecture. I do love the s390 arch and the massive IO hardware over there, but IBM has paywalled down entry so hard that there is no audience. They even went to the trouble of making Go binaries transportable for direct execution…

Former P-series/AIX SME here. I agree 100%. IBM's training programs are a joke. P-series and mainframe machines have a lot of cool tech, and they're very resilient. They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running. x86 systems would more likely freeze/crash immediately. But the only reason I know P-series/AIX at all is because one small branch of IBM hired me for my linux skills back in 2011, and I learned on th…

> They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running.

That's also true for a Kubernetes cluster.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#40

All the Pain an unclear future of the mainframe is IBM's fault. Its insanely closed ecosystem, from hardwar do software. No one other than IBM has access to it. Seems to me that going further not even IBM team will know how to manage. Once market builds an interesting compelling offer to mainframe, enterprises will leave IBM as fast as possible.

I find it strange that no one has reverse engineered and or cracked the platform and made key generators. The microcode The oses

The answer is simple: no such needs ever...

To deploy mainframes, you've most likely spent millions, sometime might even be hundreds of millions. In other words, money is not the problem. So why would someone ever risk getting into huge trouble by reverse engineering or cracking?

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