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IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#61

Post by zozbot234 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #41
mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and…

> There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software.

You actually need both, the point of the extremely resilient hardware is that it can act as the single source of truth when you need it - including perhaps hosting some web-based transactions that directly affect your single source of truth. (Calling this a "model" for web-based infrastructure in general would be misleading though: a credit card transaction on the web is not your ordinary website! The web is just an implementation technology here.) Everything else can be ephemeral open systems, which is orders-of-magnitude cheaper.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#62

Post by vbezhenar »

roncesvalles wrote: post #41
mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and…

What I think today people do:

1. They run complicated infrastructure software, written by third-party developers.

2. And they run their own simple programs on top of them.

So for example you can rent Kubernetes cluster from AWS and run simple HTTP server. If your server crashes, Kubernetes will restart it, so it's resilient. There will be records in some metrics which will light up some alerts and eventually people will know about it and will fix it.

Another example: your simple program does some REST GET query. This query failed for some reason. But that query was intercepted by middleware proxy and that proxy determines that HTTP response was 5xx, so it can retry it. So it retries it few times with properly calibrated duration and eventually gets a response and propagates it back to the simple program. Simple program had no idea about all the stuff happening to make it work, it just threw HTTP query and got a response.

There's a lot of complicated machinery to enable simple programs to be part of resilient architecture. That's a goal, anyway.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#63

Post by freedomben »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #45
Frieren wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.

Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about. IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM. Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers d…

SpaceX is pretty heavily in consumer products/services now that Starlink is big. But otherwise yes you are correct.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#65

Post by g947o »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #60
roncesvalles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and…

> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example TSYS is super expensive and is dying out. The current generation of banking software is very much shifting to distributed software across commodity data centers.

Source? Interested in learning more about this

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#66

Post by freedomben »

p-e-w wrote: post #15
mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.

Google was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#67

Post by phrotoma »

parthdesai wrote: post #57
phrotoma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.

Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land.

A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence.

And that was circa 2010.

One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#68

Post by formerly_proven »

silvestrov wrote: post #5

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI. So why would IBM add ARM? > As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run…

IBM has two architectures which are de-facto only used by them, s390x and ppc64le. They have poured a lot of resources into having open source software support those targets, and this announcement might mean they find it easier/cheaper going forward to virtualize ARM instead and maybe even migrate slowly to ARM.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#69

Post by panick21_ »

shrimppersimmon wrote: post #28
mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER. Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications. They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.

The designed many, many more CPU architectures.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#70

Post by vbezhenar »

parthdesai wrote: post #57
phrotoma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.

I don't think "know COBOL" is enough. I'm pretty sure I can learn COBOL in a week. It's more about "know COBOL and know all this old stuff like CLIs, etc, and know all these old approaches".
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