Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

www-03.ibm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#81

Post by jbergens »

pbourke wrote: post #64
drKarl wrote: post #59

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transaction…

Computers, even these, are cheaper than development and opportunity costs for a complex system. Especially if that system has been around for 30+ years and lies at the core of a large business.

But development for mainframes seems to be much more costly than development on pc's. If you need this type of machine you need it, but it will probably cost you a lot to work with it over the years.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#82

Post by TallGuyShort »

halayli wrote: post #34
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system

I know that but this is a very general definition of TPS. How many CPU cycles a transaction requires? It varies on the transaction of course. So I am wondering why they use TPS as a unit when it can be anything.

You're thinking very much in terms of a PC architecture. Many components of the mainframe including a lot of the I/O hardware and some instructions in the assembly language itself are record oriented, and within reasonable limits operate on an entire record at once. It's not that big of a jump to go from entire records being atomic operations to at least speaking about entire transactions being the basic, atomic units of computation in the system.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#83

Post by pdardeau »

drKarl wrote: post #59

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transaction…

You're regurgitating 'common' wisdom here, but you really should check your assumptions and reality when it comes to current mainframes. IBM's mainframes have a minimum and maximum number of engines (CPU). An engine can be either general purpose (I forget the acronym they use) for use with z/OS, or can be a specialty engine (IFL, zIIP, zAAP). My understanding is that it's the same hardware, just a simple firmware update to tell the engine what 'type' it is. An IFL (what you would use to run Linux under z/VM) is significantly cheaper than the general purpose one used for z/OS. Also, mainframes can be loaded with more engines that what you've paid for -- this is what IBM calls Capacity-On-Demand (COD). So you can temporarily activate additional engines to handle spikes. The zSeries has some fantastic capabilities for Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS). The systems I've been around keep engine utilizations quite high (98/99%) as the norm.

A mainframe is typically partitioned into multiple, smaller systems. This is what IBM calls a Logical Partition (LPAR). This partitioning is done with firmware called PR/SM. This capability has been around since the 3090 (mid to late 80's). Within an LPAR, one typically installs either z/OS or z/VM (there are other systems too, but less commonly used this way). Running in an LPAR is 'bare metal'. Within z/VM, there's typically a mix of guest types, but this is where Linux would typically be configured to run. z/VM has some pretty impressive capabilities and has been around for a LONG time. It's very stable. The biggest things that you would probably dislike about it are: (1) one uses a 3270 emulator to do day-to-day system-level admin work, (2) it only runs (legally) on real mainframe hardware, and (3) much of IBM's jargon is dated and would unfamiliar to people coming from x86.

The modern mainframe hardware and software has an impressive feature set for virtualized networking (networking is all software defined and runs within the box). This means you can set up hundreds or thousands of Linux guests and have them on networks that are all virtualized within z/VM. And of course, z/VM guests can be created and spun-up on demand and stopped on-demand. This has been there for decades.

IBM now has support for OpenStack in z/VM. From what I've perused, it seems to be quite slick. Assuming it all works as advertised, this would make folks coming from x86 feel much more at home.

Many seem to think that distributed systems are so much cheaper. You can't just think of it as the price of the rack server though. You have to include everything in the mix to understand the total cost: hardware, software, networking, people (headcount and consulting), power and cooling, floorspace, and intangibles (such as capabilities). When you do the math, mainframes running Linux under z/VM are often fairly economical (YMMV).

Once you throw off the stereotypes and objectively dig into the modern mainframe, you might be surprised at what you find.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#84

Post by wmf »

feld wrote: post #74

The "encryption" buzzword is worthless without details. And I wonder if they'll stand behind their product if their crypto flavor of choice is broken and needs to be changed. Otherwise that's an expensive brick of swiss cheese.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cry... (previous generation) http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/

One reason for industry standards is that they distribute risk across the whole industry. So if NIST crypto is broken the entire industry goes down together; one company wouldn't have a competitive disadvantage.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#85

Post by pdardeau »

erglkjahlkh wrote: post #29
spydum wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true.. Though I recall the power7 stuff being released years ago as a very tech heavy event, and yet it seemed to go down without much of an impact as well (though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing). I think people who are invested (culturally/mentally)in ibm will continue to buy ibm (and no doubt be successful). I just don't see them growing any new markets.

I have participated in sales, and I did not want to get into hours long discussion (boring, and not really important) about what Power/AIX offers so I boiled it down for potential customers like this: If you want the best with insane price level, buy into Power/AIX. If you are not really sure, please don't. You need to train administrators (with larger setups) - or prepare to shell in a lot of money, the hardware con…

> the [Power/AIX] virtualization is insanely good in practice

This is my experience as well. IMO, Power/AIX has the most sophisticated virtualization available. IBM just has no idea how to market it.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#86

Post by drKarl »

pdardeau wrote: post #83
drKarl wrote: post #59

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transaction…

You're regurgitating 'common' wisdom here, but you really should check your assumptions and reality when it comes to current mainframes. IBM's mainframes have a minimum and maximum number of engines (CPU). An engine can be either general purpose (I forget the acronym they use) for use with z/OS, or can be a specialty engine (IFL, zIIP, zAAP). My understanding is that it's the same hardware, just a simple firmware upd…

Excellent explanation! Specially the fact that within a mainframe you can create hundreds or even thousands of virtualized linux guests, which can be created or destroyed on demand. That makes for a much more compelling use case!

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#87

Post by karambahh »

Shivetya wrote: post #57
jlarocco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.…

I am on an iSeries, the little brother to the z. We have a pair of zSeries as well. COBOL and RPG (its fully free form by the way, looks like any other language) are both very much rooted in business logic, in particular math. Their number handling is well known and without inconsistencies of many newer languages. That and the code base is well established and works. Throw in that memory leaks are nearly non existent…

I've been lucky enough to do an internship in banking, where Cobol is (and I guess will be for the foreseable future) the core language.

I didn't have to write lots of Cobol, but it's been very educational: both its very rigorous syntax (and number handling as you said!) and the fact that the code I was modifying had been written even before I was born.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

Cobol in itself is not a bad language at all! Mainframes are obviously rock solid and for development purposes, open source implementations of MVS exist (and were already useful 15 years ago, such as Hercules[1])

[1]http://www.hercules-390.org/

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#88

Post by ask123 »

I have been working in the mainframe industry for over 5 years now and i know tons of company (government, banks, insurance and others) are still running mainframe. I picked this field because i saw the opportunity of how alot of the old folks are retiring and companies are willing to pay alot of money to get young folks to join and learn the mainframe. Honestly its not even that hard as long as you are willing to learn.... what are your thoughts about it? If someone was willing to train people, would people be interested in it?

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#89

Post by Erwin »

gojock wrote: post #79
aries1980 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.

yes but buying 3 of them gets you 3 machines that can do 3GIPS, not one machine that can do 9GIPS

That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#90

Post by graycat »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
graycat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In about 1993 or so, at IBM, PL/I was being supported by just one guy! If they have a new release, then they may have put some more people on it! PL/I is not totally out of date! E.g., it has some really sweetheart scope of names rules. The On Conditions are generally nicer than Try-Catch, e.g., if in a code block A and do a Goto out of it to a statement label in a containing code block B (it's fair to call PL/I a bl…

> It's been said that the golden age of language design was the 1960s. C was designed after PL/I and was a really big step down so that it could compile on a DEC mini-computer with 8 KB of main memory while PL/I always had at least 64 KB. UNIX's success in the market brought C upon us. Actually it was a very big step down, not only in terms of what other systems programming languages of the same era were capable of,…

> Algol for B5000

Early in my career I wrote some Algol. So, got to love block structured languages and adopted the style of left margin indention then called publication Algol.

I was on the computer selection committee at FedEx, and from what it had we were impressed with Algol, etc. So a Burroughs system is what we recommended and got.

Alas, it was too slow. Soon the computing was way, way behind, and Big Blue got called in and got a really big, new account. The MVT/MVS family of operating systems, with JCL, etc. was like an unanesthetized root canal procedure while undergoing a barbed wire enema, but it could get the work done.

Generally that computing is having problems with virus is a total bummer -- we should be able to run malicious code safely.

Gee, Flash keeps telling me their code is a security risk. No joke! And that's version 12 or so of their code. Flash guys, I've got more to do than be a lab rat running on a wheel going 'round and 'round downloading code.

Yup, looks like Flash guys or someone was correct: I spent all of December and part of January fighting a virus on Windows: Kept getting instances of iexpore.exe running. Yes, that is the EXE of Windows Internet Explorer (IE). So, I got those instances even without starting IE. So, I ran Microsoft's latest virus removal tools, days for each, and they found nothing. The virus was still there. So, I did a Windows System Restore back to the earliest copy I had, 2 months ago. Seems to have worked. But that was about six weeks of virus mud wrestling for no good reason.

A simple Google search shows that discussions about fighing that iexplore.exe problem is all over the Web; apparently it is a very common virus.

Flash guys, are you to blame for that one?

Flash guys: Programming lesson 1 in Coding 101: Check your input and detect any problems. If the input is not suitably clean, then refuse to use it. If the specifications of your input is too complicated for a check, at least good checks while running, then correct your specifications. Flash guys, I can understand one bug, but 12? Are you guys even trying, I mean trying to fix bugs instead of pushing users to download?

And Microsoft guys, why do you let your code let bad guys somewhere east of Moscow mess up my computer? You guys just like shipping bugs? Believe me, I do not like fixing viruses.

As I recall, Multics was written in PL/I. Prime had a version of PL/I and used it for much of their operating system.

Once Google ran a recruiting ad and I sent them a resume. I got a phone call from one of their recruiters, and his big question was "What is your favorite programming language?"

I said, "PL/I".

Wrong answer! Likely he was looking for C++.

Come on guy, I want to do something other than fight memory leaks -- in PL/I if some work is some part of my code raises an On Condition (a software version of an interrupt, which might also have been from a hardware interrupt), then in the code block that gets executed by the On Unit that has been established for that condition, can decide what to do with the interrupt. So, one thing to do is just to kill off that work that raised the interrupt. So, say that the block of the On Unit that gets executed is X in code block B, some code in block B did the function call that got the work going, and just want to kill off that work. So, from block X just do a Goto to the statement label want in block B and not in block X, and presto, bingo, that work is killed off, that is, wiped clean by the wrath of non-local Goto. So, in particular, likely all the storage (all except based storage) allocated by that worked to be killed off is freed. So, look, Ma, no memory leaks from exceptional condition handling!

Google guys: The original definition of C++ was just as a pre-processor to C. And you want to assume that that is a lot better than what IBM, George Radin, etc. did with PL/I? Do you have anyone who understands PL/I?

Post reply on HN