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Buying an IBM Mainframe

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Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#91

Post by kev009 »

bluecmd wrote: post #29
kev009 wrote: post #14

It's a lot cheaper in to do this in the US and with a long term view, my total outlay was under $3000 for a z800, z114, ds6800 all in with transportation. I also temporarily had two DS8870s but resold them because they were worth a lot more than I paid and I will pick up another for cheaper over the course of this year. Both of my frames have HMCs, the z114 was even IBM banded and "MSQ" maintenance service qualified…

Hi kev! Thanks for your comments, you are 100% right. Yes, living in the states make this hobby waaay easier. The surplus auctions help as well, having various goverments with various languages going in Europe does not make it as easy :-). Was $3000 your outlay for the system + the DS6800? Or just the shipping? That is a great find in that case! I just want to correct a small thing: You need SEs (the frame mounted la…

IIRC $2k for the z114, $1 for the z800 and a few hundred for a one way moving truck rental I moved it myself, and maybe a few hundred for the ds6800 which I got lucky when it was FICON enabled the auction did not specify. There are three off-label mainframe support companies in the US that broker machines and parts for companies trying to bleed out their machines due to some transition plan or whatever. I've made acquaintance with one of them so I got the z114 for a great price because it wasn't suitable for any of their common customers and they were able to move it quickly from decom to me.

For the HMC I recall reading this in a manual or hearing it from a mainframe professional but I can't quickly cite it. It may be for some things that a home user doesn't necessarily need, like remote access. Can you access the z/OS System Console from the SEs, that is the only critical thing I can think of.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#92

Post by floatboth »

callesgg wrote: post #89

Is there something that makes these ibm mainframes special like some feature? Are they simply like a big computer?

From what I've heard, redundancy and scalability in a single machine (like, you can hot-swap CPUs on a running machine and have lots of redundant RAM, etc.) and being able to run an OS with backwards compatibility all the way to the fscking 1960s or whatever.

That OS is… something: https://medium.com/@bellmar/hello-world-on-z-os-a0ef31c1e87f

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#93

Post by kev009 »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #83

I cringed when he said he bought a DS6800. When I worked at IBM we had about 20 of them and they were shit. Always broke and getting into weird states. No way I'd run one with a support contract.

My understanding is a team ported the ESS "Shark" code from AIX to the little Linux 2.x embedded controllers. It looked like Adaptec OEM hardware when I tore mine apart. I can see how that would go poorly versus the proper cabinet sized arrays. They are definitely good enough for home use but I agree not what you want any production workload on. I heard from a 3rd party support company there is some part that is prone to failure but I cannot recall what it was.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#94

Post by mrbill »

dboreham wrote: post #82
jandrese wrote: post #74

My interest in doing this (my wife would kill me anyway) kind of evaporated when in almost every paragraph he hit on licensing issues you might have. What a headache for someone who just wants to tinker on the hardware and maybe buy a few parts off ebay for the full experience. I have no doubt software updates, documentation, and everything is locked behind some portal that requires you to have a stupidly expensive s…

Shout out to HP (fka Dec) with their support for hobby use of VMS. I have a couple of VAXen (just desktop microvax, no need to get excited) that I had running 15 years ago using the hobby license, which it seems still exists : https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548

It definitely still exists - I used my old DECUS membership number to get a new set of license PAKs (and a link to download the install media and software kits) last week.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#95

Post by msla »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #84
jschwartzi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My second thought about this was "no wonder IBM is largely dead outside of stodgy corporate IT. Nobody can actually learn to use it without dropping $100,000+ on equipment."

Back when I was at IBM one of the hats I wore was AS/400 administrator and programmer. I miss working with it and would like to buy one for my home lab, but the licensing is a killer. I find used ones on the market, but they usually don't include the license keys or media, and without a support contract can't get them. I really wish IBM had a hobbyist program. I wouldn't expect it be free, but I wouldn't mind paying…

The irony is that IBM had one of the first Open Source communities: SHARE, dating back to 1955, shared software up to and including a whole OS, SOS (SHARE Operating System), well before Unix or home computers even existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#96

Post by cfallin »

jussij wrote: post #57
Koshkin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does all the energy get converted to heat? What about “useful work”?

The law of Conservation of Energy says all that input electrical energy going into the system has to be accounted for in the form of some other energy. Now the only thing moving will be the fans and the hard disks, which means only a very little of that input energy will be converted to kinetic energy. The system will not be storing energy, meaning none of the input energy is being converted to potential energy. Now…

Even the kinetic energy (fan motors, HDD motors) eventually becomes heat. E.g., the moving air from fans dissipates its energy in turbulence in the room's air, and in a closed system (airtight room), the resistance to airflow (resulting in heat) must equal the pressure differential created by the fans, unless the air builds up unbounded speed. Likewise, torque to keep the HDD platters spinning will be exactly equal to frictional losses once the disks are spun up, so all power into the spindle motors becomes heat.

Even noise that leaves the system either becomes heat as the pressure waves dissipate through the atmosphere, or else do work on eardrums (mechanical energy) which eventually becomes heat as the inner ear resists the motion of the ear bones :-)

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#97

Post by leokennis »

bluecmd wrote: post #34
dx034 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Author here, I might write a blog article about that because it is really quite interesting. 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 a…

Well...you sort of “pay for what you use”. I believe the extremely simplified version is you pay for the peak CPU usage (excluding specialty processors like ZIIP) in a moving 4 hour average window.

Context: I work for a large organization that used to run several physical Z13 mainframes, all of them containing several sysplexes. If we had issues, an IBM consultant would fly in within the day. We were definitely not IBM’s biggest customer but we were not insignificant for them either.

We had a lot of mainframe support staff (so not people programming for mainframe but people maintaining storage, DB2, z/OS upgrades etc.) and I think even for them, the IBM bill was more or less: we see a large number, no idea why it’s this amount, but we cannot prove it is not right, so I guess we’ll just pay it.

Mainframe billing is really complicated.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#98

Post by Roboprog »

bluecmd wrote: post #58
aphrax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a one off cost? Is there a yearly cost for keeping it in the datacenter?

There is recurring costs as well, something like $400/mo in power usage bills, and another $400 in internet and space rental fees per month. The folks over at the datacenter have been very happy to have me so there might be some discounts in there as well, but I am not sure. My goal was to keep the recurring cost as low as I can, and compared to what hosting a beast like this in a conventional datacenter would cost I…

So, the M5 (M05) needed more power?

As somebody who started out in the 80s with Apple II and C64 stuff the year before going to college, I always laughed at the old “Star Trek’ episode where the new computer has to tap into the main engine for power. After seeing your new bit of kit, that doesn’t sound so far fetched :-)

Have fun with this beast.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#99

Post by danpalmer »

jasonhansel wrote: post #86
jasonhansel wrote: post #77

My current side project idea: build a modern programming language with a nice syntax that compiles (transpiles?) to mainframe COBOL, mostly to get mainframe programmers to stop writing code in SHOUTING ALL CAPS.

Note: is anyone interested in using something like this? If so, let me know! I'm curious as to how I can make it useful for people in the field.

As I understand it, the field is going in the other direction, namely JVM/CLR COBOL. This means that companies can migrate their COBOL codebases to “commodity hardware”, save on mainframe costs, and then progressively refactor into Java/.NET replacing bits of COBOL piecemeal.

The main company I’ve heard of doing this is MicroFocus, they have all the dev tooling for it for the major IDEs, compilers, etc.

One of the main things that complicates the problem, again as I understand it, is that there is no official COBOL spec. There are several versions from several vendors, but compilers have to account for mainframe hardware bugs, so there are many different targets that have to be supported. Most companies want a different, specific, set of compiler features.

Re: Buying an IBM Mainframe

#100

Post by pickle-wizard »

kev009 wrote: post #93
pickle-wizard wrote: post #83

I cringed when he said he bought a DS6800. When I worked at IBM we had about 20 of them and they were shit. Always broke and getting into weird states. No way I'd run one with a support contract.

My understanding is a team ported the ESS "Shark" code from AIX to the little Linux 2.x embedded controllers. It looked like Adaptec OEM hardware when I tore mine apart. I can see how that would go poorly versus the proper cabinet sized arrays. They are definitely good enough for home use but I agree not what you want any production workload on. I heard from a 3rd party support company there is some part that is pron…

Yeah I found the root linux password online. There was more than once I had to SSH in and fix the SLIP connection between the controllers when they went into a brain split.

If I recall correctly they were running SuSE Linux with Websphere App for management and DB2 storing all of the configuration information.

I hadn't heard they traced their linage back to the shark. That surprises me a bit because we had several of those and they were very reliable. Though thinking about it that makes sense.

Hopefully the later software fixed the reliability problems. I got rid of all of ours in about 2010 or so. Replaced them DS5000 on the Open Systems side (which had their own set of problems), and DS8000s on the Mainframe side. The DS8000 was pretty rock solid.

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