5 ms·

Every large financial institution, airline, or large company that does millions of transactions an hour that isn't competing with IBM or young enough to impleme

by surge 11y ago

Every large financial institution, airline, or large company that does millions of transactions an hour that isn't competing with IBM or young enough to implement a different platform that can scale to that level. There is a z/OS security talk I saw that partially dispels the myths and prejudices against mainframes as legacy. In some cases z/OS is more modern than what you might find on your desktop and OSs like Linux are implementing features in its kernel that have been in zOS for years.

ghuntley 11y ago
That would be Soldier of Fortran - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfl4spvM5DI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfl4spvM5DI
- surge 11y ago
  Right I love his stuff. I was thinking of his talk at BSides LV 2014 which he gave the same talk but he also had talks this year also at BSides and DefCon. I also wanted to mention that where I've worked and many other places there is a crisis of brain drain at companies as the mainframe experts who are highly paid retire out and there are programs to recruit young people who are more attracted to other platforms. There is a lot of pay and job security in the field. I know of one situation where a guy past retirement is paid full salary to work 1/3 of full-time from his vacation home because the company could not afford to lose his knowledge and struggled to find someone competent enough to learn under him that was interested in mainframe. In other words, someone young with these skills would be highly paid and in higher demand at many companies.
  - DigitalJack 11y ago
    Is there any way to learn this sort of thing outside of being at a company with a z/architecture mainframe? I know about the Hercules project, but as far as I can tell, you can only run predecessors to Z/OS (due to licensing as I understand it), and zLinux.
    - ghuntley 11y ago
      Yep. IBM has been running a hackathon since early 2002 all around the world as a recruiting funnel to resolve the talent shortage problems @surge refers to. Runs every year, all across the world and there are always great prizes (mainframe tshirts, ipads, iphones, macbook pros) just for completing the exercises plus side-track options to drop out of uni and instantly obtain six-figure employment at one of IBM's customers if you do well. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/academic/masterthemainframe/ http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/academic/masterthe... and https://www.facebook.com/MasterTheMainframe https://www.facebook.com/MasterTheMainframe
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
MichaelGG 11y ago
A million tx/hour is only few hundred/second. I've done call routing, including full ACID balance updates, at over 10x that volume, on commodity hardware and software. Why is this a huge challenge for anyone? I get the feeling it's mostly legacy plus scenarios where the rigor IBM applies is valuable and you go along with whatever they suggest.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  It depends on the size/type of the transaction of course... A financial transaction might not be exactly comparable with a call setup.
  - StillBored 11y ago
    IBM doesn't have magic pixie dust in zseries mainframes. I had one, and trust me, you can beat it in every single metric with commodity hardware. What makes them "faster" in many cases is that the decades old apps were written by people "with a clue" and they run pretty much on the hardware. I've had a joke going for a few years, that websphere was created to cause efforts to port off the mainframe to fail. AKA its pretty much impossible to take something running in ztpf, rewrite it in java and plunk it on a EC2 instance and have a hopes chance in hell of making it work without spending more than the next two decades of mainframe maintenance costs in monthly amazon bills. That doesn't mean you can't rewrite it in C++ on a DL580 with an attached Flash840 and leave the mainframe in the dust if you have competent programmers.
    - jussij 11y ago
      > you can beat it in every single metric with commodity hardware. The zSeries selling point is not the hardware, but the reliability (which is in fact the hardware). The z in that series stands for zero down time and they are not selling hardware, but close to 100% reliability. Now in reality, no one can guarantee zero down time, but IBM does in fact guarantee 5 nines (99.999%) and 6 nines (99.9999%) up time and that guarantee costs money. You certainly can't get those sort of up-time numbers using nothing but commodity hardware.
  - 11y ago

by surge 11y ago

ghuntley 11y ago

That would be Soldier of Fortran - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfl4spvM5DI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfl4spvM5DI

surge 11y ago
Right I love his stuff. I was thinking of his talk at BSides LV 2014 which he gave the same talk but he also had talks this year also at BSides and DefCon. I also wanted to mention that where I've worked and many other places there is a crisis of brain drain at companies as the mainframe experts who are highly paid retire out and there are programs to recruit young people who are more attracted to other platforms. There is a lot of pay and job security in the field. I know of one situation where a guy past retirement is paid full salary to work 1/3 of full-time from his vacation home because the company could not afford to lose his knowledge and struggled to find someone competent enough to learn under him that was interested in mainframe. In other words, someone young with these skills would be highly paid and in higher demand at many companies.
- DigitalJack 11y ago
  Is there any way to learn this sort of thing outside of being at a company with a z/architecture mainframe? I know about the Hercules project, but as far as I can tell, you can only run predecessors to Z/OS (due to licensing as I understand it), and zLinux.
  - ghuntley 11y ago
    Yep. IBM has been running a hackathon since early 2002 all around the world as a recruiting funnel to resolve the talent shortage problems @surge refers to. Runs every year, all across the world and there are always great prizes (mainframe tshirts, ipads, iphones, macbook pros) just for completing the exercises plus side-track options to drop out of uni and instantly obtain six-figure employment at one of IBM's customers if you do well. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/academic/masterthemainframe/ http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/academic/masterthe... and https://www.facebook.com/MasterTheMainframe https://www.facebook.com/MasterTheMainframe
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

MichaelGG 11y ago

A million tx/hour is only few hundred/second. I've done call routing, including full ACID balance updates, at over 10x that volume, on commodity hardware and software. Why is this a huge challenge for anyone? I get the feeling it's mostly legacy plus scenarios where the rigor IBM applies is valuable and you go along with whatever they suggest.

rdtsc 11y ago
It depends on the size/type of the transaction of course... A financial transaction might not be exactly comparable with a call setup.
- StillBored 11y ago
  IBM doesn't have magic pixie dust in zseries mainframes. I had one, and trust me, you can beat it in every single metric with commodity hardware. What makes them "faster" in many cases is that the decades old apps were written by people "with a clue" and they run pretty much on the hardware. I've had a joke going for a few years, that websphere was created to cause efforts to port off the mainframe to fail. AKA its pretty much impossible to take something running in ztpf, rewrite it in java and plunk it on a EC2 instance and have a hopes chance in hell of making it work without spending more than the next two decades of mainframe maintenance costs in monthly amazon bills. That doesn't mean you can't rewrite it in C++ on a DL580 with an attached Flash840 and leave the mainframe in the dust if you have competent programmers.
  - jussij 11y ago
    > you can beat it in every single metric with commodity hardware. The zSeries selling point is not the hardware, but the reliability (which is in fact the hardware). The z in that series stands for zero down time and they are not selling hardware, but close to 100% reliability. Now in reality, no one can guarantee zero down time, but IBM does in fact guarantee 5 nines (99.999%) and 6 nines (99.9999%) up time and that guarantee costs money. You certainly can't get those sort of up-time numbers using nothing but commodity hardware.
- 11y ago