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I don't quite understand what they're used for. Who buys these things and what are they doing with them that can't be done with other cheaper alternatives now?

I don't quite understand what they're used for. Who buys these things and what are they doing with them that can't be done with other cheaper alternatives now? The article says they're over $100k.

SteveNuts 11y ago
When I worked at $HugeHealthCareCompany they had a ton of Z systems. Mainly used for data crunching on huge data warehouses.
- blakesterz 11y ago
  Ah, so is it something like $HugeHealthCareCompany can't send this kind of data to AWS or something because of HIPPA or whatever? Along those lines, I'd bet banks and finance places can't ship anything outside either. Makes more sense now :-)
  - profeta 11y ago
    still doesn't answer why that platform though. 100k gets you lots and lots of servers with crypto hardware.
    - ethbro 11y ago
      I'd bet the problem is maintenance scaling. TCO of IBM mainframe + support + staff vs lots and lots of servers + staff + hardware staff (+ probably porting some legacy mainframe code to something distributed). If you're looking at a clean room build, it might not make sense often. But if you're starting with certain situations that accumulated over decades, maybe? I know a lot of the people I work with are gradually porting stuff off mainframe onto more modern hardware stacks, but Rome wasn't built in a day, etc etc.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Some quotes from the link scott_s provided: "The company's CEO said the total cost of ownership of the new mainframes is about 50% lower than that of the company's sprawling server farm." "However, mission-critical workloads that typically run on mainframes aren't a good match for public clouds, because mainframes are far more reliable. Public clouds such as Amazon's Amazon Web Services sometimes undergo unscheduled outages, and often the system must be rebooted in order to apply security patches or upgrades. For companies that require 100% uptime, public clouds simply aren't feasible."
  - lostmypassword2 11y ago
    You can run HIPAA workloads on AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/
AnonNo15 11y ago
Honestly, nothing that commodity x86 servers can't do.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  What commodity servers have Channel I/O with sustained 90+% utilization without virtual machines? And which support virtualization using software that passed pentesting with source? And which have 30+ years uptime at high volume sites? Really, because I'd love to buy them. I'd have believed you if you said VMS clusters or NonStop systems. They're not x86 either, though, although a VMS port is underway.
  - coleca 11y ago
    The mainframe shops I have worked in liked to talk about the continuous uptime of the mainframe, but it was always phrased in "unplanned outages". They still IPLed (Initial Process Load - aka rebooted) the mainframe every Sunday night, to apply maintenance patches to z/OS or perform other maintenance, which would take down all the applications. So, while the mainframe was technically up, I wouldn't call it continuous uptime, since the apps were all down. Just my observations, maybe better run mainframe orgs could work around that. Mainframes are very impressive beasts. The shops I know that use them needed them to do "big data" before such a term existed. They were the only game in town in the 80s and 90s to perform operations on massive quantities of data, and run massively parallel operations. Most people worry and generate alerts when their CPU goes over 80 or 90% utilization, but on the mainframe running at 100% utilization is the ideal scenario to maximize your investment. Once you're on the mainframe though, it's a very long and difficult process to get off. And usually there is little to no business incentive to do so. Want to embark on a 18 month 7-8 figure project to migrate off the mainframe, or spend that money to build X feature our customers have been demanding? Tough sell for the CIO..
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Interesting perspective and examples. Yeah, Im sure some get planned downtime. Ours never has that I've seen. We are a 24/7 business too. They might have Sysplex or something, though, to take one node down with system still running.
scott_s 11y ago
A decent background: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-i... Basically, highly transactional workloads that have severe performance and reliability requirements. If you're serving a web app, maybe you can spin up a bunch of instances on AWS because while performance and security are important, they're not that important. And by "not that important", I mean not important enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on. To a large consumer bank, it is that important. You also may be able to get away with having an eventual consistency model because it's okay if two different users see two different views of your app. But that's not okay for a bank processing credit card transactions, so they are forced to deal with highly transactional workloads which are now consistent. I had the same questions as you did, but after talking to some of the z systems folks, I think it may be the case that mainframes, or things that look like mainframes, will always be around. Consider that basically the entire consumer banking and insurance industries still use mainframes. It's possible to consider that an artifact of legacy, but it's also possible evidence that their use-case doesn't fit well with the alternatives (clusters of smaller systems). Disclaimer: I work for IBM Research, but not in this area.
- scholia 11y ago
  > Consider that basically the entire consumer banking and insurance industries still use mainframes. It's possible to consider that an artifact of legacy Legacy is certainly a large chunk of it. The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have been using IBM mainframes since the 1960s or 1970s, and some were IBM "shops" before computers were invented. The cost of moving software and data from a proprietary IBM stack would be enormous, even if you could guarantee that it would work. However, the failure rate and cost overruns that appear to be endemic to very large systems development (including IBMs) make moving a risky proposition. The average CEO is focused on quarterly numbers and is unlikely to stay around for very long. If IBM mainframes were in place decades before the CEO arrived, and will likely be around for at least a decade to come, why take the risk?
- jakub_h 11y ago
  Didn't pseudo-time solve these things a long time ago, only to be forgotten (and not developed further) by the mainstream?
vyrotek 11y ago
Someone asked a similar question a few years ago and there was a good discussion on HN about it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 My father's entire career revolved around IBM's TPF mainframe systems. Airline Reservation Systems, Credit Card Processing, and the IRS use it for extremely high volume processing.
orionblastar 11y ago
Mainframes are designed for 100s of users at the same time. They have a lot more I/O than desktop computers have. There is a lot of legacy COBOL and FORTRAN programs out there still in use that need legacy mainframes to run the code.

I don't quite understand what they're used for. Who buys these things and what are they doing with them that can't be done with other cheaper alternatives now? The article says they're over $100k.

SteveNuts 11y ago

When I worked at $HugeHealthCareCompany they had a ton of Z systems. Mainly used for data crunching on huge data warehouses.

blakesterz 11y ago
Ah, so is it something like $HugeHealthCareCompany can't send this kind of data to AWS or something because of HIPPA or whatever? Along those lines, I'd bet banks and finance places can't ship anything outside either. Makes more sense now :-)
- profeta 11y ago
  still doesn't answer why that platform though. 100k gets you lots and lots of servers with crypto hardware.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    I'd bet the problem is maintenance scaling. TCO of IBM mainframe + support + staff vs lots and lots of servers + staff + hardware staff (+ probably porting some legacy mainframe code to something distributed). If you're looking at a clean room build, it might not make sense often. But if you're starting with certain situations that accumulated over decades, maybe? I know a lot of the people I work with are gradually porting stuff off mainframe onto more modern hardware stacks, but Rome wasn't built in a day, etc etc.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Some quotes from the link scott_s provided: "The company's CEO said the total cost of ownership of the new mainframes is about 50% lower than that of the company's sprawling server farm." "However, mission-critical workloads that typically run on mainframes aren't a good match for public clouds, because mainframes are far more reliable. Public clouds such as Amazon's Amazon Web Services sometimes undergo unscheduled outages, and often the system must be rebooted in order to apply security patches or upgrades. For companies that require 100% uptime, public clouds simply aren't feasible."
- lostmypassword2 11y ago
  You can run HIPAA workloads on AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/

AnonNo15 11y ago

Honestly, nothing that commodity x86 servers can't do.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
What commodity servers have Channel I/O with sustained 90+% utilization without virtual machines? And which support virtualization using software that passed pentesting with source? And which have 30+ years uptime at high volume sites? Really, because I'd love to buy them. I'd have believed you if you said VMS clusters or NonStop systems. They're not x86 either, though, although a VMS port is underway.
- coleca 11y ago
  The mainframe shops I have worked in liked to talk about the continuous uptime of the mainframe, but it was always phrased in "unplanned outages". They still IPLed (Initial Process Load - aka rebooted) the mainframe every Sunday night, to apply maintenance patches to z/OS or perform other maintenance, which would take down all the applications. So, while the mainframe was technically up, I wouldn't call it continuous uptime, since the apps were all down. Just my observations, maybe better run mainframe orgs could work around that. Mainframes are very impressive beasts. The shops I know that use them needed them to do "big data" before such a term existed. They were the only game in town in the 80s and 90s to perform operations on massive quantities of data, and run massively parallel operations. Most people worry and generate alerts when their CPU goes over 80 or 90% utilization, but on the mainframe running at 100% utilization is the ideal scenario to maximize your investment. Once you're on the mainframe though, it's a very long and difficult process to get off. And usually there is little to no business incentive to do so. Want to embark on a 18 month 7-8 figure project to migrate off the mainframe, or spend that money to build X feature our customers have been demanding? Tough sell for the CIO..
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Interesting perspective and examples. Yeah, Im sure some get planned downtime. Ours never has that I've seen. We are a 24/7 business too. They might have Sysplex or something, though, to take one node down with system still running.

scott_s 11y ago

A decent background: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-i... Basically, highly transactional workloads that have severe performance and reliability requirements. If you're serving a web app, maybe you can spin up a bunch of instances on AWS because while performance and security are important, they're not that important. And by "not that important", I mean not important enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on. To a large consumer bank, it is that important. You also may be able to get away with having an eventual consistency model because it's okay if two different users see two different views of your app. But that's not okay for a bank processing credit card transactions, so they are forced to deal with highly transactional workloads which are now consistent. I had the same questions as you did, but after talking to some of the z systems folks, I think it may be the case that mainframes, or things that look like mainframes, will always be around. Consider that basically the entire consumer banking and insurance industries still use mainframes. It's possible to consider that an artifact of legacy, but it's also possible evidence that their use-case doesn't fit well with the alternatives (clusters of smaller systems). Disclaimer: I work for IBM Research, but not in this area.

scholia 11y ago
> Consider that basically the entire consumer banking and insurance industries still use mainframes. It's possible to consider that an artifact of legacy Legacy is certainly a large chunk of it. The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have been using IBM mainframes since the 1960s or 1970s, and some were IBM "shops" before computers were invented. The cost of moving software and data from a proprietary IBM stack would be enormous, even if you could guarantee that it would work. However, the failure rate and cost overruns that appear to be endemic to very large systems development (including IBMs) make moving a risky proposition. The average CEO is focused on quarterly numbers and is unlikely to stay around for very long. If IBM mainframes were in place decades before the CEO arrived, and will likely be around for at least a decade to come, why take the risk?
jakub_h 11y ago
Didn't pseudo-time solve these things a long time ago, only to be forgotten (and not developed further) by the mainstream?

vyrotek 11y ago

Someone asked a similar question a few years ago and there was a good discussion on HN about it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4446880 My father's entire career revolved around IBM's TPF mainframe systems. Airline Reservation Systems, Credit Card Processing, and the IRS use it for extremely high volume processing.

orionblastar 11y ago

Mainframes are designed for 100s of users at the same time. They have a lot more I/O than desktop computers have. There is a lot of legacy COBOL and FORTRAN programs out there still in use that need legacy mainframes to run the code.