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Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?
- daly 10y agoOne reason is the installed base. I worked as systems programmer on mainframes for years. There are still a lot of them out there running legacy applications.
- svennek 10y agoBasic econ 101: they are still profitable...
- dekhn 10y agomainframes are designed for reliable, predictable high throughput. they have very long software and hardware support cycles. if I ran a business and a mainframe was the most cost-effective way to do it, I'd use one.
- agumonkey 10y agoI was surprised to see what is inside a mainframe. Dedicated IO blocks for instance. They're not beefed up standard PC.
- dekhn 10y agoummm... precisely! You can basically take a sufficiently provisioned mainframe and "carve it up" into virtual machines with guaranteed isolation and performance. This is unlike VMs running on an x86-64 server, where there is a lot of isolation and performance issues.
- brianwawok 10y agoThe flip side, is for the cost of 1 mainframe you can often buy 500 linux PCs.. which end up giving you 100x the CPU and 100x the IO of the mainframe (with a bit of other challenges like orchestration and such).
- dekhn 10y agosure... but I'd rather have 1 mainframe than 500 PCs. They typically have higher utilization, the problems don't need to be parallelized, you don't have to think about your network. I still use PCs for everything I do, haven't yet found a need for a mainframe personally.
- kpil 10y agoI have 1 mainframe, and which I had 500 PCs... It's solid engineering, but it's also a lot of branding. If you have a "golden egg" application that have a lot of internal state so you can't run it on 10 servers, then a mainframe might be a good solution to keep it running. I think the most common reason to have a mainframe is that you happen to have too many managers that used to be mainframe developers.
- kpil 10y agoAnd besides, I think you get at least 500x CPU. It's hard to beat Intel's CPUs.
- dekhn 10y agomainframe CPUs are no joke
- kpil 10y agoPer core? Numbers please. The zLinux CPUs are slower than my laptop.
- dekhn 10y agoThe processing unit in a z13 is a 5GHz, with up to eight cores per unit. There is an enormous cache hierarchy (much larger than largest Xeons) often with dedicated per-core cache resources. Are you working from the same data as me? Also, those CPUs, since they are hooked up to IO processors, tend to have higher utilization (less time waiting for data).
- cateye 10y agoBecause nobody ever got fired for buying one.
- andreiw 10y agoIBM didn't quit making servers - it just stepped out of the x86 server market. That's a big difference.
- dzdt 10y agoIt is really annoying that the linked article gives statistics only in completely meaningless forms: "a processor that contains 300 percent more memory than found on most servers and 100 percent more bandwidth" ... "able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day." What is a transaction, and what is processing one? "The concept of a 'mobile transaction' is a bit of marketing-speak." And no more detailed explanation! Of course the answer to the rhetorical title question is IBM makes them because customers buy them. I think the reasons they keep selling are (1) clients have legacy apps that are very critical and very well tested and run on mainframe environments and (2) mainframes give higher reliability than other single-box solutions. But these points are my take; the article doesn't say anything meaningful!
- alfalfasprout 10y agoTo answer these questions for you: mainframes are perfect for transactional workflows. Wait but you haven't told me what a transaction is!!! So... by a transactional workflow, typically it's going to be some workflow where you get a request, perform some operations on a database, and then sometimes return a response. This can be a withdrawal from an ATM, a trade received by a broker, a new user registering on a website, etc. Mainframes have CPUs and hardware designed to accelerate and make these transactions more robust over commodity hardware. An example is with hardware compression and robust transactional memory when using DB2. It's not uncommon to see mainframes with decades of uptime. You just don't get that with commodity hardware. Mainframes are cheap when you really do have simple transactional workflows like this at massive scale. Financial institutions are an obvious choice as a result. Since they're so reliable and you're dealing with a simple node, the cost savings can be significant.
- gozur88 10y agoPeople have been asking this question for decades, and the answers haven't changed - 1) mainframes do some things very well in terms of security and stability and 2) porting software is expensive. In the mid '90s I was working for a company that bought the "Mainframes are old technology and we're not an old technology company" line (those industry broadsheets should really be kept away from management) and set out to replace the old reliable mainframe with OTS Unix machines. We got the answer to the OP question and we got it good and hard.
- venomsnake 10y agoWhy on Earth has wired writing declined so much? Better title - Why there is still robust market for mainframes? IBM makes mainframes because industry needs and wants them. Why such need arise is the real question. And it is barely scratched in the article.