3 ms·

The sales job Amazon et al did in convincing the world resilience was the job of app developers, not the system vendor, was quite impressive. And while it's tr

The sales job Amazon et al did in convincing the world resilience was the job of app developers, not the system vendor, was quite impressive. And while it's true that commodity folks could stand to learn from mainframe folks - serverless looks quite a lot like a forty years on re-invention of CICS if you squint a bit - your story reminds me how profoundly true the opposite is, as well. I've been part of a team that ran Linux on s390x, and it was a great exercise in demonstrating that however reliable your mainframe, it's still a SPOF. Even if you don't have my bad luck of four catastrophic hardware failures in as many years, your one reliable box still depends on the power, network fabric, storage fabric, etc at a single site. If you want to avoid losing your business when a sparky screws up, you need... several mainframes. At which point you're spending an absolutely astronomical amount to either sysplex, or you're building resilience into your applications, just like a bitty box. And yes, so many mainframe folks are so very out of touch with the broader world. In around 2016 I had the supposed regional tech expert on z-Series system lecture me (rather snidely) on how: 1. s390 processors were 20 - 40 times more performant that Intel processors (demonstrably not true for any workload I cared about). 2. You could not do virtualisation on x86_64. It was impossible. With a straight face, in the year 2016, this guy told me, and clearly believed, that it was not possible to run heterogenous virtualised workloads on an Intel processor. Apparently tens of billions of Jeff Bezos' net worth literally did not exist for him. There was more, but it was like talking to someone who had been frozen in a block of ice since 1996.

southern_cross 8y ago
Given what is currently known today (there may be more bombshells yet to come) about x86 system- and chip-level vulnerabilities, both unintentional and intentional, I'm not sure that any sane CxO would allow their data to come anywhere near the platform if they were starting all over today again from scratch. Not that I would necessarily trust any other vendor either (especially not Microsoft), but still ... Always remember (and don't ever forget) that the only reason most of us have even heard of Intel and Microsoft is because of their relationship to IBM back in the day. They weren't chosen, nor did they ascend to great heights, based the quality of their products. Rather IBM chose them mostly for the sake of its own convenience, and then they leveraged that relationship to the hilt.
- rodgerd 8y ago
  s390x is subject to speculative execution attacks, just like x86_64. Your position appears to be rooted in superstition, rather than facts.
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    Indeed, but what is Intel up to these days - at least eight different variations of attack here? And let's not forget about the whole Intel ME thing, either. BTW, just because a speculative execution attack or whatever is theoretically possible on an IBM system doesn't necessarily mean that it can be carried out in any practical sense, given the overall design of those systems and their general level of built-in security. But IBM can't just sit there and ignore the possibility, either. Another problem they have these days relates to open source software and such, which they've been porting to their platforms much more lately. If a security patch for that software comes out then they still have to apply it, even if there may be no practical way to exploit it on their systems. And it can be quite unnerving to see long lists of such patches show up on a regular basis for systems which are otherwise generally considered to be rock solid.

southern_cross 8y ago

Given what is currently known today (there may be more bombshells yet to come) about x86 system- and chip-level vulnerabilities, both unintentional and intentional, I'm not sure that any sane CxO would allow their data to come anywhere near the platform if they were starting all over today again from scratch. Not that I would necessarily trust any other vendor either (especially not Microsoft), but still ... Always remember (and don't ever forget) that the only reason most of us have even heard of Intel and Microsoft is because of their relationship to IBM back in the day. They weren't chosen, nor did they ascend to great heights, based the quality of their products. Rather IBM chose them mostly for the sake of its own convenience, and then they leveraged that relationship to the hilt.

rodgerd 8y ago
s390x is subject to speculative execution attacks, just like x86_64. Your position appears to be rooted in superstition, rather than facts.
- southern_cross 8y ago
  Indeed, but what is Intel up to these days - at least eight different variations of attack here? And let's not forget about the whole Intel ME thing, either. BTW, just because a speculative execution attack or whatever is theoretically possible on an IBM system doesn't necessarily mean that it can be carried out in any practical sense, given the overall design of those systems and their general level of built-in security. But IBM can't just sit there and ignore the possibility, either. Another problem they have these days relates to open source software and such, which they've been porting to their platforms much more lately. If a security patch for that software comes out then they still have to apply it, even if there may be no practical way to exploit it on their systems. And it can be quite unnerving to see long lists of such patches show up on a regular basis for systems which are otherwise generally considered to be rock solid.