5 ms·

"As late as 2017, IBM reported 92 of the top 100 banks still used mainframes for their core businesses." https://www.tpr.org/post/how-cobol-still-powers-global-

"As late as 2017, IBM reported 92 of the top 100 banks still used mainframes for their core businesses." https://www.tpr.org/post/how-cobol-still-powers-global-economy-60-years-old https://www.tpr.org/post/how-cobol-still-powers-global-econo...

bubblethink 7y ago
But why ? Other than inertia and legacy reasons that is. Is there some non partisan resource on this ? A paper or a neutral blog ? Whenever you try to research something like this, you end up on either IBM pages or pages by mainframe enthusiasts. I want to know exactly what you are buying compared to a regular high availability database like setup in the cloud.
- PebblesHD 7y ago
  I work fairly regularly with our mainframe team, and the general reasoning boils down to massive parallelism and consistency when processing critical data. The number of rows our mainframe can process and write with perfect accuracy is leagues ahead of what similarly priced commodity hardware could achieve. There’s a reason the world still pretty much runs on COBOL/Natural and a hardware design from the 70s, it worked well then and has worked well ever since. Slightly related but I’d describe most of my role being getting data from our micro-services down into the mainframe in a format it understands so we can do ‘something’ with it.
  - bubblethink 7y ago
    Interesting. So something like google bigquery (or any of the various saas offerings by others) would not be a good match for this problem space ? For massive parallelism, we have GPUs, accelerators, and database products built on these things (admittedly, still somewhat new). By consistency, do you mean tolerance to transient errors and the like ? i.e. Beyond whatever you get with ECC ? Or are you talking about memory consistency models ? I am just constantly surprised that on the one hand FAANG+ which run so much of the internet economy do not use mainframes, and yet banks do.
    - bendbro 7y ago
      The promise of the cloud is that it provides you with "trivially", "infinitely", "cost-efficiently" scalable infrastructure. Banks don't need any of that. They can buy a $100k (?) mainframe, a hundred or so devs, and leave that part of the business on autopilot for 20+ years. Why even bother futzing around in the cloud?
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        > They can buy a $100k (?) mainframe, You'll find those on e-Bay. A new one will be significantly more expensive.
        wongarsu 7y ago
        Compared to the cost of software engineers a few million every few decades for a mainframe aren't that significant either way.
        rbanffy 7y ago
        Also, reaching the same kind of capabilities would require a substantial investment in R&D. IBM has been developing zOS for more than 50 years now.
    - PebblesHD 7y ago
      In addition to what bendbro suggests, which is actually quite close to reality if oversimplified, banks also have sovereignty concerns with data that may have additional classification and regulatory strings attached. In Australia where I’m based, ‘material’ data such as financial and audit information must be kept in country and its veracity attested to, which is why so many large banks here at least still have big iron in managed data centres for most of their core transactional systems. Edited to specify which sibling I was referring to.
    - unionpivo 7y ago
      Banks used to store peoples gold, now they store data. I don't think any serious bank will consider trusting outsider with their core business. And mainframes are essentially early on premises clouds. And today's, cloud offerings still don't do what mainframes did as easily. (and there are several things that cloud does offer that mainframes can't do)
- idlewords 7y ago
  Someone posted in a related thread I was nerding out on tonight that mainframes are excellent when you need to do an enormous amount of I/O with 100% uptime and "exactly once" consistency guarantees. According to that poster, you also don't need to build distributed logic or certain kinds of error handling into your software.
- znpy 7y ago
  > But why ? Recapping what i've written in another comment: - 100% uptime - reference, full featured platform that does its job doesn't change much during the years - write once, run forever approach - everything on premise
- tarsinge 7y ago
  My high level view is that with a mainframe you get a lot of the advantages of the cloud without the hassle of implementing a distributed system / data integrity and consistency over the network (ie something like having the AWS console where you can instantiate services but everything is local. Upgrading the account is physically putting more/swapping resources in the Mainframe). Also there is the cost of migrating, these systems work perfectly reliably since more than 30 years.

bubblethink 7y ago

But why ? Other than inertia and legacy reasons that is. Is there some non partisan resource on this ? A paper or a neutral blog ? Whenever you try to research something like this, you end up on either IBM pages or pages by mainframe enthusiasts. I want to know exactly what you are buying compared to a regular high availability database like setup in the cloud.

PebblesHD 7y ago
I work fairly regularly with our mainframe team, and the general reasoning boils down to massive parallelism and consistency when processing critical data. The number of rows our mainframe can process and write with perfect accuracy is leagues ahead of what similarly priced commodity hardware could achieve. There’s a reason the world still pretty much runs on COBOL/Natural and a hardware design from the 70s, it worked well then and has worked well ever since. Slightly related but I’d describe most of my role being getting data from our micro-services down into the mainframe in a format it understands so we can do ‘something’ with it.
- bubblethink 7y ago
  Interesting. So something like google bigquery (or any of the various saas offerings by others) would not be a good match for this problem space ? For massive parallelism, we have GPUs, accelerators, and database products built on these things (admittedly, still somewhat new). By consistency, do you mean tolerance to transient errors and the like ? i.e. Beyond whatever you get with ECC ? Or are you talking about memory consistency models ? I am just constantly surprised that on the one hand FAANG+ which run so much of the internet economy do not use mainframes, and yet banks do.
  - bendbro 7y ago
    The promise of the cloud is that it provides you with "trivially", "infinitely", "cost-efficiently" scalable infrastructure. Banks don't need any of that. They can buy a $100k (?) mainframe, a hundred or so devs, and leave that part of the business on autopilot for 20+ years. Why even bother futzing around in the cloud?
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      > They can buy a $100k (?) mainframe, You'll find those on e-Bay. A new one will be significantly more expensive.
      - wongarsu 7y ago
        Compared to the cost of software engineers a few million every few decades for a mainframe aren't that significant either way.
        rbanffy 7y ago
        Also, reaching the same kind of capabilities would require a substantial investment in R&D. IBM has been developing zOS for more than 50 years now.
  - PebblesHD 7y ago
    In addition to what bendbro suggests, which is actually quite close to reality if oversimplified, banks also have sovereignty concerns with data that may have additional classification and regulatory strings attached. In Australia where I’m based, ‘material’ data such as financial and audit information must be kept in country and its veracity attested to, which is why so many large banks here at least still have big iron in managed data centres for most of their core transactional systems. Edited to specify which sibling I was referring to.
  - unionpivo 7y ago
    Banks used to store peoples gold, now they store data. I don't think any serious bank will consider trusting outsider with their core business. And mainframes are essentially early on premises clouds. And today's, cloud offerings still don't do what mainframes did as easily. (and there are several things that cloud does offer that mainframes can't do)
idlewords 7y ago
Someone posted in a related thread I was nerding out on tonight that mainframes are excellent when you need to do an enormous amount of I/O with 100% uptime and "exactly once" consistency guarantees. According to that poster, you also don't need to build distributed logic or certain kinds of error handling into your software.
znpy 7y ago
> But why ? Recapping what i've written in another comment: - 100% uptime - reference, full featured platform that does its job doesn't change much during the years - write once, run forever approach - everything on premise
tarsinge 7y ago
My high level view is that with a mainframe you get a lot of the advantages of the cloud without the hassle of implementing a distributed system / data integrity and consistency over the network (ie something like having the AWS console where you can instantiate services but everything is local. Upgrading the account is physically putting more/swapping resources in the Mainframe). Also there is the cost of migrating, these systems work perfectly reliably since more than 30 years.