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I would have asked the opposite question: what does mainframe add other than complexity? It's a lot easier to find good engineers to write and maintain softwar

I would have asked the opposite question: what does mainframe add other than complexity? It's a lot easier to find good engineers to write and maintain software for Linux on x86-64 than it is to find mainframe engineers, which makes things simpler, arguably.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility, and the knowledge that you don't have to rewrite your systems from the ground up. How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing? What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities? Perhaps not so simple after all. Which suggests an interesting contrarian career path - train on COBOL + mainframe you'll never lack well-paid work. You'll also avoid the usual fad tracking.
- coder543 7y ago
  > A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility Citation needed, especially on that implication that x86-64 lacks reliability. I’ve run reliable services on commodity hardware that literally processed over 5 billion transactions per day. > How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing? If something better comes along, why wouldn’t you want to move to it? But “better” in this context would imply popular support and plentiful access to developers, so you would have years of warning. It wouldn’t come as a surprise. As of now, it has been going for at least a decade, and shows no signs of stopping. > What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities? This is not some huge, unsolved problem. It has been solved many times, in my opinion, so just learn how others do it and follow suit. I’m not here to teach sysadmin “tips and tricks.” I would be completely clueless on how to stage updates for a mainframe. Turn it off and back on? And I’m betting all of the good training material there is locked behind expensive paywalls. > Perhaps not so simple after all. Disagree, especially since you can hire people to solve these problems for a lot less money than you can get just the hardware for a mainframe, let alone hire the extremely rare (read: expensive) personnel needed to maintain and develop applications for mainframe. If IBM would focus on bringing the entry-level cost of mainframe down, they would probably be able to get more adoption, and more people would be able and motivated to learn their systems.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    "Citation needed, especially on that implication that x86-64 lacks reliability." Basically, the hardware and software on a mainframe does it for you. Versus having to implement redundancy and resilience into your app. You can pull a CPU on a running mainframe, and it keeps chugging. Batch failures, app failures, etc, have a very well defined ecosystem for recovery that's consistent across apps. As you imply, though, provided you pick the right software, there's not much difference in reliability these days. The variety of software choices is what kills reliability on x86/Linux. Too little established experience because there's too many choices.
  - abtinf 7y ago
    Virtually every sentence of your comment demonstrates snobby ignorance. You treat your erroneous assumptions as fact and build a house of cards on top.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - selectodude 7y ago
    I think it’s become an incredibly small and important niche, and that’s ok. It’s not broken, doesn’t need to be fixed, and compared to other costs spending $100mm/yr on COBOL programmers and mainframes isn’t going to destroy their business. It’s highly specialized stuff. It has a proven track record of working very well. Switching off of it will cause a lot more headaches than it will fix.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- neverartful 7y ago
  Your idea is logical, but it's not exactly that way in practice. Many (most?) of the mainframe jobs are not that well-paid (for software industry). The other thing is that it nearly limits you to working in banking, airlines, government, insurance.
neverartful 7y ago
It adds one throat to choke. You won't have separate vendors for the OS and the hardware to point fingers at each other. In the case of the mainframe, there's usually a whole raft of other software that's all from IBM to add to the one throat to choke: TPF, z/OS, z/VM, CICS, DB2, etc.
rbanffy 7y ago
> what does mainframe add other than complexity? Compared to what? A cluster of x86 computers where all the security, cryptography, observability, reliability, availability has to be written by the owner on top of something like Kubernetes? And that can achieve the kind of throughput a mainframe has? I'd say a mainframe is much simpler than that. It's already done. All you need to do is to sign the check and read the (hundreds of) manuals.
cat199 7y ago
> mainframe add if it's already in place, it's not 'adding' anything, it simply 'is'.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility, and the knowledge that you don't have to rewrite your systems from the ground up. How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing? What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities? Perhaps not so simple after all. Which suggests an interesting contrarian career path - train on COBOL + mainframe you'll never lack well-paid work. You'll also avoid the usual fad tracking.

coder543 7y ago
> A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility Citation needed, especially on that implication that x86-64 lacks reliability. I’ve run reliable services on commodity hardware that literally processed over 5 billion transactions per day. > How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing? If something better comes along, why wouldn’t you want to move to it? But “better” in this context would imply popular support and plentiful access to developers, so you would have years of warning. It wouldn’t come as a surprise. As of now, it has been going for at least a decade, and shows no signs of stopping. > What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities? This is not some huge, unsolved problem. It has been solved many times, in my opinion, so just learn how others do it and follow suit. I’m not here to teach sysadmin “tips and tricks.” I would be completely clueless on how to stage updates for a mainframe. Turn it off and back on? And I’m betting all of the good training material there is locked behind expensive paywalls. > Perhaps not so simple after all. Disagree, especially since you can hire people to solve these problems for a lot less money than you can get just the hardware for a mainframe, let alone hire the extremely rare (read: expensive) personnel needed to maintain and develop applications for mainframe. If IBM would focus on bringing the entry-level cost of mainframe down, they would probably be able to get more adoption, and more people would be able and motivated to learn their systems.
- tyingq 7y ago
  "Citation needed, especially on that implication that x86-64 lacks reliability." Basically, the hardware and software on a mainframe does it for you. Versus having to implement redundancy and resilience into your app. You can pull a CPU on a running mainframe, and it keeps chugging. Batch failures, app failures, etc, have a very well defined ecosystem for recovery that's consistent across apps. As you imply, though, provided you pick the right software, there's not much difference in reliability these days. The variety of software choices is what kills reliability on x86/Linux. Too little established experience because there's too many choices.
- abtinf 7y ago
  Virtually every sentence of your comment demonstrates snobby ignorance. You treat your erroneous assumptions as fact and build a house of cards on top.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- selectodude 7y ago
  I think it’s become an incredibly small and important niche, and that’s ok. It’s not broken, doesn’t need to be fixed, and compared to other costs spending $100mm/yr on COBOL programmers and mainframes isn’t going to destroy their business. It’s highly specialized stuff. It has a proven track record of working very well. Switching off of it will cause a lot more headaches than it will fix.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
neverartful 7y ago
Your idea is logical, but it's not exactly that way in practice. Many (most?) of the mainframe jobs are not that well-paid (for software industry). The other thing is that it nearly limits you to working in banking, airlines, government, insurance.

neverartful 7y ago

It adds one throat to choke. You won't have separate vendors for the OS and the hardware to point fingers at each other. In the case of the mainframe, there's usually a whole raft of other software that's all from IBM to add to the one throat to choke: TPF, z/OS, z/VM, CICS, DB2, etc.

rbanffy 7y ago

> what does mainframe add other than complexity? Compared to what? A cluster of x86 computers where all the security, cryptography, observability, reliability, availability has to be written by the owner on top of something like Kubernetes? And that can achieve the kind of throughput a mainframe has? I'd say a mainframe is much simpler than that. It's already done. All you need to do is to sign the check and read the (hundreds of) manuals.

cat199 7y ago

> mainframe add if it's already in place, it's not 'adding' anything, it simply 'is'.