3 ms·
This is likely catering specifically to IBM's customers who have been them from the mainframe days and continue to rely on IBM products (airline, banking etc.).
by pm90 7y ago
This is likely catering specifically to IBM's customers who have been them from the mainframe days and continue to rely on IBM products (airline, banking etc.). The systems used by these orgs are massive in complexity and I'm not sure how much they want to invest in refactoring them to run on COTS hardware.... it probably doesn't make sense for them financially.
- nabla9 7y agoThere is market for reliability, security and scale in compact size, so they can get new customers. Companies like Robinhood may discover that it's actually cheaper to by reliable and secure hardware and write software into it than try to write fault tolerant and secure software over COTS hardware.
- tinco 7y agoIs it really that easy to write reliable software for mainframes? What sort of abstraction do you get from them that you don't get in commodity hardware? Nice easy shot at Robinhood of course, but they're a very young company. Do the big banks really have a fundamental edge that's not just more invested hours?
- msandford 7y agoI think the idea is that your locks and threads are so close latency wise that you only need a few to get the job done. Versus trying to figure out how to parallelize things, some of which are inherently non-parallelizable. But sometimes you don't know until you try! Ain't life grand?
- dfox 7y agoIBM started to market what is essentially z with only IFL CPs as kind of k8s in a box so they obviously try to expand into lower tier markets.