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I've recently worked with mainframes in a large, global organisation. Like the majority of people commenting here, I was sceptical about them. The reality is,
by dgrrrrr 6y ago
I've recently worked with mainframes in a large, global organisation. Like the majority of people commenting here, I was sceptical about them.
The reality is, when it comes to transactions per second, reliability, security and vertical scaling - nothing beats them.
Also, it worked out about 60% less expensive to run a z-series for three years than it would've been to use a third party cloud solution.
So, yeah. Mainframes rock. And that's the reality of it.
- srazzaque 6y agoI'm super-curious, do you have any raw numbers, benchmarks or other comparative points about developing on them (vs commodity h/w) to share? It's uncommon to find people that have worked across both mainframes and commodity h/w and can make direct comparisons. Edit: typo
- dgrrrrr 6y agoIn terms of cost comparisons, I don't have any raw data that I can share - so, apologies and feel free to take the number I stated with a pinch of salt. In terms of security, z-series can be configured to meet the common criteria EAL 5 and beyond. Which is pretty d*mn secure and I don't believe can be matched by commodity hardware. In terms of transactions per second, which is one of the most important metrics here, the z-series can cope with up to 1.1 millions per second. I believe the chunkiest single AWS instance maxes out at 10,000 tps. Then there's reliability... a lot of these mainframe beasts have years, if not decades of up-time in a lot of cases. On the downside, developing on them is clunky and there's a severe shortage of expertise. College graduates barely even know mainframes exist.
- m1sta_ 6y agoThe hardware is great. It's the software and labour that kills things from a cost perspective.
- dgrrrrr 6y agoThe labour! There's a severe skills shortage. The average age of a mainframe admin is about 95 years old!