7 ms·

Mainframe hardware is amazing. You can do many soficiated configurations and is quite fault tolerant. The kicker is the price. If your a large multi-billion

Mainframe hardware is amazing. You can do many soficiated configurations and is quite fault tolerant. The kicker is the price. If your a large multi-billion dollar corporation it might make sense to buy a few of them. For the rest of us the price is way too much. As for cobol, cobol will be running long after we are dead. It's a testament to cobol's resilience. That being said, I am not a mainframe guy and I don't plan to be. The cloud, linux and container does what need and quickly. (Mainframers can add their snark here.)

rbanffy 6y ago
I seriously doubt a 4-socket, 80-thread, 8 terabyte x86 box from Lenovo is that much cheaper than the lowest end of the z15 spectrum. A 4-socked Dell with 8 TB of RAM will cost you almost 400 thousand dollars and, in order to get 5 nines out of it, you'd better buy a bunch of them. You also won't be able to match the single thread performance of the z15 CPUs and almost a gigabyte of L4 cache.
- trasz 6y ago
  If mainframes were competitive performance-wise, IBM wouldn’t prohibit publishing benchmarks.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Performance is not the only metric. Reliability and availability are also important and, in that regard, these machines are unrivalled. Also, benchmarking these machines is not a simple thing when each machine is custom built to its owner's needs.
    - trasz 6y ago
      Except that the mainframe reliability figures apply to a sysplex (think cluster), not a single machine. And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. So, here's the thing: for mainframes we only have marketing data; the actual performance figures are secret. Which looks a bit suspicious, don't you think? As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing. You can choose the configuration, but it's all pre-made, nothing custom there.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        > And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. At what cost? How much will you pay for a 4 socket Dell that has 8 TB of redundant memory? How much cheaper than a similarly capable z15 will it be? > As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing How many configurations are available?
      - p_l 6y ago
        Not just to sysplex - the correct comparison is not "le random Dell server with RAIM configuration", but HPE NonStop and/or carefully husbanded vmware vFT configuration - and that's for single mainframe cage. For the last decade or so IBM had been selling pretty much all mainframes with hot-swap FT cpu books, and the standard purchase model is very cloudy - you lease them (so it's all OPEX, instead of CAPEX), and in fact IBM will happily sell you "on-demand usage based pricing" for that lease. It's just that you can order that machine to be in your datacenter, but many clients simply use IBM's lesser-known cloud offering.
- unixhero 6y ago
  I think you have a point. However. Seriously. Who the heck needs 5 9s? Who are dependent on only being able to hold their breaths for 60 milliseconds per week?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    An unscheduled reboot of a reasonably sized server doesn't happen in 60 ms. I don't think 60 ms is even enough to properly power up all components of the BMC. We are looking into, at best, many minutes of unscheduled downtime. Depending on your business model, that lost revenue could have paid for a lot of metal in the first place.
    - p_l 6y ago
      60ms won't get you stabilized voltages on motherboard, let alone a reboot.

rbanffy 6y ago

I seriously doubt a 4-socket, 80-thread, 8 terabyte x86 box from Lenovo is that much cheaper than the lowest end of the z15 spectrum. A 4-socked Dell with 8 TB of RAM will cost you almost 400 thousand dollars and, in order to get 5 nines out of it, you'd better buy a bunch of them. You also won't be able to match the single thread performance of the z15 CPUs and almost a gigabyte of L4 cache.

trasz 6y ago
If mainframes were competitive performance-wise, IBM wouldn’t prohibit publishing benchmarks.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Performance is not the only metric. Reliability and availability are also important and, in that regard, these machines are unrivalled. Also, benchmarking these machines is not a simple thing when each machine is custom built to its owner's needs.
  - trasz 6y ago
    Except that the mainframe reliability figures apply to a sysplex (think cluster), not a single machine. And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. So, here's the thing: for mainframes we only have marketing data; the actual performance figures are secret. Which looks a bit suspicious, don't you think? As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing. You can choose the configuration, but it's all pre-made, nothing custom there.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      > And the single-machine features, such as memory mirroring, are available elsewhere. At what cost? How much will you pay for a 4 socket Dell that has 8 TB of redundant memory? How much cheaper than a similarly capable z15 will it be? > As for "custom-built" - nope, not such thing How many configurations are available?
    - p_l 6y ago
      Not just to sysplex - the correct comparison is not "le random Dell server with RAIM configuration", but HPE NonStop and/or carefully husbanded vmware vFT configuration - and that's for single mainframe cage. For the last decade or so IBM had been selling pretty much all mainframes with hot-swap FT cpu books, and the standard purchase model is very cloudy - you lease them (so it's all OPEX, instead of CAPEX), and in fact IBM will happily sell you "on-demand usage based pricing" for that lease. It's just that you can order that machine to be in your datacenter, but many clients simply use IBM's lesser-known cloud offering.
unixhero 6y ago
I think you have a point. However. Seriously. Who the heck needs 5 9s? Who are dependent on only being able to hold their breaths for 60 milliseconds per week?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  An unscheduled reboot of a reasonably sized server doesn't happen in 60 ms. I don't think 60 ms is even enough to properly power up all components of the BMC. We are looking into, at best, many minutes of unscheduled downtime. Depending on your business model, that lost revenue could have paid for a lot of metal in the first place.
  - p_l 6y ago
    60ms won't get you stabilized voltages on motherboard, let alone a reboot.