5 ms·

Despite decades in software and IT, I know embarrassingly little about mainframes. Simple question for anyone knowledgeable in the field: Is there any justifia

Despite decades in software and IT, I know embarrassingly little about mainframes. Simple question for anyone knowledgeable in the field: Is there any justifiable reason for a greenfield project in 2020 to choose mainframes as a platform?

jacquesm 6y ago
IO; reliability. That and only that. Until recently you could have added 'large amounts of memory' to that too, but you can now get TB+ machines for very little money elsewhere and most problems an ordinary business will run into will fit in that footprint.
- neverartful 6y ago
  In some cases, it can be desirable to have single vendor so that there is '1 throat to choke'. (i.e., can't pass the buck).
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Good point, yes, it can be a way to get out of party A pointing to party B and party B pointing to party A. That said, I would hate to have IBM be the highest level contractor for anything that really mattered to me. Their reputation is no longer deserved imnsho.
    - yourapostasy 6y ago
      > That said, I would hate to have IBM be the highest level contractor for anything that really mattered to me. My experience is with highly-skilled staff who are very comfortable with using the IBM troubleshooting facilities of the product, you very quickly (a few days on normal support cases, 2-6 hours on Sev 1 cases, about an hour on Sev 1 where you're paying for enhanced support) get to real developers with real source code access. The problems come when you aren't using skilled staff. There has been a huge upturn in support cases I've see in clients' IBM Support case histories that are really "professional services/training-through-support" incidents, where it is painfully obvious the requesting parties don't know the most basic aspects of the products they're opening support cases upon. Both customers and IBM are shooting themselves in the foot here: customers for leaning on IBM with unskilled staff, IBM for accepting it. No good solutions without spending more money (on both sides), unfortunately. Everyone who snarks about enterprise software: the road to enterprise scale dominance is paved with a maze of twisty little requirements, all alike (on the surface, then you peel it back and the cockroaches of edge cases come swarming out). There are more things in IT, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        > There are more things in IT, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That was a fine comment right up to the snark. I've been in IT for 35 years now, a portion of that on mainframes. Yes, customers are often also to blame. But IBM is no longer equivalent to competent. They have plenty of incompetents on staff and do not hesitate to let those fend for themselves where customer data is on the line. A recent case involved fairly massive data loss for a customer, and I'm still surprised that never made the news. IBM is still quality hardware, and very good documentation on that hardware but the professional services organization is a mixed bag.
        yourapostasy 6y ago
        Not meant as a snark, a constant reminder I keep telling myself every day, that there is way more in IT than I'll ever have time to learn. All I have to do if I ever think I'm beginning to get my arms around it all is look to someone like Fabrice Bellard or innumerable others. We only win as a team, not many such Free Electrons in the world to pass around, I'm certainly not such a talent, I just heave against the entropy with the gang and share like everyone else. For IBM professional services, you'll have no quibble from me. Very mixed bag from what customers tell me, and customers nearly have to be domain experts to make smart purchase decisions on contractors. A non-trivial chunk of big name professional services placements (not just IBM) are third parties, most of those third parties get run through mandatory sub-sub-contracting relationships and there is even a thriving industry feeding off of sub-sub-sub-contracting relationships. IBM Support however, IME while it has declined markedly in L1 and marginally in L2 (you need to get to the L2 leads quickly if you know what you're doing and want to save time), is still quite good in L3, and if you pay for the enhanced support, exceptionally good (but it is so expensive that few people outside the IBM ecosystem have even heard it is an option). IBM's documentation has always been very thorough, but I've seen a decline in accuracy and editing (to organize the typically voluminous standards) that corresponds with their gutting of the US technical writing teams who when I worked with Redbooks upon were typically very technically proficient in their own right. I try to help out these days by insisting upon a documentation APAR when I run across documentation defects in my accounts, but I'm likely in the minority of users. Ever since they took away the ability to comment on individual pages in Knowledge Center, they've considerably increased the friction for users to help increase the quality of documentation. YMMV of course, just sharing my perspective.
ancienttechie 6y ago
Possibly security. When the IBM 370-class mainframe was born, it was often in a data center with competitors running on the same machine. That machine was a "universe" and its many software components (various DBs, communications, file structures, language modules, etc.) EACH have its own security. No one can do ANYTHING without explicit tediously-granted authorizations - there is no such thing as a global "root" access. If anyone has EVER hacked the traditional core systems (where the data is), it's a well-kept secret - versus the not uncommon news of "modern" systems being hacked.
ancienttechie 6y ago
If you REALLY want to know some tech details, the freely-downloadable Redbooks can tell you more than most humans would ever want to know. Two of many are available below (and you can browse the library for others too): IBM z15 Technical Introduction (3.3m PDF) http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg248850.html?Open http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg... IBM z15 Technical Guide (22.1m PDF) http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg248852.html?Open http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg... (Please forgive my URL handling, newbie here!)
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Thanks! Added to my reading list

jacquesm 6y ago

IO; reliability. That and only that. Until recently you could have added 'large amounts of memory' to that too, but you can now get TB+ machines for very little money elsewhere and most problems an ordinary business will run into will fit in that footprint.

neverartful 6y ago
In some cases, it can be desirable to have single vendor so that there is '1 throat to choke'. (i.e., can't pass the buck).
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Good point, yes, it can be a way to get out of party A pointing to party B and party B pointing to party A. That said, I would hate to have IBM be the highest level contractor for anything that really mattered to me. Their reputation is no longer deserved imnsho.
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    > That said, I would hate to have IBM be the highest level contractor for anything that really mattered to me. My experience is with highly-skilled staff who are very comfortable with using the IBM troubleshooting facilities of the product, you very quickly (a few days on normal support cases, 2-6 hours on Sev 1 cases, about an hour on Sev 1 where you're paying for enhanced support) get to real developers with real source code access. The problems come when you aren't using skilled staff. There has been a huge upturn in support cases I've see in clients' IBM Support case histories that are really "professional services/training-through-support" incidents, where it is painfully obvious the requesting parties don't know the most basic aspects of the products they're opening support cases upon. Both customers and IBM are shooting themselves in the foot here: customers for leaning on IBM with unskilled staff, IBM for accepting it. No good solutions without spending more money (on both sides), unfortunately. Everyone who snarks about enterprise software: the road to enterprise scale dominance is paved with a maze of twisty little requirements, all alike (on the surface, then you peel it back and the cockroaches of edge cases come swarming out). There are more things in IT, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      > There are more things in IT, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That was a fine comment right up to the snark. I've been in IT for 35 years now, a portion of that on mainframes. Yes, customers are often also to blame. But IBM is no longer equivalent to competent. They have plenty of incompetents on staff and do not hesitate to let those fend for themselves where customer data is on the line. A recent case involved fairly massive data loss for a customer, and I'm still surprised that never made the news. IBM is still quality hardware, and very good documentation on that hardware but the professional services organization is a mixed bag.
      - yourapostasy 6y ago
        Not meant as a snark, a constant reminder I keep telling myself every day, that there is way more in IT than I'll ever have time to learn. All I have to do if I ever think I'm beginning to get my arms around it all is look to someone like Fabrice Bellard or innumerable others. We only win as a team, not many such Free Electrons in the world to pass around, I'm certainly not such a talent, I just heave against the entropy with the gang and share like everyone else. For IBM professional services, you'll have no quibble from me. Very mixed bag from what customers tell me, and customers nearly have to be domain experts to make smart purchase decisions on contractors. A non-trivial chunk of big name professional services placements (not just IBM) are third parties, most of those third parties get run through mandatory sub-sub-contracting relationships and there is even a thriving industry feeding off of sub-sub-sub-contracting relationships. IBM Support however, IME while it has declined markedly in L1 and marginally in L2 (you need to get to the L2 leads quickly if you know what you're doing and want to save time), is still quite good in L3, and if you pay for the enhanced support, exceptionally good (but it is so expensive that few people outside the IBM ecosystem have even heard it is an option). IBM's documentation has always been very thorough, but I've seen a decline in accuracy and editing (to organize the typically voluminous standards) that corresponds with their gutting of the US technical writing teams who when I worked with Redbooks upon were typically very technically proficient in their own right. I try to help out these days by insisting upon a documentation APAR when I run across documentation defects in my accounts, but I'm likely in the minority of users. Ever since they took away the ability to comment on individual pages in Knowledge Center, they've considerably increased the friction for users to help increase the quality of documentation. YMMV of course, just sharing my perspective.

ancienttechie 6y ago

Possibly security. When the IBM 370-class mainframe was born, it was often in a data center with competitors running on the same machine. That machine was a "universe" and its many software components (various DBs, communications, file structures, language modules, etc.) EACH have its own security. No one can do ANYTHING without explicit tediously-granted authorizations - there is no such thing as a global "root" access. If anyone has EVER hacked the traditional core systems (where the data is), it's a well-kept secret - versus the not uncommon news of "modern" systems being hacked.

ancienttechie 6y ago

If you REALLY want to know some tech details, the freely-downloadable Redbooks can tell you more than most humans would ever want to know. Two of many are available below (and you can browse the library for others too): IBM z15 Technical Introduction (3.3m PDF) http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg248850.html?Open http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg... IBM z15 Technical Guide (22.1m PDF) http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg248852.html?Open http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg... (Please forgive my URL handling, newbie here!)

dcolkitt 6y ago
Thanks! Added to my reading list