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What’s running on this hardware? Who is writing new software for it? Clearly a lot because they have money to invest in this cutting edge R&D but I’ve never met

What’s running on this hardware? Who is writing new software for it? Clearly a lot because they have money to invest in this cutting edge R&D but I’ve never met anyone who says they code for IBM mainframes.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
Yo (kind of:) There's the usual finance / banking guys. But also a lot of ERPs - the corporate bread and butter hr, Financials, crm, erm, scm, etc applications (I'm in this space, historically as sysadmin / light developer, then perf testing, infra architect, tech team lead, now as kind of a ops manager). Over my 25 years and few dozen projects, mainframe was a significant portion of implementations and almost always at least on the table as potential platform. Fwiw, What I always find fascinating though is that after many an implementation on "distributed platform", I. E. Unix Linux or Windows, as soon as any performance issue arises, there's a lot of calls to "move it back to mainframe" . I don't agree with that myself necessarily, but A lot of big enterprise shops feel that mainframe is an expensive pain, but reliable predictable well-performing expensive pain.
- algo_trader 5y ago
  > on "distributed platform", I. E. Unix Linux or Windows Is the mainframe really "more reliable" or "more performant" than a well provisioned cluster of commodity hw? I mean after 20 years of optimising the SW stack, and monster xeons and tera-memory and fibre-channels and SSDs and everything so cheap and accessible. Is it really tech or just corporate inertia keeping this industry alive? ;)
  - jyounker 5y ago
    As I recall, there have been something six attempts to move the airline scheduling systems off of mainframes, but the efforts keep failing to compete with the existing mainframes.
flomo 5y ago
Friday night HN thoughts... (1) IBM charges for "MIPS", so faster processor, mo' money. (2) Because of the humungo margins in this space, they have a great R&D budget. (3) The marketing has to be IBM mainframes are the most bestest and "worth it", so every gen is ahead in some respects. (4) IBM makes a lot of money outsourcing legacy mainframe workloads, so faster systems keeps them ahead of the curve there. Years ago, IBM had a partner offering mainframe Linux/Java "cloud servers". But that must not have added-up. They will tell their existing customers Z is great for these workloads but you don't see Google or Amazon buying them.
dhosek 5y ago
I know that when we got the tour of the data center at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, they had an IBM mainframe in the room. It's worth noting that with modern computing systems, you could be deploying to a Z/OS system without even necessarily being aware of it.
mhh__ 5y ago
I wish IBM had competitors in the space so we might actually get to use them without having to hedge ridiculous amounts of IBM lock in. The sheer amount of engineering that goes into these things is amazing.
pabs3 5y ago
Lots of Linux distros support IBM mainframes, Debian for example: https://www.debian.org/ports/s390/ https://www.debian.org/ports/s390/
rwmj 5y ago
Linux runs fine on s390x. Red Hat ships and supports RHEL for it with the usual selection of packages. It's interesting for me because it's the "last" (common) big endian architecture, so it's the last place available to test for endianness bugs.
- erk__ 5y ago
  It could be really interesting if any of the up and coming arm processors could be made to reliable work in big-endian mode. There is some custom kernels floating around that uses the Raspberry Pi in BE-mode.
valtz 5y ago
Applications where the growing list of Intel and AMD security holes are unacceptable. Secure virtualization for example. POWER9 has a slightly lower performance that amd64 (don't know about POWER10), but that is the main value proposition. It would be interesting though to see what would happen if security researchers got the same cheap access to these platforms as to amd64.
- rrss 5y ago
  The article is about IBM Z, not POWER. Both IBM Z and POWER processors are vulnerable to a variety of spectre-style attacks.
smolder 5y ago
To some extent, the stock market runs on mainframes. I have worked along side some mainframe programmers, but never touched the things myself.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Yo (kind of:) There's the usual finance / banking guys. But also a lot of ERPs - the corporate bread and butter hr, Financials, crm, erm, scm, etc applications (I'm in this space, historically as sysadmin / light developer, then perf testing, infra architect, tech team lead, now as kind of a ops manager). Over my 25 years and few dozen projects, mainframe was a significant portion of implementations and almost always at least on the table as potential platform. Fwiw, What I always find fascinating though is that after many an implementation on "distributed platform", I. E. Unix Linux or Windows, as soon as any performance issue arises, there's a lot of calls to "move it back to mainframe" . I don't agree with that myself necessarily, but A lot of big enterprise shops feel that mainframe is an expensive pain, but reliable predictable well-performing expensive pain.

algo_trader 5y ago
> on "distributed platform", I. E. Unix Linux or Windows Is the mainframe really "more reliable" or "more performant" than a well provisioned cluster of commodity hw? I mean after 20 years of optimising the SW stack, and monster xeons and tera-memory and fibre-channels and SSDs and everything so cheap and accessible. Is it really tech or just corporate inertia keeping this industry alive? ;)
- jyounker 5y ago
  As I recall, there have been something six attempts to move the airline scheduling systems off of mainframes, but the efforts keep failing to compete with the existing mainframes.

flomo 5y ago

Friday night HN thoughts... (1) IBM charges for "MIPS", so faster processor, mo' money. (2) Because of the humungo margins in this space, they have a great R&D budget. (3) The marketing has to be IBM mainframes are the most bestest and "worth it", so every gen is ahead in some respects. (4) IBM makes a lot of money outsourcing legacy mainframe workloads, so faster systems keeps them ahead of the curve there. Years ago, IBM had a partner offering mainframe Linux/Java "cloud servers". But that must not have added-up. They will tell their existing customers Z is great for these workloads but you don't see Google or Amazon buying them.

dhosek 5y ago

I know that when we got the tour of the data center at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, they had an IBM mainframe in the room. It's worth noting that with modern computing systems, you could be deploying to a Z/OS system without even necessarily being aware of it.

mhh__ 5y ago

I wish IBM had competitors in the space so we might actually get to use them without having to hedge ridiculous amounts of IBM lock in. The sheer amount of engineering that goes into these things is amazing.

pabs3 5y ago

Lots of Linux distros support IBM mainframes, Debian for example: https://www.debian.org/ports/s390/ https://www.debian.org/ports/s390/

rwmj 5y ago

Linux runs fine on s390x. Red Hat ships and supports RHEL for it with the usual selection of packages. It's interesting for me because it's the "last" (common) big endian architecture, so it's the last place available to test for endianness bugs.

erk__ 5y ago
It could be really interesting if any of the up and coming arm processors could be made to reliable work in big-endian mode. There is some custom kernels floating around that uses the Raspberry Pi in BE-mode.

valtz 5y ago

Applications where the growing list of Intel and AMD security holes are unacceptable. Secure virtualization for example. POWER9 has a slightly lower performance that amd64 (don't know about POWER10), but that is the main value proposition. It would be interesting though to see what would happen if security researchers got the same cheap access to these platforms as to amd64.

rrss 5y ago
The article is about IBM Z, not POWER. Both IBM Z and POWER processors are vulnerable to a variety of spectre-style attacks.

smolder 5y ago

To some extent, the stock market runs on mainframes. I have worked along side some mainframe programmers, but never touched the things myself.