All of the work we do in distributed systems and making things redundant and robust and stable, every time I read something about an IBM mainframe I think: “Tho

All of the work we do in distributed systems and making things redundant and robust and stable, every time I read something about an IBM mainframe I think: “Those IBM engineers figured it all out already!” From the article: “ So What Has IBM Done That is So Revolutionary? In the first paragraph, I mentioned that IBM Z is their big mainframe product – this is the big iron of the industry. It’s built better than your government-authorized nuclear bunker. These systems underpin the critical elements of society, such as infrastructure and banking. Downtime of these systems is measured in milliseconds per year, and they have fail safes and fail overs galore – with a financial transaction, when it is made, it has to be committed to all the right databases without fail, or even in the event of physical failure along the chain. This is where IBM Z comes in. It’s incredibly niche, but has incredibly amazing design.”