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And today's news... IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims : https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsu

by shagie 5y ago

And today's news... IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims : https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsuit/?td=rt-3a https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsui...

zozbot234 5y ago
The big news is that IBM is still selling mainframes at all, and even getting rich from it. Doesn't hyperscaler tech nowadays do pretty much everything that we used to need a mainframe for?
- kube-system 5y ago
  Hardware is only a small part of implementing a new technology in a business. Most businesses only buy new tech when there is a business need that drives it. For big B2Bs that haven't changed how they do business or how they interact with their customers in 30 years, there often hasn't been a need to change their business processes. If the mainframe breaks, it's much cheaper and lower risk just to buy a new one, than it is to get different infrastructure and reimplement 30 years of code for which no SMEs are around anymore.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Not only that but that they are making more money from it than the other “sexier” units. Mainframes run the world.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  We shouldn’t underestimate some companies’ desire to keep running the same software. However, as for stuff they legitimately do "better", they’re mind bogglingly reliable. We’re talking two or three seconds of downtime per year. They’re also accurate - every instruction they perform is checked for correctness and if something goes wrong, that task can be migrated to another CPU core and resumed transparently. Cores can fail, socket can fail, etc. without the system going down. Hardware can be replaced without downtime. Processes and data are just migrated elsewhere. They recover from hardware faults and resume at the same instruction within milliseconds with no data loss (cache contents can be mirrored to other machines in the data center, etc.) The hyperscaler model would be to eventually recognize tasks sent to some machine aren’t returning and reschedule them from the beginning. VMs would resume from the last snapshot, etc. It takes a few seconds at best. For 99.9% of the world, that’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable. We work off of eventually consistent models. But there still remains a small audience for which that model isn’t acceptable, and they’ll pay through the nose because there’s not many companies making machines that way anymore.
  - avar 5y ago
    I'm not convinced that they're paying though the nose. You'll easily spend a lot more in just salary costs trying to attain the same combination of reliability and thoughput on off the shelf hardware. Most shops won't need it, but there's a reason many financial institution are still using these, and it's not because it's all legacy software due for replacement.

by shagie 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

The big news is that IBM is still selling mainframes at all, and even getting rich from it. Doesn't hyperscaler tech nowadays do pretty much everything that we used to need a mainframe for?

kube-system 5y ago
Hardware is only a small part of implementing a new technology in a business. Most businesses only buy new tech when there is a business need that drives it. For big B2Bs that haven't changed how they do business or how they interact with their customers in 30 years, there often hasn't been a need to change their business processes. If the mainframe breaks, it's much cheaper and lower risk just to buy a new one, than it is to get different infrastructure and reimplement 30 years of code for which no SMEs are around anymore.
rbanffy 5y ago
Not only that but that they are making more money from it than the other “sexier” units. Mainframes run the world.
Teknoman117 5y ago
We shouldn’t underestimate some companies’ desire to keep running the same software. However, as for stuff they legitimately do "better", they’re mind bogglingly reliable. We’re talking two or three seconds of downtime per year. They’re also accurate - every instruction they perform is checked for correctness and if something goes wrong, that task can be migrated to another CPU core and resumed transparently. Cores can fail, socket can fail, etc. without the system going down. Hardware can be replaced without downtime. Processes and data are just migrated elsewhere. They recover from hardware faults and resume at the same instruction within milliseconds with no data loss (cache contents can be mirrored to other machines in the data center, etc.) The hyperscaler model would be to eventually recognize tasks sent to some machine aren’t returning and reschedule them from the beginning. VMs would resume from the last snapshot, etc. It takes a few seconds at best. For 99.9% of the world, that’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable. We work off of eventually consistent models. But there still remains a small audience for which that model isn’t acceptable, and they’ll pay through the nose because there’s not many companies making machines that way anymore.
- avar 5y ago
  I'm not convinced that they're paying though the nose. You'll easily spend a lot more in just salary costs trying to attain the same combination of reliability and thoughput on off the shelf hardware. Most shops won't need it, but there's a reason many financial institution are still using these, and it's not because it's all legacy software due for replacement.