3 ms·
Every time I hear someone advocating for mainframes, they always praise them and make them appear as something like a computing behemoth, that, while expensive
by awesomeMilou 4y ago
Every time I hear someone advocating for mainframes, they always praise them and make them appear as something like a computing behemoth, that, while expensive outperforms any commoditiy hardware at the tasks it's good at, wether it's in performance or reliability.
But there's never any real world use case. It's always just "If you're running a mainframe, you don't care about money". No performance benchmarks, no architecture comparisons. You get shown an architecture diagram of a mainframe, next to one of say, a cloud system and you get asked "See??", like the conclusion is obvious.
> Instead, we got lowest-common-denominator systems. Not what was best, merely what was cheapest, easiest, and just barely good enough – the “minimum viable product” that an industry of shysters and con-men think is a good thing.
How is this _not_ a good thing??
>But mainframes aren’t. They cost a lot, and rental and licensing costs a lot, and running them costs a lot… everything costs a lot. Meaning you don’t use them if you care about costs that much. You have other reasons. What those are doesn’t matter so much.
...which is exactly my point! Yeah it makes sense that there is a separate ecosystem for mainframes! Because from the outside and these kind of arguments it looks like IBM has been siphoning off some great marketing in the 80s and 90s and _really_ ignorant managers in charge of purchasing at large banks and the US gov.
On an unrelated note, I kinda made the experience that people that like mainframes usually have some weird obsession with high level computing architectures. Is there maybe a correlation?
- zppln 4y ago> No performance benchmarks, no architecture comparisons. Yeah, I remember dipping my toes into this world when I was trying out COBOL a few years ago. IIRC they market these things with "transactions per second", which doesn't exactly lend it self to direct comparison with other systems...
- HyperSane 4y agoIBM actually forbids customers from sharing the performance of its z/OS mainframe performance benchmarks, which should tell you that they must be terrible for the money.
- neverartful 4y agoThe value proposition (if I may use that terminology) of mainframes is not performance -- it's 'RAS' (reliability, availability, serviceability). Of course, if you've got a huge legacy codebase of COBOL and CICS, it might be more a matter of 'keeping the lights on' for the business.
- rbanffy 4y agoAlso, benchmarks would have to be carefully set up. Sure you can do more MIPS on a cluster of generic underpowered x86 boxes, but what happens if you remove a RAM stick, shoot a bullet through an SSD or are hit by an earthquake? The numbers alone are hard to compare if the guarantees are totally different. A second thing to count is that it’s vastly cheaper to run thousands of services out of a small group of very large machines than to run the same workload on a large number of cheap machines.
- HyperSane 4y agoIBM sure does love to boast about performance in their marketing though.
- mhh__ 4y agoMainframes are supposed to be good at the type of jobs that you can't really do an apples to apples comparison of - they're not supposed to be running linear algebra benchmarks, however equally a lot of quasi-distributed systems (some cloud infra or whatever) performance will completely collapse when you try to scale them beyond little benchmarks. I've read IBMs docs on their processor architectures, I'm sure they're fast enough but no more than that. Wouldn't choose one for infrastructure but would love to have a play with a mainframe.
- rbanffy 4y ago> I've read IBMs docs on their processor architectures, I'm sure they're fast enough but no more than that. I’ve played with the LinuxONE community cloud for a while and one thing that quickly become obvious is how ridiculously fast the machines are. Not only the 5+ GHz CPUs but all that very smart IO that seems to magically predict what the CPU will want, and have it on hand. And the cache architecture of the z16 CPU is awesome.
- lproven 4y agoHi. I wrote the blog post here. > Every time I hear someone advocating for mainframes, they always praise them [1] I wasn't "advocating" anything. I was talking about how they've survived. They have survived. Whether it's under emulation doesn't matter: still being sold, still driving the same peripherals from the same software. Their survival, thus far, is a fact. So the question I was trying to address was why. That's not advocacy. [2] If I were, which I wasn't -- It is pretty hard to advocate for anything without praising it. :-) The points about performance others have answered very well. > How is this _not_ a good thing?? "You can have good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two." We have fast and cheap. The end. > people that like mainframes usually have some weird obsession with high level computing architectures Um. Define what you mean by "high level architectures" here?