5 ms·

When the cloud was first really taking off, I had a friend who swore by his mainframes, touting high reliability, great performance, excellent customer service.

When the cloud was first really taking off, I had a friend who swore by his mainframes, touting high reliability, great performance, excellent customer service. It would be interesting to do a cost comparison.

wmf 4y ago
I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Mainframes can still be "cost effective" for, well, the type of companies that buy mainframes heh. It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
- hestefisk 4y ago
  Lots and lots of banks (and non banks) rely on IBM mainframe still and will for years to come. They have done this calculation on whether to replatform and migrate several times. It’s very hard to stand up a positive npv for such an idea unfortunately. I guess greenfield is very different.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dillab2 4y ago
    The thing is, there aren't really any successful greenfield developments in these types of business spaces. So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into (which I think is at least partially true), or the type of computing they do actually benefits from being done on a mainframe (which is also true given that there is a lot of record processing for these industries, and not too much serving lots of web requests to users). Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      Or case 3: You still have ancient RPG code running that makes the business go $.
    - StillBored 4y ago
      Yah, given my experience, you buy the mainframe for one of the native zos/etc flavors, and then the IBM sales people basically throw in the IFL's which will never get used for the zos/etc workloads effectively for such a nominal price, they might as well be free. Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it. I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective. PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      > So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into AIUI, Oxide Computer is targeting the "private cloud" space which is sort of adjacent to this stuff and could easily intrude on it. Of course they're based on AMD EPYC hardware, but the rest of the system is custom designed for ease of management and reliability.
  - Stranger43 4y ago
    I havent heard of a successfull[1] greeenfield for an enterprise ERP system replacement, especially not one done using off the shelf technologies. The thing that recent grads(weather engineering or business) tend to miss here is that for a lot of those organisation the central mainframe system and the organization's policies and culture is pretty entangled to the point where you cannot just replace either. [1] on time, on budget and without leaving some aspects of the old system running under some sort of virtualization.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Google ported their entire monorepo to Power That's interesting; any chance you could give the background on that or point me to more information?
  - wmf 4y ago
    This is the best I can find: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/headed-into-its-fifth-year-openpower-has-momentum-into-the-power9-generation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...
- datameta 4y ago
  Power is performance, Z is maximum uptime (target is something like 3 seconds offline per year)
- xenadu02 4y ago
  > I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z. Nah, there are a ton of businesses of all sizes across the world with many man-years of effort put into writing software that runs on various layers of the IBM stack from Cobol on up. For one regional grocery store I know of they started in the 70s. Let's average 10 developers on staff churning out 4GL, Cobol, and whatever else since 1979. I hear it runs webservices now to serve the desktop and mobile client apps. 10 engineers * 43 years = 430 man-years put into a pile of software highly customized to exactly how they do business, from corporate & accounting to the warehouses to the ice cream factory to the industrial-scale bakery to the retail stores. Every single process at the company driven by mountains of custom software. The thing that knows more people buy Texas Toast at Store #473 so it prompts the manager to order extra and the bakery to put an extra Texas Toast run into the already tight schedule? Yeah that runs on the IBM mainframe... because that's where the cash register sales data goes and where the managers handle orders and where warehouse tickets are printed and where the bakery solves the traveling salesman problem to create schedules around quickly expiring products (did I mention the delivery truck schedules also run on the mainframe?). If we assume it would "only" take 10% of the effort to replace, mythical man-month is not a problem, and you can handle dual-running the integrated systems for the decade it will take to perform the swap... you saved a year of your on-staff developer's salaries while putting every part of your business at risk of exploding (and ceasing all improvements to the existing stack lest you chase a moving target)... and you end up with something more or less equivalent except on commodity hardware. $1m for IBM hardware? $5m? $10m? Pfffffffttttt... Chump change. Where do I sign the check? Sold and sold. Don't even bother sending a rep out.

wmf 4y ago

I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z.

bombcar 4y ago
Mainframes can still be "cost effective" for, well, the type of companies that buy mainframes heh. It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
hestefisk 4y ago
Lots and lots of banks (and non banks) rely on IBM mainframe still and will for years to come. They have done this calculation on whether to replatform and migrate several times. It’s very hard to stand up a positive npv for such an idea unfortunately. I guess greenfield is very different.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dillab2 4y ago
  The thing is, there aren't really any successful greenfield developments in these types of business spaces. So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into (which I think is at least partially true), or the type of computing they do actually benefits from being done on a mainframe (which is also true given that there is a lot of record processing for these industries, and not too much serving lots of web requests to users). Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    Or case 3: You still have ancient RPG code running that makes the business go $.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Yah, given my experience, you buy the mainframe for one of the native zos/etc flavors, and then the IBM sales people basically throw in the IFL's which will never get used for the zos/etc workloads effectively for such a nominal price, they might as well be free. Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it. I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective. PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into AIUI, Oxide Computer is targeting the "private cloud" space which is sort of adjacent to this stuff and could easily intrude on it. Of course they're based on AMD EPYC hardware, but the rest of the system is custom designed for ease of management and reliability.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  I havent heard of a successfull[1] greeenfield for an enterprise ERP system replacement, especially not one done using off the shelf technologies. The thing that recent grads(weather engineering or business) tend to miss here is that for a lot of those organisation the central mainframe system and the organization's policies and culture is pretty entangled to the point where you cannot just replace either. [1] on time, on budget and without leaving some aspects of the old system running under some sort of virtualization.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Google ported their entire monorepo to Power That's interesting; any chance you could give the background on that or point me to more information?
- wmf 4y ago
  This is the best I can find: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/headed-into-its-fifth-year-openpower-has-momentum-into-the-power9-generation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...
datameta 4y ago
Power is performance, Z is maximum uptime (target is something like 3 seconds offline per year)
xenadu02 4y ago
> I'm going to channel the efficient market hypothesis (I apologize) here and say that people have done that cost comparison and not one of them bought mainframes. Heck, Google ported their entire monorepo to Power but not to z. Nah, there are a ton of businesses of all sizes across the world with many man-years of effort put into writing software that runs on various layers of the IBM stack from Cobol on up. For one regional grocery store I know of they started in the 70s. Let's average 10 developers on staff churning out 4GL, Cobol, and whatever else since 1979. I hear it runs webservices now to serve the desktop and mobile client apps. 10 engineers * 43 years = 430 man-years put into a pile of software highly customized to exactly how they do business, from corporate & accounting to the warehouses to the ice cream factory to the industrial-scale bakery to the retail stores. Every single process at the company driven by mountains of custom software. The thing that knows more people buy Texas Toast at Store #473 so it prompts the manager to order extra and the bakery to put an extra Texas Toast run into the already tight schedule? Yeah that runs on the IBM mainframe... because that's where the cash register sales data goes and where the managers handle orders and where warehouse tickets are printed and where the bakery solves the traveling salesman problem to create schedules around quickly expiring products (did I mention the delivery truck schedules also run on the mainframe?). If we assume it would "only" take 10% of the effort to replace, mythical man-month is not a problem, and you can handle dual-running the integrated systems for the decade it will take to perform the swap... you saved a year of your on-staff developer's salaries while putting every part of your business at risk of exploding (and ceasing all improvements to the existing stack lest you chase a moving target)... and you end up with something more or less equivalent except on commodity hardware. $1m for IBM hardware? $5m? $10m? Pfffffffttttt... Chump change. Where do I sign the check? Sold and sold. Don't even bother sending a rep out.