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A mainframe is your own on-premises AWS. (IBM should send me money for this tagline). Seriously though, there are businesses where sending the data to a third

A mainframe is your own on-premises AWS. (IBM should send me money for this tagline). Seriously though, there are businesses where sending the data to a third party is absolutely impossible. You can spend a lot of money building your own private cloud... or, you can buy a mainframe, which will be cheaper, and if your industry is mainframe-friendly, there will be a lot of support and accumulated experience.

ak_111 3y ago
Even for on-premise I think a better solution these days it to build your own cluster rather than depend on IBM or the few vendors that supply mainframe. IMO the theory, technology, stack, libraries, ... for distributed computing has evolved a lot over the last decades that if you really had to have on-premise it is easier to create your own on-premise EC2 than rely on IBM to supply you with mainframes.
- atemerev 3y ago
  If your business is not in core tech, you are out of your competence to build your own multi-region cluster or a private cloud. It is a quite challenging task to start with, with unpredictable costs. Many HN readers do not understand this, as they always worked in core tech. And if you rely on systems integrators to do that, it will be quite expensive, and you are not sure if this particular integrator will be around in the next 30 years. (Amazon will probably be around, which is why AWS is popular, but sometimes public cloud is not an option at all). In this context, mainframes are quite competitive. Their costs are predictable (and comparable to, if not less than to private cloud offers from systems integrators), IBM will probably be around for long or at least acquired by somebody who will carry the support contracts (like Sun -> Oracle), and they will provide full technical support, again with predictable costs.
  - ak_111 3y ago
    Interesting take, makes sense.

ak_111 3y ago

Even for on-premise I think a better solution these days it to build your own cluster rather than depend on IBM or the few vendors that supply mainframe. IMO the theory, technology, stack, libraries, ... for distributed computing has evolved a lot over the last decades that if you really had to have on-premise it is easier to create your own on-premise EC2 than rely on IBM to supply you with mainframes.

atemerev 3y ago
If your business is not in core tech, you are out of your competence to build your own multi-region cluster or a private cloud. It is a quite challenging task to start with, with unpredictable costs. Many HN readers do not understand this, as they always worked in core tech. And if you rely on systems integrators to do that, it will be quite expensive, and you are not sure if this particular integrator will be around in the next 30 years. (Amazon will probably be around, which is why AWS is popular, but sometimes public cloud is not an option at all). In this context, mainframes are quite competitive. Their costs are predictable (and comparable to, if not less than to private cloud offers from systems integrators), IBM will probably be around for long or at least acquired by somebody who will carry the support contracts (like Sun -> Oracle), and they will provide full technical support, again with predictable costs.
- ak_111 3y ago
  Interesting take, makes sense.