5 ms·

Thanks for that and yeah that fits with what I've found, mostly continuation of legacy, critical systems that were built on mainframes. It just seems shocking t

Thanks for that and yeah that fits with what I've found, mostly continuation of legacy, critical systems that were built on mainframes. It just seems shocking to me the amount of investments IBM still puts on developing those machines given that no one seems to want to use them anymore? It feels like I must be missing something, or maybe just underestimating how much money is involved in this legacy business.

reaperducer 1y ago
given that no one seems to want to use them anymore According to a 2024 Forrester Research report, mainframe use is as large as it's ever been, and expected to continue to grow. Reasons include (not from the report) hardware reliability and scalability, and the ability to churn through crypto-style math in a fraction of the time/cost of cloud computing. Report is paywalled, but someone on HN might have a free link.
- wmf 1y ago
  Those analyst reports are kind of bought and paid for by vendors BTW.
- wstrange 1y ago
  Consider me skeptical. A mainframe has to be the least cost effective "crypto-style" math machine you could imagine.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    They have a lot of cryptographic functionality built directly into hardware, and IBM is touting quantum resistant cryptography as one of the key features. You won't mine Bitcoin on one, but, if you are concerned a bad actor could get a memory or disk dump of your system and store it until quantum computers become practical, IBM says they have your back.
  - zifpanachr23 1y ago
    I'd expect them to be significantly better than the competition in that area given the large part of the CPU that is a dedicated coprocessor specifically for crypto (called CPACF). There is much less area given to crypto on x86_64. Of course we are talking about encryption here. TLS and AES etc etc. Not Bitcoin mining, which would indeed not be very cost effective.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  "Crypto-style" here, I am guessing--but not entirely certain--from a downstream comment, is intended as cryptographic in the more general sense, and not "cryptocurrency" as "crypto"-alone is often used for these days?
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    This is correct. Whether the Bitcoin bros want to believe it or not, they didn't invent the word "crypto." Nobody tell them it even pre-dates computers!
wmf 1y ago
IBM mainframes are extremely profitable. There are ~1,000 customers who cannot migrate off mainframes and are willing to spend almost any amount to keep their apps working. Mainframe profits subsidize all of IBM's other money-losing divisions like cloud.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  > customers who cannot migrate off mainframes and are willing to spend almost any amount to keep their apps working. They all can migrate their apps off the mainframes. It's just that it's cheaper to continue paying for the machines.
  - skissane 1y ago
    Australia's social security system is implemented using Model 204 – that's a database combined with transactional 4GL, that runs under z/OS, now sold by Rocket software. It was quite popular in the 1980s, but now I believe there are only two customers left on the planet – the Australian federal government, and the US federal government (although possibly they have more than one customer within the US federal government–Veterans Affairs is one, but maybe there are one or two more.) A couple of years ago, Australia cancelled its multi-billion dollar project to move off it on to a Linux-based solution (Pegasystems), after having spent over US$120 million on it. The problem was that although the new system did the calculations correctly, it took minutes to process a single individual, something the mainframe could do in 2 seconds. But, I'm 100% sure this was nothing to do with the inherent nature of the problem they were trying they were trying to solve – I think it was likely because they'd picked the wrong off-the-shelf product as a replacement and the wrong team to implement it, and if they'd gone with different vendors it could well have succeeded – but after spending years and over US$100 million to discover that, they aren't keen to try again.
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      They could host a competition. Build a database the same size with fake but realistic data. Then leave to the competitors match the constraints. Actually, I’d love to take part of a challenge like this.
zifpanachr23 1y ago
While new processes don't often get created for mainframes (most of the tasks it is particulary suited for have already been automated by this point, and the market of companies doing those tasks is pretty statics) outside of bolting on more modern interfaces to existing backend, one thing that is often ignored in answering the "why mainframes" question is that the overall amount of compute being done on the platform continues to increase. The same old batch and transaction processing programs get fitted with shiny web frontends and more and more business gets sent to those same old programs. So you can end up in a situation where mainframes remain a very stable business that is worth investing in for future upgrades, even while they become more and more "niche" in the eyes of most computer users over time as the number of computers increases at a faster rate than mainframe capacity increase, so the ratio of computer capacity to mainframe capacity is going up, therefore mainframe capacity is growing substantially while also making up less percent of a larger market over time. Then of course there are the margins, which are much higher than they are for x86_64 servers or other common architecture. A slow and steady increase in demand, mixed with outstanding margins, makes for a good business plan. Many of the big existing mainframe customers already have multiple max capacity models and are pushing them to their limits as web and analytics and AI/ML and a bunch of other factors increase the overall amount of workload finding their way to mainframes. IBM wouldn't be making those brand new generations of 4-frame models with a new larger max capacity if there weren't customers buying them.

reaperducer 1y ago

given that no one seems to want to use them anymore According to a 2024 Forrester Research report, mainframe use is as large as it's ever been, and expected to continue to grow. Reasons include (not from the report) hardware reliability and scalability, and the ability to churn through crypto-style math in a fraction of the time/cost of cloud computing. Report is paywalled, but someone on HN might have a free link.

wmf 1y ago
Those analyst reports are kind of bought and paid for by vendors BTW.
wstrange 1y ago
Consider me skeptical. A mainframe has to be the least cost effective "crypto-style" math machine you could imagine.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  They have a lot of cryptographic functionality built directly into hardware, and IBM is touting quantum resistant cryptography as one of the key features. You won't mine Bitcoin on one, but, if you are concerned a bad actor could get a memory or disk dump of your system and store it until quantum computers become practical, IBM says they have your back.
- zifpanachr23 1y ago
  I'd expect them to be significantly better than the competition in that area given the large part of the CPU that is a dedicated coprocessor specifically for crypto (called CPACF). There is much less area given to crypto on x86_64. Of course we are talking about encryption here. TLS and AES etc etc. Not Bitcoin mining, which would indeed not be very cost effective.
dragonwriter 1y ago
"Crypto-style" here, I am guessing--but not entirely certain--from a downstream comment, is intended as cryptographic in the more general sense, and not "cryptocurrency" as "crypto"-alone is often used for these days?
- reaperducer 1y ago
  This is correct. Whether the Bitcoin bros want to believe it or not, they didn't invent the word "crypto." Nobody tell them it even pre-dates computers!

wmf 1y ago

IBM mainframes are extremely profitable. There are ~1,000 customers who cannot migrate off mainframes and are willing to spend almost any amount to keep their apps working. Mainframe profits subsidize all of IBM's other money-losing divisions like cloud.

rbanffy 1y ago
> customers who cannot migrate off mainframes and are willing to spend almost any amount to keep their apps working. They all can migrate their apps off the mainframes. It's just that it's cheaper to continue paying for the machines.
- skissane 1y ago
  Australia's social security system is implemented using Model 204 – that's a database combined with transactional 4GL, that runs under z/OS, now sold by Rocket software. It was quite popular in the 1980s, but now I believe there are only two customers left on the planet – the Australian federal government, and the US federal government (although possibly they have more than one customer within the US federal government–Veterans Affairs is one, but maybe there are one or two more.) A couple of years ago, Australia cancelled its multi-billion dollar project to move off it on to a Linux-based solution (Pegasystems), after having spent over US$120 million on it. The problem was that although the new system did the calculations correctly, it took minutes to process a single individual, something the mainframe could do in 2 seconds. But, I'm 100% sure this was nothing to do with the inherent nature of the problem they were trying they were trying to solve – I think it was likely because they'd picked the wrong off-the-shelf product as a replacement and the wrong team to implement it, and if they'd gone with different vendors it could well have succeeded – but after spending years and over US$100 million to discover that, they aren't keen to try again.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    They could host a competition. Build a database the same size with fake but realistic data. Then leave to the competitors match the constraints. Actually, I’d love to take part of a challenge like this.

zifpanachr23 1y ago

While new processes don't often get created for mainframes (most of the tasks it is particulary suited for have already been automated by this point, and the market of companies doing those tasks is pretty statics) outside of bolting on more modern interfaces to existing backend, one thing that is often ignored in answering the "why mainframes" question is that the overall amount of compute being done on the platform continues to increase. The same old batch and transaction processing programs get fitted with shiny web frontends and more and more business gets sent to those same old programs. So you can end up in a situation where mainframes remain a very stable business that is worth investing in for future upgrades, even while they become more and more "niche" in the eyes of most computer users over time as the number of computers increases at a faster rate than mainframe capacity increase, so the ratio of computer capacity to mainframe capacity is going up, therefore mainframe capacity is growing substantially while also making up less percent of a larger market over time. Then of course there are the margins, which are much higher than they are for x86_64 servers or other common architecture. A slow and steady increase in demand, mixed with outstanding margins, makes for a good business plan. Many of the big existing mainframe customers already have multiple max capacity models and are pushing them to their limits as web and analytics and AI/ML and a bunch of other factors increase the overall amount of workload finding their way to mainframes. IBM wouldn't be making those brand new generations of 4-frame models with a new larger max capacity if there weren't customers buying them.