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The Mainframe Six (2022)
- kps 1y agoNeeds a catchy name. - 1960s: IBM and the Seven Dwarfs [Univac RCA NEC GE Honeywell CDC Burroughs] - 1970s: IBM and the BUNCH [Burroughs Univac NEC CDC Honeywell]
- rbanffy 1y agoLet's see... IBM and the FUNHA? IBM and the HU-FAN?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bob1029 1y agoMainframe is still my favorite architecture for F100 use cases. You'll note how your grocery stores, debit cards, gas stations, toll roads, et. al., continued to function ~fine during the AWS outage this week. The biggest problem with the mainframe conversation is the TCO paradox that it creates. For the average CTO, the prospect of paying IBM millions of dollars up front is absolutely a non-starter. They just can't get beyond this aspect. It doesn't matter if you promise them a genie with unlimited wishes at the end - and this isn't too far off from what you actually get in some cases. The initial sticker shock is simply a bridge too far. The savings you see only manifest after years of not doing the other things. This kind of savings is usually invisible to the business leaders. You have to make a really big leap of faith and have a lot of good mentors and leaders around you to execute on this kind of architecture. It is also essential to lead the technology people along the path of best practices. I've seen a large corporation justify moving away from mainframe after allowing its employees to load applications on it that are wildly unsuitable for that kind of compute platform. Think things like SalesForce and GitHub Enterprise - "See, it runs like ass and IBM is billing us like crazy! - we need to get off mainframe".
- p_l 1y agoYou don't have to pay upfront, IBM in fact prefers you don't Leasing, or frank out renting aka "cloud" that just happens to be IBM is the preferred form, especially as they can sell you on usage based pricing (good if your workload follows common pattern of spiking at end of month)
- UltraSane 1y agoIt seems very strange to pay for usage on hardware only you can use.
- p_l 1y agoBut profitable to IBM, and counts as OpEx not CapEx for accounting. A bit like cloud. But if you want they will ship it to you, or just setup a VPN or even a more dedicated connection (say, MPLS) to one of their datacenters. Or even sell it to you cloud style, running on LPAR/zVM. They also tend to send you a more filled out mainframe (more CPU, more memory) so you can be flexible with utilization or "pay on demand" for more occassionally.
- adamzwasserman 1y agoA hacker classic: https://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html https://www.hactrn.net/sra/vaxen.html
- watersb 1y ago# VAXen, My Children, Just Don't Belong In Some Places The trouble started when the Chief User went to visit his computer and its VAXherd. He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's Director of Data Processing that, "There are some _very strange_ people in there with the computers." Now since this user person was the Comptroller of this Extremely Large Financial Institution, their VAX had been promptly hustled over to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable place." The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy hats. Oh my. It's 2025 and I'm just reading this for the first time. In 1998, we were getting some large consumer brands on the World Wide Web for the first time. One of our customers had a Director of Security who didn't trust us. When he came out to see our data center, our web services, he trusted us even less. The guys wore ties that day, but the long hair didn't help. It was really too bad; the Security Director was not wrong about many aspects of the whole idea and he was able to get executives in our parent company to realize that security best practices would require some structural changes on our part; we couldn't just buy a net appliance to take care of it. Having that client on board with that Security Director's input could have been a productive experience. But he didn't like what he saw, and that particular project was canceled. Given the rather percussive events in this tale of The Little VAX and the DataCenter, perhaps that was all for the best.
- Aloha 1y agoWhat about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS It certainly looks mainframe like to me
- rbanffy 1y agoIt fits the stereotype. Looks more fitting than the GCOS 7 and GCOS 8 boxes, which are only Xeon servers running Linux and the mainframes in VMs. We can also look at the HPE top of the line NonStop machines that way.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drtournier 1y agoI just discovered that 90% of all credit card activity still rely on mainframes https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/mainframe-market https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/mainfram...
- graycat 1y agoAs I was being interviewed by an IBM branch manager in Chicago (my wife had started grad school at the University of Chicago), it was explained to me: "Some people think that IBM is a technology company or a computer company. It's not. IBM is marketing company. IBM would be in the grocery business if they thought there was any money in it."