4 ms·

The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.

by wmf 1mo ago

tempest_ 1mo ago
At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.
- theandrewbailey 1mo ago
  Someone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.
  - wmf 1mo ago
    The existing 1,000 customers replace their old mainframes with newer models.
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  They are mostly leased, I think.
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    I don't think that's the case anymore.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  > At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then you'll need to build the same level of reliability out of your unreliable components. Current solutions are getting really good at that, but it's your job to integrate them. In the end, it's not really a matter of how much money you spend, but how you spend it - the numbers will closely match. Regulators don't really care how you do it, as long as you don't fail to provide adequate guarantees to your customers (banking is extremely regulated, and customers are well protected).
  - tempest_ 1mo ago
    Sure, but there are very very few new consumer banks. Most of the existing ones already have mainframes because they were early adopters.
    - rbanffy 1mo ago
      There are many "new banks" that have been using cloud. It remains to be seen if they'll opt to migrate their stacks to mainframes, in which case, the ARM support might come in handy, as more packages are better optimized (as in using platform-specific functionality) for ARM than for s390x (where I don't think many people spend much time).
bitwize 1mo ago
A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.
- wmf 1mo ago
  That may be true but the dozens of x86 servers are cheaper and easier to use.
  - bob1029 1mo ago
    Sometimes quality of service matters more than cost. If the consumer segment started to develop a sense that their payment cards were glitchy or unreliable, our economy could suffer real consequences. Error free, secure, instant payment experiences are essential. Go visit a local grocery store and measure how long it takes to authorize a transaction each time a card is presented to the terminal. Pay special attention to how fast the Visa and American Express networks are. At my local Kroger the terminal and network setup is so fast that you can use the chip reader almost like a mag stripe reader. https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.8236.html https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
  - AdamN 1mo ago
    Not totally - it's really nice when you don't have to worry about complex cluster scaling and it's all nice and vertical. Everything in those machines is also hot swappable so really the only downtime will be from an application defect or a catastrophic event (fire in the datacenter).
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]

The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.

by wmf 1mo ago

The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.

tempest_ 1mo ago

At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.

theandrewbailey 1mo ago
Someone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.
- wmf 1mo ago
  The existing 1,000 customers replace their old mainframes with newer models.
SoftTalker 1mo ago
They are mostly leased, I think.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  I don't think that's the case anymore.
rbanffy 1mo ago
> At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then you'll need to build the same level of reliability out of your unreliable components. Current solutions are getting really good at that, but it's your job to integrate them. In the end, it's not really a matter of how much money you spend, but how you spend it - the numbers will closely match. Regulators don't really care how you do it, as long as you don't fail to provide adequate guarantees to your customers (banking is extremely regulated, and customers are well protected).
- tempest_ 1mo ago
  Sure, but there are very very few new consumer banks. Most of the existing ones already have mainframes because they were early adopters.
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    There are many "new banks" that have been using cloud. It remains to be seen if they'll opt to migrate their stacks to mainframes, in which case, the ARM support might come in handy, as more packages are better optimized (as in using platform-specific functionality) for ARM than for s390x (where I don't think many people spend much time).

bitwize 1mo ago

A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.

wmf 1mo ago
That may be true but the dozens of x86 servers are cheaper and easier to use.
- bob1029 1mo ago
  Sometimes quality of service matters more than cost. If the consumer segment started to develop a sense that their payment cards were glitchy or unreliable, our economy could suffer real consequences. Error free, secure, instant payment experiences are essential. Go visit a local grocery store and measure how long it takes to authorize a transaction each time a card is presented to the terminal. Pay special attention to how fast the Visa and American Express networks are. At my local Kroger the terminal and network setup is so fast that you can use the chip reader almost like a mag stripe reader. https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.8236.html https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
- AdamN 1mo ago
  Not totally - it's really nice when you don't have to worry about complex cluster scaling and it's all nice and vertical. Everything in those machines is also hot swappable so really the only downtime will be from an application defect or a catastrophic event (fire in the datacenter).
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]