4 ms·

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 t

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_ 29d 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 29d 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).

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_ 29d 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 29d 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).