11 ms·

IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

102 points by zmonkeyz 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lancewiggs 12y ago
It's fascinating to see the rhetoric focussing on mobile transactions being the main driver of demand. While it's certainly huge, there are still a lot of other uses.
- pantulis 12y ago
  I was surprised that the word "omnichannel" is missing.
_RPM 12y ago
literally every device used by consumers today can be traced back to IBM.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  How so? How does an ARM powered smartphone or tablet trace back to IBM?
  - _RPM 12y ago
    When you press the main button. BOOM! Interrupt! That is one example. They even had virtualization in the 80's on System / 370 long VMWare came out.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      http://virtualirfan.com/history-of-interrupts http://virtualirfan.com/history-of-interrupts So no on that one. Visualiation? You mean virtualization. That was a given, Turing should be credited with that, after all the whole idea of a universal Turing machine is that it can emulate any other Turing machine (including another universal one).
      - graycat 12y ago
        VM is not really an emulation. If the guest's code is just user level code, then it just runs as usual directly in the hardware processor. But if in the guest's code there is a privileged instruction, that is, an instruction reserved for an operating system, then the VM gets an interrupt and, then, decides if VM wants to execute the privileged instruction on behalf of the guest. To make this all efficient, there is some hardware called virtual machine assist.
    - greenyoda 12y ago
      It goes back even farther than the 1980s. IBM's virtualization product, VM/370, was released in 1972.[1] The development of it happened in the late 1960s on a special version of the 360 that had virtual memory support.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS
    - graycat 12y ago
      There was the operating systems CMS and CP67 done by the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center for the IBM 360/67 in, right, about 1967. The CP67 was control program 67 and was for virtual machine. CMS was Cambridge Monitor Systems, maybe off and on Conversational Monitor System, and the command-line time-sharing operating system users saw. CP67 was intended as a means for interactive, time-shared operating system development. So, right, could run CP67 on CP67 -- once that was done 7 levels deep. The combination CP67/CMS was, for the time, a total dream for a time sharing system. Stop malicious code? Sure: On CP67 write and run any code, any instructions doing anything you want with any data you want, and you just cannot bother any other users. So, could run malicious code safely. I used CP67/CMS and PL/I from National CSS Time Sharing in Stamford, CT to schedule the fleet at FedEx. Founder, COB, CEO Fred Smith's remark about the output was "Amazing document" "Solved the most important problem facing FedEx". The Board was pleased and a nice chunk of funding was enabled. It literally saved the company. No, Fred never gave me my promised stock, that once he said would be worth $500,000. Add a few zeros for now. Since then CP67 was called VM, and for years IBM's internal computing was done on about 3600 mainframes around the world and all running VM/CMS and connected with VNET which was a lot like the Internet except the communications were via bisync lines and the routing was done by the mainframes themselves. No, that setup didn't depend on Systems Network Architecture (SNA). Yes, there were a lot of fora! The advantages of running on VM were too good to pass up, so eventually essentially all production IBM mainframes were running their operating systems as guests on VM on the bare metal. In virtual machine, IBM was way out in front.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        They still are. When I started learning how OS/400 work, now IBM i. I was quite interested to see the execution model of having everything stored as bytecode, with a JIT kernel doing AOT compilation at install time. Something that is kind of being done on the Android and Windows worlds, attempted on Oberon and Inferno, but not with the extent that the OS/400 does it.
  - serf 12y ago
    Well, off the top of my head, and unlikely to be the only association.. IBM licensed the 286 for the IBM PC/AT. Acorn wanted to use the 286 for the Archimedes, but Intel would not allow licensing. This forced Acorn to create their own processor, resulting in the first RISC based consumer PC. Perhaps that snowballs into our current tech environment.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Exactly, that's why I picked ARM. So that line does not trace back to IBM in any way, besides, Intel isn't IBM.
      - serf 12y ago
        So that line does not trace back to IBM in any way, besides, Intel isn't IBM. eh.. sorta.[0]. IBM had significant stake in Intel during the time period we're talking about, and that whole period was filled with anti-trust talk, which turned into actual anti-trust fire a few years later in the 90s. I may not have been blunt enough in my other comment, but I was alluding to the idea that IBM and Intel may have been involved in anti-competitive behavior against Acorn, which caused them to innovate in such a way that created the systems we enjoy today (modern mobile). The idea that the pressures on the company spawned innovation. [0]: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-29/business/fi-1393_1_intel-corp-shares http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-29/business/fi-1393_1_in...
        jacquesm 12y ago
        'Was the cause of a complete redevelopment' is the polar opposite of 'can be traced back to' whatever ugly dealings IBM and Intel may have had (which doesn't surprise me one bit).
  - trsohmers 12y ago
    It's a lot easier to claim that all modern processors (that are based on a load/store architecture... All RISC chips, basically... and that includes x86) trace back to the CDC 6600, probably Seymour Cray's most direct and influential gift to the world of computing.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I can get behind that. Control data, or it will control you!
    - JoachimS 12y ago
      And the IBM reference would be IBM 801 by John Cocke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke Dunno how much it actually influenced the Archimedes though.
jacquesm 12y ago
That's a fairly content free release as these come. Nothing about the actual architecture, clearly aimed at managers rather than techies, IBM does enterprise sales very well. But of course I'm more interested in the nitty gritty details (though I'll likely never be in a position to pull the trigger on a purchase like this). Funny how Linux is mentioned in the press release, and other platforms don't even rate a mention.
- spydum 12y ago
  Very true.. Though I recall the power7 stuff being released years ago as a very tech heavy event, and yet it seemed to go down without much of an impact as well (though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing). I think people who are invested (culturally/mentally)in ibm will continue to buy ibm (and no doubt be successful). I just don't see them growing any new markets.
  - Afforess 12y ago
    >though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing I was talking to an ibmer a while ago and AIX was mentioned. We agreed the platform had technical merits, and on a pure platform level was superior to x32/x64 but the network effects of commodity hardware had already won the platform game. No one writes software for any other platforms but intel/amd64. AIX lost for the battle, similar to the reasons betamax lost to VHS.
  - erglkjahlkh 12y ago
    I have participated in sales, and I did not want to get into hours long discussion (boring, and not really important) about what Power/AIX offers so I boiled it down for potential customers like this: If you want the best with insane price level, buy into Power/AIX. If you are not really sure, please don't. You need to train administrators (with larger setups) - or prepare to shell in a lot of money, the hardware contains nasty licensing surprises, the hardware is rather expensive, and so on. When you get it running, it's insanely powerful indeed, and the platform itself nearly never screws up (if you tested properly for Monday parts), and the virtualization is insanely good in practice. Some potential customers have bought Power/AIX, some not. The ones that did are still years after customers, and to my knowledge pretty happy. I believe IBM is actually gaining customers. Slowly, but they are. Those that made the choice knew what they got into, and are not going to change their views.
jacquesm 12y ago
I've found some specs: - up to 141 configurable processors - new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ - 110GIPS - Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support - On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors - up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM) PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/ZSD03035USEN.PDF http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...
- jlarocco 12y ago
  I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor. Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s. But here's a new machine with 10 TB of RAM, and the release notes are quick to point out new features for COBOL and PL/I. Go figure.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    The specs from 2045 will still mention COBOL, PL/I and of course Java.
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    > I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money. In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but in a field that is less narrow and specific than you would think[1], there's still no real replacement for (modern) Fortran. [1] numeric applications that need to get close to the hardware's peak performance, written in a higher level language than C that is usable by non-CS-graduates.
halayli 12y ago
what's a transaction in this context?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system
  - halayli 12y ago
    I know that but this is a very general definition of TPS. How many CPU cycles a transaction requires? It varies on the transaction of course. So I am wondering why they use TPS as a unit when it can be anything.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      They use TPS as a unit because that's how large banks and other transaction oriented entities do their provisioning and capacity planning. That's their 'unit', not CPU cycles.
      - halayli 12y ago
        But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?
        Someone 12y ago
        There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp. And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC (https://www.spec.org/ https://www.spec.org/) says something, but not all.
ivan_ah 12y ago
The part about the in-memory analytics reminds me a lot of the SAP HANA spiel: Transaction Database --> copy --> analytics db = slow In-memory transactions with built-in analytics = fast I totally understand the value of analytics and BI applications, but does it all have to be realtime? And what "mobile analytics" are they going to compute exactly? Forget analytics, I can tell you what mobile users are doing right now---they're all playing candy crush.
- chime 12y ago
  Their customers are not King.com or most techie startups. Their customers are insurance companies, banks, and other financial behemoths. My bank recently alerted me because I swiped my credit card at one gas station away from home but did not buy gas (the pump was out of gas) and then swiped again at another gas station in a 3mi radius within 30 minutes (obviously since I needed gas). Their system picked up these two transactions, figured out they were both gas stations, geo-located them to be out of my area, calculated the distance to be close enough to reason it was just one person (and not my wife using her card elsewhere), and triggered an alert because the first transaction was really just a $1 pre-auth with no actual charge. While none of this is really that complex if you built a fraud-detection system from ground up with these requirements, imagine running this rule on a few hundred million transactions per day. Now add in a thousand more fraud-detection rules, scoring algorithms, and pattern recognition for uncommon usage. Then hook it up to the mobile app to further reduce chances of fraudulent usage by tracking user's location, businesses silently checked-in, and alert preferences. IBM is targeting companies that need this.
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    I thought the customer was always king, and nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.
smegel 12y ago
The biggest, baddest Linux hypervisor known to mankind.
drKarl 12y ago
While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transactions, but still quite high today... and also you can spin up new servers as needed, or destroy servers as they are no longer needed, so you control your costs when you don't need as much instead of having a very expensive mainframe 90% underutilized 90% of the time.
- pbourke 12y ago
  Computers, even these, are cheaper than development and opportunity costs for a complex system. Especially if that system has been around for 30+ years and lies at the core of a large business.
  - jbergens 12y ago
    But development for mainframes seems to be much more costly than development on pc's. If you need this type of machine you need it, but it will probably cost you a lot to work with it over the years.
- brudgers 12y ago
  The CAP theorem suggests some limits on a distributed systems approach. These matter very much in industries like banking and others involving financial transactions. It's no accident that checking each transaction for credit card fraud is listed as a feature. If there's float, there's an opportunity for arbitrage. IBM is full of really smart people some of whom work on really hard problems using the principles of Computer science. The z13 wasn't the result of two recent grads pivoting a Yelp for Rabbits startup and the z13 isn't for companies hoping to do a billion transactions a day. It's for those doing it.
- 7952 12y ago
  Distributed systems as a whole can still suffer from the same kind of issues that you would expect to see in a monolithic system. Look at how a single bad software update can take down Google or AWS. At a basic level this kind of sytem gives you lots of low latency bandwidth connecting CPUs to each other and CPUs to storage. That is a useful quality to have and not neccessarily easily repoducible using network and internet connections between servers and data centers.
anentropic 12y ago
YES BUT WHY IS THE FONT SO SMALL?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- twic 12y ago
  That's IBM's new 9-pixel type process.
easytiger 12y ago
> z13 is the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale Or you know, any kind of transaction because there is no difference. Fuck I hate marketing.
feld 12y ago
The "encryption" buzzword is worthless without details. And I wonder if they'll stand behind their product if their crypto flavor of choice is broken and needs to be changed. Otherwise that's an expensive brick of swiss cheese.
- wmf 12y ago
  http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cryptography.html http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cry... (previous generation) http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/ http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/ One reason for industry standards is that they distribute risk across the whole industry. So if NIST crypto is broken the entire industry goes down together; one company wouldn't have a competitive disadvantage.
ask123 12y ago
I have been working in the mainframe industry for over 5 years now and i know tons of company (government, banks, insurance and others) are still running mainframe. I picked this field because i saw the opportunity of how alot of the old folks are retiring and companies are willing to pay alot of money to get young folks to join and learn the mainframe. Honestly its not even that hard as long as you are willing to learn.... what are your thoughts about it? If someone was willing to train people, would people be interested in it?

102 points by zmonkeyz 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

It's fascinating to see the rhetoric focussing on mobile transactions being the main driver of demand. While it's certainly huge, there are still a lot of other uses.

pantulis 12y ago
I was surprised that the word "omnichannel" is missing.

_RPM 12y ago

literally every device used by consumers today can be traced back to IBM.

jacquesm 12y ago
How so? How does an ARM powered smartphone or tablet trace back to IBM?
- _RPM 12y ago
  When you press the main button. BOOM! Interrupt! That is one example. They even had virtualization in the 80's on System / 370 long VMWare came out.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    http://virtualirfan.com/history-of-interrupts http://virtualirfan.com/history-of-interrupts So no on that one. Visualiation? You mean virtualization. That was a given, Turing should be credited with that, after all the whole idea of a universal Turing machine is that it can emulate any other Turing machine (including another universal one).
    - graycat 12y ago
      VM is not really an emulation. If the guest's code is just user level code, then it just runs as usual directly in the hardware processor. But if in the guest's code there is a privileged instruction, that is, an instruction reserved for an operating system, then the VM gets an interrupt and, then, decides if VM wants to execute the privileged instruction on behalf of the guest. To make this all efficient, there is some hardware called virtual machine assist.
  - greenyoda 12y ago
    It goes back even farther than the 1980s. IBM's virtualization product, VM/370, was released in 1972.[1] The development of it happened in the late 1960s on a special version of the 360 that had virtual memory support.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS
  - graycat 12y ago
    There was the operating systems CMS and CP67 done by the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center for the IBM 360/67 in, right, about 1967. The CP67 was control program 67 and was for virtual machine. CMS was Cambridge Monitor Systems, maybe off and on Conversational Monitor System, and the command-line time-sharing operating system users saw. CP67 was intended as a means for interactive, time-shared operating system development. So, right, could run CP67 on CP67 -- once that was done 7 levels deep. The combination CP67/CMS was, for the time, a total dream for a time sharing system. Stop malicious code? Sure: On CP67 write and run any code, any instructions doing anything you want with any data you want, and you just cannot bother any other users. So, could run malicious code safely. I used CP67/CMS and PL/I from National CSS Time Sharing in Stamford, CT to schedule the fleet at FedEx. Founder, COB, CEO Fred Smith's remark about the output was "Amazing document" "Solved the most important problem facing FedEx". The Board was pleased and a nice chunk of funding was enabled. It literally saved the company. No, Fred never gave me my promised stock, that once he said would be worth $500,000. Add a few zeros for now. Since then CP67 was called VM, and for years IBM's internal computing was done on about 3600 mainframes around the world and all running VM/CMS and connected with VNET which was a lot like the Internet except the communications were via bisync lines and the routing was done by the mainframes themselves. No, that setup didn't depend on Systems Network Architecture (SNA). Yes, there were a lot of fora! The advantages of running on VM were too good to pass up, so eventually essentially all production IBM mainframes were running their operating systems as guests on VM on the bare metal. In virtual machine, IBM was way out in front.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      They still are. When I started learning how OS/400 work, now IBM i. I was quite interested to see the execution model of having everything stored as bytecode, with a JIT kernel doing AOT compilation at install time. Something that is kind of being done on the Android and Windows worlds, attempted on Oberon and Inferno, but not with the extent that the OS/400 does it.
- serf 12y ago
  Well, off the top of my head, and unlikely to be the only association.. IBM licensed the 286 for the IBM PC/AT. Acorn wanted to use the 286 for the Archimedes, but Intel would not allow licensing. This forced Acorn to create their own processor, resulting in the first RISC based consumer PC. Perhaps that snowballs into our current tech environment.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Exactly, that's why I picked ARM. So that line does not trace back to IBM in any way, besides, Intel isn't IBM.
    - serf 12y ago
      So that line does not trace back to IBM in any way, besides, Intel isn't IBM. eh.. sorta.[0]. IBM had significant stake in Intel during the time period we're talking about, and that whole period was filled with anti-trust talk, which turned into actual anti-trust fire a few years later in the 90s. I may not have been blunt enough in my other comment, but I was alluding to the idea that IBM and Intel may have been involved in anti-competitive behavior against Acorn, which caused them to innovate in such a way that created the systems we enjoy today (modern mobile). The idea that the pressures on the company spawned innovation. [0]: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-29/business/fi-1393_1_intel-corp-shares http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-29/business/fi-1393_1_in...
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        'Was the cause of a complete redevelopment' is the polar opposite of 'can be traced back to' whatever ugly dealings IBM and Intel may have had (which doesn't surprise me one bit).
- trsohmers 12y ago
  It's a lot easier to claim that all modern processors (that are based on a load/store architecture... All RISC chips, basically... and that includes x86) trace back to the CDC 6600, probably Seymour Cray's most direct and influential gift to the world of computing.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I can get behind that. Control data, or it will control you!
  - JoachimS 12y ago
    And the IBM reference would be IBM 801 by John Cocke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke Dunno how much it actually influenced the Archimedes though.

jacquesm 12y ago

That's a fairly content free release as these come. Nothing about the actual architecture, clearly aimed at managers rather than techies, IBM does enterprise sales very well. But of course I'm more interested in the nitty gritty details (though I'll likely never be in a position to pull the trigger on a purchase like this). Funny how Linux is mentioned in the press release, and other platforms don't even rate a mention.

spydum 12y ago
Very true.. Though I recall the power7 stuff being released years ago as a very tech heavy event, and yet it seemed to go down without much of an impact as well (though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing). I think people who are invested (culturally/mentally)in ibm will continue to buy ibm (and no doubt be successful). I just don't see them growing any new markets.
- Afforess 12y ago
  >though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing I was talking to an ibmer a while ago and AIX was mentioned. We agreed the platform had technical merits, and on a pure platform level was superior to x32/x64 but the network effects of commodity hardware had already won the platform game. No one writes software for any other platforms but intel/amd64. AIX lost for the battle, similar to the reasons betamax lost to VHS.
- erglkjahlkh 12y ago
  I have participated in sales, and I did not want to get into hours long discussion (boring, and not really important) about what Power/AIX offers so I boiled it down for potential customers like this: If you want the best with insane price level, buy into Power/AIX. If you are not really sure, please don't. You need to train administrators (with larger setups) - or prepare to shell in a lot of money, the hardware contains nasty licensing surprises, the hardware is rather expensive, and so on. When you get it running, it's insanely powerful indeed, and the platform itself nearly never screws up (if you tested properly for Monday parts), and the virtualization is insanely good in practice. Some potential customers have bought Power/AIX, some not. The ones that did are still years after customers, and to my knowledge pretty happy. I believe IBM is actually gaining customers. Slowly, but they are. Those that made the choice knew what they got into, and are not going to change their views.

jacquesm 12y ago

I've found some specs: - up to 141 configurable processors - new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ - 110GIPS - Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support - On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors - up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM) PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/ZSD03035USEN.PDF http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...

jlarocco 12y ago
I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor. Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s. But here's a new machine with 10 TB of RAM, and the release notes are quick to point out new features for COBOL and PL/I. Go figure.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The specs from 2045 will still mention COBOL, PL/I and of course Java.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  > I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money. In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but in a field that is less narrow and specific than you would think[1], there's still no real replacement for (modern) Fortran. [1] numeric applications that need to get close to the hardware's peak performance, written in a higher level language than C that is usable by non-CS-graduates.

halayli 12y ago

what's a transaction in this context?

jacquesm 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system
- halayli 12y ago
  I know that but this is a very general definition of TPS. How many CPU cycles a transaction requires? It varies on the transaction of course. So I am wondering why they use TPS as a unit when it can be anything.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    They use TPS as a unit because that's how large banks and other transaction oriented entities do their provisioning and capacity planning. That's their 'unit', not CPU cycles.
    - halayli 12y ago
      But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?
      - Someone 12y ago
        There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp. And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC (https://www.spec.org/ https://www.spec.org/) says something, but not all.

ivan_ah 12y ago

The part about the in-memory analytics reminds me a lot of the SAP HANA spiel: Transaction Database --> copy --> analytics db = slow In-memory transactions with built-in analytics = fast I totally understand the value of analytics and BI applications, but does it all have to be realtime? And what "mobile analytics" are they going to compute exactly? Forget analytics, I can tell you what mobile users are doing right now---they're all playing candy crush.

chime 12y ago
Their customers are not King.com or most techie startups. Their customers are insurance companies, banks, and other financial behemoths. My bank recently alerted me because I swiped my credit card at one gas station away from home but did not buy gas (the pump was out of gas) and then swiped again at another gas station in a 3mi radius within 30 minutes (obviously since I needed gas). Their system picked up these two transactions, figured out they were both gas stations, geo-located them to be out of my area, calculated the distance to be close enough to reason it was just one person (and not my wife using her card elsewhere), and triggered an alert because the first transaction was really just a $1 pre-auth with no actual charge. While none of this is really that complex if you built a fraud-detection system from ground up with these requirements, imagine running this rule on a few hundred million transactions per day. Now add in a thousand more fraud-detection rules, scoring algorithms, and pattern recognition for uncommon usage. Then hook it up to the mobile app to further reduce chances of fraudulent usage by tracking user's location, businesses silently checked-in, and alert preferences. IBM is targeting companies that need this.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  I thought the customer was always king, and nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

smegel 12y ago

The biggest, baddest Linux hypervisor known to mankind.

drKarl 12y ago

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transactions, but still quite high today... and also you can spin up new servers as needed, or destroy servers as they are no longer needed, so you control your costs when you don't need as much instead of having a very expensive mainframe 90% underutilized 90% of the time.

pbourke 12y ago
Computers, even these, are cheaper than development and opportunity costs for a complex system. Especially if that system has been around for 30+ years and lies at the core of a large business.
- jbergens 12y ago
  But development for mainframes seems to be much more costly than development on pc's. If you need this type of machine you need it, but it will probably cost you a lot to work with it over the years.
brudgers 12y ago
The CAP theorem suggests some limits on a distributed systems approach. These matter very much in industries like banking and others involving financial transactions. It's no accident that checking each transaction for credit card fraud is listed as a feature. If there's float, there's an opportunity for arbitrage. IBM is full of really smart people some of whom work on really hard problems using the principles of Computer science. The z13 wasn't the result of two recent grads pivoting a Yelp for Rabbits startup and the z13 isn't for companies hoping to do a billion transactions a day. It's for those doing it.
7952 12y ago
Distributed systems as a whole can still suffer from the same kind of issues that you would expect to see in a monolithic system. Look at how a single bad software update can take down Google or AWS. At a basic level this kind of sytem gives you lots of low latency bandwidth connecting CPUs to each other and CPUs to storage. That is a useful quality to have and not neccessarily easily repoducible using network and internet connections between servers and data centers.

anentropic 12y ago

YES BUT WHY IS THE FONT SO SMALL?

deleted 12y ago
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twic 12y ago
That's IBM's new 9-pixel type process.

easytiger 12y ago

> z13 is the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale Or you know, any kind of transaction because there is no difference. Fuck I hate marketing.

feld 12y ago

The "encryption" buzzword is worthless without details. And I wonder if they'll stand behind their product if their crypto flavor of choice is broken and needs to be changed. Otherwise that's an expensive brick of swiss cheese.

wmf 12y ago
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cryptography.html http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cry... (previous generation) http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/ http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/ One reason for industry standards is that they distribute risk across the whole industry. So if NIST crypto is broken the entire industry goes down together; one company wouldn't have a competitive disadvantage.

ask123 12y ago

I have been working in the mainframe industry for over 5 years now and i know tons of company (government, banks, insurance and others) are still running mainframe. I picked this field because i saw the opportunity of how alot of the old folks are retiring and companies are willing to pay alot of money to get young folks to join and learn the mainframe. Honestly its not even that hard as long as you are willing to learn.... what are your thoughts about it? If someone was willing to train people, would people be interested in it?