Mainframe Programming to Make a Comeback?

ajw1976 writes to tell us that IBM has released a series of announcements today "introducing many new software tools, academic programs, and support for outside developers." The new releases are designed to help entice programmers and businesses back to the mainframe. From the article: "The announcements, according to analysts briefed on them in advance, signal a shift from defense to offense in the company's mainframe strategy. Last month, I.B.M. introduced a machine priced at $100,000, about half the previous starting price for its mainframes, which can run up to several million dollars. The announcement of the low-end mainframe was made in China, which I.B.M. regards as a promising market for the machines."

Comments

mainframes rock

[yagu]

Cool, I can dust off my old bell bottom pants and platform shoes. I knew they would come back!

All seriousness aside, I started out coding for mainframes, mostly assembly. To this day some of the most screaming and cool programs I ever wrote were on mainframes (wrote (in assembly) an on-line trouble logging system to replace a paper system back in '76).

I did lots of COBOL programming and maintenance for a major, now absorbed by increasingly corrupt larger pseudo-telcos, telco. COBOL, not the most exciting language, but the throughput and data integrity of those days I've not seen matched since (and I still love Unix as my first choice for environment).

Which brings me (and us) to what I think works in favor of mainframes having a chance at a major comeback:

• TCP/IP stack not builtin and assumed. In the old days, if you wanted to communicate with other architectures it was a RPITA. With internet protocol everything is easy. Now you can take the raw power and integrity of the mainframe and lace it up to foreign technology.
• IBM's OSS/Linux participation. I don't know if IBM has completely jumped on this bandwagon, but they've made contributions, and you can "do" Unix on their mainframes. And, they have cool passthrough mechanisms, how cool is it to write a shell script that can access VSAM data? If you don't know, it is very cool.
• Mainframes historically have gi-huge support organizations built up around them. They have backups to backups. And, it's all managed for you.
• Mainframes are single point of support, you all know you're using the same configuration (well, to the extent you're in the same virtual system on a mainframe).
• Mainframes aren't Windows (sorry, had to put that in for the troll mods.)

This is a partial list. I've long lusted for the raw power of mainframes with the standard support and the nimble Unix utilities.

Re:mainframes rock

[EmoryBrighton]

I have heard a lot about mainfraimes (heck, I work for the gov and we rent a 3M+/year Unisys mainframe for certain sensitive databases) ... but I have never seen statistics that show *how much better* those mainframes are...

Does anyone know of any (non VENDOR) studies & comparisons vs traditional computer architectures?

Re:mainframes rock

[AuMatar]

Mainframes are just too different a world. Its not just performance (in fact, the performance difference is due only to an insane number of cores and memory, not an inherently better chip), its reliability. Some IBM mainframes have CPUs that do every instruction twice in parallel (different cores on the chip). If the results don't match, it turns the chip off as defective and shunts the program to a backup. That kind of thing just doesn't exist in traditional architectures.

Although in the days of clusters, I don't know if mainframes can make it. Clusters have the same edge and much lower cost. I think we're more likely to see some of the OS advantages of mainframes get ported down.

Re:mainframes rock

[morgan_greywolf]

Does anyone know of any (non VENDOR) studies & comparisons vs traditional computer architectures?

Mainframes are traditional computer architecture! Unix is 'new' compared to mainframe technology.

The modern mainframe is, in general, vastly more reliable than even the best of the best of 'big servers.' Mainframes are generally redundant to the point that you can change out thefr CPUs, memory, drives, etc. without turning the power off or rebooting the machine. Linux and Unix servers might boast about a couple of years of uptime, but many mainframe systems have been up for decades.

Many mainframe systems can process orders of magnitude more transactions than your typical *nix system running Oracle -- even when compared to systems with SMP, gigabytes of memory and the latest in high-speed storage. In fact, the stuff that people use nowadays for high-speed, high-reliability storage -- storage area networks (SANs) -- have their roots in mainframe technology. EMC, one of the market leaders in SANs was formerly part of Data General. In fact, so does most of the rest of your high availability 'enterprise-class' technologies -- SMP, NUMA, clustering, etc. Where do you think Linux's current SMP technologies came from? IBM. Who developed them on mainframes, ported them to AIX and then eventually ported them to Linux.

Massively-clustered systems like Google's are quickly become the norm for high-end stuff. But there are certain things that will probably always run on Big Iron. Whenever tasks are mission-critical and need to 24x7 and 'three 9's' doesn't even touch the tip of the iceberg in what you need in reliability -- you'll see mainframes running those tasks more often than not.

What makes a mainframe a mainframe?

[toybuilder]

Asking most programmers to appreciate mainframes must be like asking most drivers to appreciate 18-wheel big rigs -- you know they exist, and large companies rely on them, but you never really have a *need* to know what it's like to operate one.

I've always believed that mainframes have their place in the world, even when the world was announcing the era of the personal computers and the death of mainframes. But while I understood them to be highly specialized high-throughput high-reliability machines, I never had a personal experience with a mainframe operating environment. So I never truly understood what a mainframe is...

I've worked on (relatively) bigger Unix systems (8 processor SPARCservers, 4-rack Sequent NUMA-Q's, and others), but at the end of the day, they seemed no different from a single desktop Unix machine -- just faster and with more memory and storage. I've also used a VAX, briefly, during my freshman year in college. I've always imagined that VMS was closest to what a mainframe environment must be like.

So, to the folks that understand the mainframe -- what is it about them that makes them more than just faster versions of desktop machines, or even server systems that us non-mainframes are used to?

Re:Cluster computing is better

[Arker]

Clusters really aren't comparable.

They compete with supercomputers, not mainframes.

A lot of people confuse the two, but they're very different sorts of machines designed for very different purposes, with very different characteristics.

Supercomputers are great for intensive calculations. When you have a relatively small dataset and a very long string of operations to be performed on that dataset, you want a supercomputer.

A subset of supercomputer tasks are easily parallelised, and on that subset, in particular, a cluster can really rock.

But the weakness of clusters has always been in throughput - their ability to move large amounts of data around is rather weak.

Mainframes aren't great at intensive calculation, they don't compete with supercomputers, what they're designed for and great at (besides incredible reliability) is throughput. Those suckers can move enormous quantities of data around very very quickly.

Want to calculate more digits to pi? Break an encryption key? That's a supercomputer job, and a cluster can probably handle it fairly well.

Want to search a database that contains every transaction your company has ever had, with any customer or supplier, globally, for the past fifty years? That's a mainframe job. And neither a supercomputer nor a cluster is going to get close to a mainframe at doing it. All those hot little cpus will sit mostly idle while waiting for all the data to trickle in through a relatively narrow set of connections, while on the mainframe, all those (relatively slow) CPUs are being kept busy by a massive array of hard drives on an interface with more bandwidth to memory than most of us can even imagine.

Apples and oranges.