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Why OldTech Keeps Kicking
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1991 Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Just last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, and technologies from the golden age of big-box computing continue to be vital components in modern infrastructure. The New York Times explores why old technology is still around, using radio and the mainframe as perfect examples. 'The mainframe is the classic survivor technology, and it owes its longevity to sound business decisions. I.B.M. overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine. The company invested and updated the mainframe software, so that banks, corporations and government agencies could still rely on the mainframe as the rock-solid reliable and secure computer for vital transactions and data, while allowing it to take on new chores like running Web-based programs.'"
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Because the people who are used to that tech haven't kicked (the bucket).
Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Look at the inability of people to drive using joysticks, instead sticking to the classic wheel arrangement. I've seen drive by wire setups using joysticks, they work well, but people just can't get into them.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I DON'T SEE WHAT THE BIG PROBLEM IS. I
HAVE BEEN POSTING FROM MY COMMODORE 64 F
OR TWENTY YEARS NOW AND IT IS WORKING JU
ST FINE FOR ME!
The damned lameness filter has just managed to destroy my joke. Thanks a lot, filter.
Ten years gone, and still relevant.
Damn I miss Byte.
Best Slashdot Co
The x86 architecture
The QWERTY keyboard
SATA (yes, folks, a serial version of the old IBM AT bus!)
Drive letters, DOS devices
Does anyone actually use the tar program for its original purpose anymore?
"mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market"
I'm pretty sure that mainframe sales are 0% of the personal computer market.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Does noone else see the irony in a newspaper exploring the reasoning behind "old" technology being used in modern environments?
I used to make CD players for one of the tech giants, as such I was in China alot. When I say "make" I'll be more specific - I wrote the firmware.
I remember vividly a conversation with one of the chinese project managers. I was discussing the build quality of a new CD player for the US markets. It had that brown cardboard like PCB that the racks leap off if you wave a soldering iron in the general vicinity. The PCBS, the unit front, the enfire casework was glued together with a hot glue gun. The radio tuning circuit was wire wrapped around a pencil and then "frozen" in place with dripped wax whilst the software was expected to adapt to mask any tolerance issues. The manager and his team gave it a projected life span of 18 months, then the consumer would be back to buy another, he was really enthusiastic about the repeat business.
*That* is why old tech survives because it was built to last, not with built in obsolescence. And no, I never brought a CD player from my employer ever again.
I keep seeing new ways to do the same old things; perform a credit transaction, store a health record, track inventory etc. Many of these requirements have changed little for decades if not centuries, and new requirements like enhanced security are easily accomodated in a centralized environment.
The original systems created to satisfy these requirements were lightweight and efficient to run on the machinery of the time and easily managed by virtue of being centralized. By contrast, many new solutions are bloated and hard to manage because of their de-centralised nature and the need to use whatever networking protocol was simplest to implement regardless of its suitability for the task. God forbid that anyone has to look at a terminal font to get information from a system - if it's not in Times new Roman then it's just not proper information.
The sole purpose for the replacement of the older systems seems to have been "because we wanted a GUI" to make it un-neccessary to train our users or because companies thought that they could axe experienced network admins and terminal equipment that they perceived to be 'locking them' to a vendor. Now I see that in many cases the management of large systems has been "de-skilled" and involves such a cocktail of technologies that nobody knows quite how it all hangs together (least of all how secure it all is).
Best just throw in more resources to make the IT problem go away, at least it's spread over several bills so it seems easier to pay for...
Nullius in verba
What would be the cost of hiring on top of the existing mainframe admins and developers a team to migrate this stuff to Windows or UNIX? Remember some of this code is written by people who not only have left the company but may have died. Then you have to hire new developers and administrators for the UNIX/Windows systems. Change always creates the potential for problems, so expect a higher percentage of disruptions to the business as you're doling out all this money. If IBM is making it easy for you to keep what you have going, and also allows Linux, web etc. capability, why spend all that money to transition? The answer is that a lot of times companies don't. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that still had plenty of IBM mainframes. They even had a lot of their printing handled by the mainframes, although there were Windows and UNIX gateways into the print queue.
Mainframes are still around because the engineering is better.
There's no secret about how to do this. It wouldn't even add much cost to servers to do it right. Here's what's needed.
Once you have all that fault isolation, you know which component broke. This produces ongoing pressure for better components. It empowers customers to be effective hardasses about components breaking. With proper fault isolation and logging, you know what broke, you know when it broke, you know if others like it broke, and you probably know why it broke. So you know exactly which vendor needs the clue stick applied. There's none of this "reinstall the operating system and maybe it will go away" crap.
I love this "single point of failure" argument. It's a fallacy. The only single point of failure with a single mainframe is the building it physically sits in. A single mainframe is internally redundant in every possible respect you can think of (and several you didn't think of). It is that cluster you talk about fondly, except there's no (error-prone) self-assembly and no particular management burden required. It. Just. Works.
But if you're concerned about a building failure -- fire, flood, whatever -- you can buy a second machine. IBM will sell that second machine to you at a lower price. You can put the second machine in a second building, you can run fiber (preferably with two separate physical paths) between the two machines, keep them many tens of kilometers apart, and run them as a single, seamless cluster (called a Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex). And, as a programmer, you have absolutely zero coding responsibility to make that all work. If anything bad happens all your transactions instantly flip over to the other site, in-flight, real-time. And you don't lose a single byte or a single customer, and you can prove you didn't. You can also service any element of that cluster -- any element, from software to hardware to network to whatever -- without any interruption in business service. Yes, you can upgrade your database engine version while everybody's credit cards keep working. Neat party trick, that, but it's business-as-usual for mainframes.
Scalable? Each machine contains up to 64 main processors (and a minimum of two spares!) running at 4.4 GHz with more cache (and more cache levels, including copious shared cache) than anything else. (Even the clock speed argument is gone. It's a faster clock speed than X86.) Plus scores of secondary processors -- the main processors only do real work, not encryption or I/O. They don't even handle clustering -- there are dedicated processors for that. You can stuff 1.5 TB of RAM in each frame. And you can have a single cluster -- which behaves like a single logical machine from a programmer's point of view -- containing up to 32 of these machines. That's a single "machine" with 2048 main processors and hundreds (thousands?) of assist processors. Beyond that you can still do everything an Intel cluster can, like conventional load-balancing (e.g. HTTP spraying) across multiple 2048-CPU clusters. But no one has yet invented a core banking system, for example, that exceeds even a couple of these 64-way machines for a large Chinese bank, to give you some perspective.
No, this stuff is in a different league. Please read up on it sometime before dismissing it offhand. I don't dismiss the value of X86 blades for certain applications, but this mainframe stuff is very different and has important roles. Telecom switching, maybe maybe not. Telecom billing, you bet.