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The Mainframe World Is Alive, Even For Those Under 40
willdavid writes with a link to a report by Jeff Gould at Interop Systems, about the definitely-still-around world of mainframe computing, from which he extracts:
"Last week I had the occasion to visit SHARE, the premier mainframe conference, which was held in San Jose just down the road from where I live.
Based on what I saw, there is one thing I can tell you for sure, and that is that Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe.
When I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been to SHARE, he joked that it must have looked like an AARP convention. But this turned out not to be so. While there were certainly a few 60-somethings strolling around the halls, the under 40 generation was also well represented. What struck me the most was not the advanced age of the people but the relative youth of a lot of the software being discussed."
However, it's not all fountain of youth there, either. (Thanks, BDPrime.)
The ol' yellow number 2 pencil is still around as well, as is shoe-making, wine-barrel repair, and of course the oldest tool in the book ... the tool.
Like humans all technologies find their place in the universe. Mainframes have their advantages, just would not want one sitting on my lap.
99.999 Up time, speed, number of transactions, precision, hot swapping, 64 CPUs, lower cost to maintain, longer life time.
Hell, I can get a mainframe and put 30,000 Linux instance on it and use it as a cluster, or rollover servers.
PC Servers still aren't as capable as a mainframe, not even clusters.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's correct. Also, look at the retail business. Merchandise management, loss prevention, warehousing and distribution... And we're not talking arcane software packages.
Here's an example: A retail chain has payroll, merchandising, and warehousing/distribution systems, all on the mainframe. The point of sale interfaces with the mainframe as well. A store starts to run low on an item? The mainframe knows because the POS sends its inventory data constantly. The MMS then tells the warehousing system that that store needs more. A pick list is automatically printed by the warehousing system. The warehouse worker picks the item off the shelf, puts it on a conveyor belt which runs through an RFID portal, linked to the mainframe, that then routes the item to the proper truck in the dock so it gets to the correct store - automatically. The truck delivers the item to the store, and the driver enters that into a wireless device which (you guessed it!) tells the warehousing system and merchandise management system that the item has been received by the store, so the MMS always knows the inventory levels in the store. The associate sells that item, and the MMS sees that from the POS data... it also knows that this particular item pays out a spiff to the associate and sends the information directly to the payroll system, which interfaces with a company who handles payroll (like ADP), and automatically adds the spiff to their next paycheck.
Uh oh - the chain is growing and adding new stores, with increasing volumes of data to process, and the nightly batch processing is taking too long... what to do? Call IBM, license another processor... They activate it immediately for you.
But oh no! A disk is failing... no need to worry, because IBM already knows about it and has dispatched a technician to diagnose and replace the faulty hardware.
New versions of this software are being released all the time, and just about every retailer with more than a few stores uses them. These systems are modern. Don't think a big room full of giant cabinets, reel-to-reel tapes and punch cards. Some of the current IBM iSeries (AS/400) models have a form factor that looks more like a PC than a mainframe.
Show me a Windows or Linux system that can do all that, 24x7, for hundreds or thousands of stores.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Dinosaurs are extinct. IBM mainframes are more like alligators or crocodiles or sharks... mostly unchanged from, and still closely related to, it's dinosaur-era ancestors, but still alive because it's so effective at what it does. Like those animals, mainframes still are the undisputed ruler of their part of the kingdom.
When we're old... hell, when we're dead... we'll likely still have something like Slashdot, with people saying "the mainframe will die any day now".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"It is amazing how few people realize how much of our society still uses steam. You forgot geothermal, and some forms of solar plants."
Yup. Back when I was in the Navy, and I got to my first ship, a nuclear carrier, I thought nuclear power was this gee-whiz technology; if you don't know any better, you'd be inclined to think that "nuclear power" is turning those propellers... via protons, electrons, ray-guns, something sci-fi like that. When a nuke machinist mate explained how it really worked, I was kind of shocked. Basically, all we had was a steam engine, where the heat came from a reactor instead of coal. Same process, just a different heating fuel. Since those days two decades ago, I've become fascinated by just how much "advanced technology" that we use is really nothing more than barely improved methods our ancestors used. Jet engines? Nothing more than prop engines with the fans on the inside and some ignited fuel in the exhaust. Ultra-modern rifles like M-16A4's and AUG and the L86? Working from the same priciples as rifles hundreds of years old. Hell, car engines are noting but a hunk of iron with a series of explosions in them.
Technology most of the time is really nothing more than a machine that takes advantage of some principle of nature, and is often very, very simple at it's core.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
And scaling up a single mainframe gets exponentially more expensive; the price buying more commodity servers stays constant, meaning a linear cost of scaling.
Why do IT people (I'm assuming) make such lousy economists?
Think about it for just half a second. If you want to double the transactional capacity ("throughput") of your mainframe, you turn on more processor(s) inside the same box. (It's almost always inside the same box. A single mainframe can have massive capacity.) And you only do so when the mainframe is 100% busy for sustained periods, which it gracefully handles by the way without choking. You have zero reconfiguration to do to hardware, software, or applications: it's "on tap." (In fact, the machine itself can provision itself nowadays.) This is very cheap: doubling costs way, way less than the initial allocation. Also, up to 32 machines can share memory and operate as one, so if you are unusual and hit a single machine limit, no problem. It's only past 32 that you resort to partioning, traditional clustering, etc. -- and you've still got a lot more weapons at your disposal.
If you want to double your actual transactional capacity with highly distributed servers, you...well, it may be impossible. You better hope you have highly segmented and partitioned work for those servers to do, and that it is extremely well balanced so that it fits into little server buckets. The burden is mostly or entirely on you, the application developer, to figure that out -- and that's horribly expensive. (Because the work never is balanced, you have to install a bunch of servers that don't run continuously at near 100% busy, so you get less real-world performance out of each processor anyway.) But at the very least you have to more than double the number of boxes. And you have a lot of knobs to twist and turn to get your work settled into its new, large number of machines, so you better hope you don't need that extra capacity NOW. (Can't process those credit card transactions during a spike in demand? Sorry about that -- I guess your credit card company will just have skip collecting those millions of dollars.) And you get to hire and pay some more people to install, configure, and maintain those extra boxes. You also get to find more space in your data center (if you have it), consume more than double the power (if you have it), and run the air conditioning more than twice as hard (if you can). You pay Oracle, Microsoft, et. al. at least double, too. (That's not how mainframe softwre works: there are strong price curves, not lines.)
Fortunately there are some IT-economists in the world who understand this stuff.