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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.)
I spent 20+ years as a mainframe systems programmer. VM/VSE. Since then, I've learned Linux et. al. Man would I love to install Linux in a virtual machine. I'll bet it could fly.
Can somebody please explain to me what the hell a "mainframe" is/was for and why it might be dead?
According to Wikipedia, Mainframes are a bit like supercomputers but better suited to tasks where there's a LOT of input/output data, but not a lot of calculation involved. Payrolls and such.
As far as I'm aware, those tasks still exist today, probably moreso than in the 1970's and 1980's, so why would the Mainframe be dying out? Have regular desktop/server processors advanced faster than demand for this data calculation and thus are now simply adequate or is this article just a bit of FUD to make 'ol timmy look like he's doing his job?
FYI: I'm most certainly under 40. In fact, I'm barely more than half that age, so excuse my ignorance on the subject; the only times I've really heard the term "mainframe" used is in Films, Games and cheap 80's TV shows. And slashdot.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
There are some things COBOL will do better than any other language.
First, it can run through millions and millions of records very quickly. I expect that most payroll systems are done in COBOL. I can't imagine anyone doing it one in C or Java.
The language may be simple but I have not seen any other language that can slice and dice data as easily. But you have to be careful because the type checking is done at 3am when they are running production jobs!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Basically the mainframe and the software it hosts really make the cash for most enterprises - and as a consequence any sensible management are loathe to replace it with something "newer", even if the systems in question are horrible spaghetti nightmares that no-one really understands, and maintaining them is a process of trial and error. Replacement would simply be "cleaning the inside of a tin can", no obvious shareholder value at all in change for changes sake.
Also technology vendors have finally woken up to the fact that the mainframe isnt a dinosaur on the verge of extinction - for example making CICS transactions web-service enabled has made COBOL code just as capable of participating in a service-oriented architecture as a set of AXIS hosted java classes.
Perhaps you are not familiar with what a modern day large server is capable of. The cost/benefit of larger systems doesn't work in every case, but in many cases it does. Not every application is suited to run on a cluster of low cost x86 systems.
My favorite large server is the HP superdome. Check out some of the specs:
- Up to 128 core.
- Up to 2TB of RAM, usually you'd mirror this, so 1TB usable realistically.
- Up to 192 PCI-X slots.
- 12 power supplies.
- 18 fans.
- Partition the system up to 16 different ways.
- Up to 32 GB/s IO bandwidth.
- 273.1 GB/s memory bandwidth.
- Cost, starts around $1,000,000 (last I asked).
- Jump the CPU/RAM/IO around to different partitions as needed, without rebooting anything.
The thing about this that is unlike your typical entry level x86 Enterprise server - EVERYTHING is hot swap. And I mean everything. CPUs, RAM, IO. Very few pieces require a complete shutdown to service.
My favorite mainframe story: "A guy called to ask what procedure he should follow to reboot his mainframe. Tech support told him to just follow the same procedure he did last time. The guy responded, "but only knows how to do that." And so, tech support said "well, get him to do it." At which point the guy remarked: "Well, the problem is he quit 6 years ago."
Yeah. When you need _UPTIME_ it is hard to do better.
Mod parent up - he's on the mark. There's a lot of stuff out there for which the source is gone, but it still does the job. Witness the State of California's payroll system we were discussing a bit back.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
The last UNIX system I built was handling over 130,000 transactions PER SECOND.
HP Superdome + Itanium = incredibly fast.
You might enjoy this link:
http://www.kirsner.org/pages/jackSteam/jackSteamTextAlt.html
Next time you swipe a credit card, and within a few seconds you're approved for your transaction, including determining if you're purchasing something within a common pattern of recent purchases. How many x86 boxes would you need to manage this?
I would guess 20ish, minimum, not counting all the network services, monitoring and support systems the mainframe world isn't even aware of.
Double that if counting offsite.
NO, I'm not defending the "lots of cheap PCs are just like RAID" philosophy, just letting you know there are small fish in the payment industry too. They can and will simply shrug off three hours of unexpected, total OLTP downtime too.
I'm not proud of it at all, but yes, they exist. Having worked adjacent to a mainframe environment in a previous job, I see the direction we need to go. The thing to understand though, is that the open systems world is chock FULL of people who prefer to put things together themselves.
It's like convincing a man who changes his own oil to drag his car up to Prompto Lube. Pride acts as a one way filter, and the open systems side is just bloated right now.
On a smaller level, in the open systems world, I think the same problem, pride, and ideology is fueling the Linux market. Don't take that the wrong way. Linux isn't a problem, it's the lack of intellectually honest people that can't admit "in this case, Solaris/Windows/Mac/AIX... IS the best solution", or "if we keep growing, we SHOULD start looking at a mainframe"
All about pride :\
I miss the days of using Linux because it was open source, not to support open source.
I came across this while working on a Mainframe 'Linux' project
It's a very fair assessment in my opinion
http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/entry/once_again_mainframe_linux_vs
I still miss having my Unix command line thought!
And I'm 34.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
It's very impressive that all the hardware is hot-swappable. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean you will never have downtime. You need the right software for that, too. It either needs to be hot-updatable, or you need redundancy. Redundancy is the more realistic...and if you have that, anyway, why do you still need 99.999999% uptime hardware? In the end, your uptime is determined by the weakest link.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.