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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.
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
I actually just took a job in software development on z/OS (the new hip, backwards-hat wearing mainframe operating system). Aside from the impressive clustering capabilities, we've got a lot of new and exciting stuff. (I personally am a big fan of AT-TLS) It's true that the systems are old and the interfaces archaic and painful to use, but the level of configurability and reliability these things offer is staggering. We have a few customers with 100% uptimes in the 20-year range.
My school (Northern Illinois University) actually is one of the few left offering full mainframe tracks in their computer science department, although COBOL was the most painful programming experience of my life.
I'd bet that my meta-group of 50 or so people has a median age of about 33, and while it is still the old dinosaurs who know the most, the definition of "dinosaur" in my personal, 15 person group is around 50 years old.
Raw IO power, in our case. With the number of transactions we process per day (financial services - clearing, trade matching, reconciliation, etc) nothing beats the System-i in terms of raw IO in getting the data in, massaging it and spitting it out...and far easier to manage than a server farm, at least for our use. The same vendor that provides our software also provides a JAVA version, but it's not going to handle the 2 billion+ transactions we do in a quarter.
And this software isn't legacy - it's relatively new and updated on a regular basis to take into account developments in the kinds of products offered.
"Horses for courses" as my British friends like to say./p?
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!
z/OS is an upgrade of OS390, but yes - it has something called UNIX System Services, which is POSIX compliant but not as friendly as LINUX.
It's not that z/OS fights changes, exactly. Windows is crufty because it has to run MS-DOS programs from the eighties. z/OS has to run programs from the sixties, and do it with a high degree of reliability.
Disclosure: I am an IBM employee and the author of a mainframe book.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
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
There are no Linux-equivalent options for the non-student hobbyist wanting to cut their teeth on the latest generation zSeries software. You simply cannot rent cheap mainframe time with the IBM ADCD (though you could still learn a lot with just a raw z/OS subscription, there would be no compilers, no databases, no middleware, etc.). I'm not kidding or exaggerating; we just looked into this earlier this year (and if any experienced zSeries folks know differently, please post a correction here). IBM prohibits anyone from buying an ADCD subscription, then renting out time on their zSeries, at any price, with access to the ADCD. Your only option if you don't outright own a z/OS license is to pay for the IBM Remote Development Program (RDP). And no, you cannot buy an RDP subscription then resell slices of it. So you can see why the minimum entry fee of more then $4,000 USD per year for RDP would put off most non-student hobbyists.
If you are a student, you can see if your school offers zSeries courses, or look into getting a faculty sponsor for such a course in higher education campuses. IBM has programs for encouraging the training of students in zSeries technologies.
And before anyone pipes up with "Use FLEX-ES!", the commercial x86 zSeries emulator, let me disabuse you of that notion: it is dead in the water at the moment, due to legal fallout from IBM's suit with PSI that is too convoluted to get into here. Only grandfathered commercial licenses are kept on support; no new commercial or development licenses are granted by IBM, and all old development licenses were forcibly terminated as they came up for renewal. We know this because we were one of the developer licensees.
And before anyone else pipes up with "Just buy a used/cheap z/OS box!", let me set you straight on that notion: IBM has cracked down on z/OS licenses to refurbished hardware, to the point where we couldn't find anyone who would sell us old generation hardware with a new license of z/OS because they couldn't promise they could secure said license. And even if you could find some available hardware, the cheapest z/OS license quote we could find for the smallest old mainframe that we could locate was around $150K. At that price, you might as well go all-in for a brand-new "baby mainframe" for $250K.
The zSeries tech is undeniably cool and fun to play with but definitely not for non-students with a beer budget, even just to learn. The Linux world could learn a heck of a lot from the mainframe world, though. My dream platform would probably be a Lisp Machine with its data management and security facilities (amongst others) leavened and matured from mainframe tech. The zSeries folks take for granted solutions that the Linux world doesn't even realize are problems to begin with, and the zSeries guys aren't ashamed to swipe tech they like from other platforms so they aren't standing still, either; it is a pretty nifty learning experience if you are willing to dispense with any preconceived notions of "obsolete mainframes".
"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
Disclaimer: I manage the DASD (disk based storage) for a mainframe (z10) environment.
We used to run a System 390 (think watercooled and took up 1/4 of our datacenter floorspace)
We then migrated to a S390 (aircooled, the first big black box) in about 1995
We then migrated to a z900 in 2002.
We've just completed migrating to a z10.
The applications continue to run on our brand new mainframe unmodified since the early 90s. Sure we've gone from Bus and Tag to ESCON to FICON (1Gb, 2Gb and now 4Gb). But the same applications are taking up significantly less power and a percentage of the mainframe than previously did.
In the early 90s, 486dx was king. How many applications that ran on 486dx DOS systems are currently running in a VMware VM that is running MSDOS 6.22?
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?
Thank us mainframers.
Btw: I'm 36, run linux at home and on the mainframe.
Most of the reasons have been listed by other people, but I figured I'd put them all in one place and then add a few things:
1) Reliability: 5 9's (99.999%)
2) Backward compatibility, there are people still running applications written 40 years ago
3) Security: Physical (hard to move a refrigerator), Network (no external network when applications working internally), RACF, Highest level of security rating of ANY server, ever.
4) Architecture: Redundant everything: Spare processors, spare power, spare, everything. Predictive failure/automatic fail over for individual components. Memory Bus greater than anything out there. Pipes to Storage extreme. Cryptographic processors to do SSL, etc.
5) Scale up: 64 processors (4.4GHz), 1.5 TB of Memory, etc.
6) Scale out: GDPS (Geographically Disperse Parallel Sysplex) up to 32 boxes?
7) Hipervisor: Its a network in a box. Applications talking to each other use IP, not TCP/IP, so you aren't sending 35% data, 65% header when applications talk. Network is at the speed of memory. zVM has been developed for over 20 years.
8) Power Efficiency: Compared to a server cluster + cooling + redundant power, etc.
9) Network Simplicity: No need for a rats nest for your rack, cable simplicity in some cases from over 1000 cables down to 12. From 14 switches (which are very expensive) to 4.
10) Management simplicity: Less staff needed to keep it up and running. Instead they are focused on adding business value
11) Running Legacy (aka Business Critical) applications, your web presence, your portal, and a myriad of other disparate applications in one place.
12) Create new servers in minutes without needing hardware "on standby."
13) Compartmentalization in a single box
14) Shared everything while still fully separate
15) Workload manager: able to on the fly change how much resources are allocated to images AND (this is the cool thing, cause other VMs do that) give it goal times for operations. As in: Complete this task in 1/100th of a second, and it will allocate, on the fly, for that to happen, and it will guarantee it.
I think that's enough...I'm sure I'm missing some stuff, but that should be a good compilation.
One thing to note: I'm under 30, and didn't know that mainframes existed 5 years ago.
Mainframes are NOT the answer to all questions. Intel is NOT the answer to all questions. Itanium, Solaris, Power, etc...none are the answer to all questions.
Buy the right tool for the right purpose.
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.