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US House Decommissions Its Last Mainframe
coondoggie writes "The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of an era in Washington, DC computing. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed 'quasi-celebrity status' within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House's inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support."
From Big Iron to VMs and dedicated Unix machines.
I don't care what part of the political spectrum you fall under, that's change we can all get behind.
Unless your job was supporting old, proprietary big iron.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Really? This is a story? They were running a server from 1997, and now they're running a server from 2009. Really guys?
The article notes that the House of Representatives took at least 5 years to replace the applications on its 12 year old mainframe. The costs (i.e. taxpayer funds) to perform this migration work were not disclosed, but it's a pretty safe assumption those costs dwarfed any others. Moreover, the article seems to suggest that it took at least 20 other servers to replace a single 12 year old mainframe, and that's even using virtualization on the new servers. One wonders how many (more) servers the House could have replaced with a single new mainframe.
But here's a more profound question: why is the House of Representatives running its own, separate data centers (primary and disaster)? Couldn't they at least consolidate with, oh I don't know, the Senate?!?! And, a related question: for all those 12 years, why didn't the House simply move its comparatively tiny mainframe workload to a bigger mainframe anywhere else in the federal government? (Yes, they can do that without also delegating any security control. Mainframes do that.) Quite simply, it sounds like the House was, and is, wasting a lot of taxpayer money. (Shocking, I know.)
$700K/yr for software support and hardware maintenance isn't really out of line for a high-capacity system with 99.999% uptime.
Maybe they don't need that level of reliability, but if they do five-9s, they will probably find that whatever system or group of systems replaces it will have similar support costs.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Whereby the underlying question needs to: "Hopefully it's not replaced by a Microsoft 'solution'".
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Wow, that's some support bill - or was the House doing the usual Government thing and buying its 'Government Grade' punch tapes at $500 for a pack of 5!? I expect there was also one very highly paid guy who was the only living person left who knew the correct sequence of toggle key entries to start the IPL!
A corporate for which I once did some consulting was transitioning their code from an ancient mainframe to a group of PC-based servers. For some bizarre reason, the Company decided to make their in-house hardware engineer/support guy redundant BEFORE they had finished the change-over! Suffice to say, his consulting daily (or part daily) rate to come back in and kick the old system back to life as needed during its last few months was *very* high as he was the only one who knew how to sweet-talk some of the bespoke hardware. I heard of times where a 10-minute site visit was netting him a 1/2 day fee of something mad like 700UKP
No doubt the House mainframe's replacement is the $900 Dual Xeon unit previously used as a front-end processor for the mainframe's 32-port serial mux!
AT&ROFLMAO
But here's a more profound question: why is the House of Representatives running its own, separate data centers (primary and disaster)? Couldn't they at least consolidate with, oh I don't know, the Senate?!?!
I don't know. I kind of like the current situation: Two different significantly powerful political entities (House and Congress) to have their own separate data that the other entity has no control over. I could certainly see potential benefits from that in the times of major political upheavals.
Hasn't the mainframe business already done full 30 year cycle?
From what I've seen lately, virtualization is kicking in even on desktop field and normal PC's are being replaced with more power efficient thin clients.
I know thin clients aren't same as simple terminals were with mainframes since they connect to the vm-servers using gigabit ethernet instead serial cable, and instead serving unix shell, they now provide entire desktop experience to end-user.
But what's interesting for me is to see if the thin client concept really kicks in and restarts the cycle again.
What will those PC devices be like in 10-15 years when the cycle continues and returns to favor personal computing devices again, instead just personal desktop, being hosted from some cloud colocation service.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The Cloud = Mainframe V2.0?
'scuse me while I try and calm down my hysterical laughter.
(what U smokin'?)
AT&ROFLMAO
They call them high capacity application servers these days and some of them run linux. But they are mainframes. NGOML!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Government 0.9.8
We would like your help in testing and improving the pre-release version, but we don't yet recommend its use in production environments.
Uh... what? No wonder they had to pull this thing offline, that's 1.68 - 2.52 GW per week!
It's been online for 12 years, so by the time it was shut off it must have been using at least 1.57TW.
:x
The article says the retired mainframe is from 1997 so it's almost certainly a G3 or G4-based model.
If it was a G4 then replacing it with a mainframe that wasn't end-of-lifed would have entailed all the complications of migrating mainframe apps from 31-bit to 64-bit that are described in this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2003/12/15/199268/mainframe-users-face-upgrade-dilemma.htm. If it was a G3 then they would have faced even more obstacles...
This must confirm the return of the mainframe!
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Decommission the representatives. Then put the mainframe in charge. I'm sure it is much more efficient at processing bribes, though it probably lacks sex scandal capabilities.
Werent there some studies shown that a mainframe was actually more energy efficient than a cluster? I wonder if they did any actual scientific studies of efficiency or if the people in charge here just made some assumptions, and went along with the hype.
hmm guess Big Electricity wasn't lobbying hard enough. So wow next thing you know they'll stop accepting bribes from K Street...
music reviews at smother.net
Moreover, the article seems to suggest that it took at least 20 other servers to replace a single 12 year old mainframe, and that's even using virtualization on the new servers. One wonders how many (more) servers the House could have replaced with a single new mainframe.
Talking about costs makes good news. If you want to pick it apart with speculation, go right ahead. You might be right, but without real numbers and real analysis we'll never know. I think the real reason they switched is this:
How many people have you known throughout your IT career that have mainframe experience? I've known exactly two. One of which was my next-door neighbor while growing up who worked as a programmer for Unisys (now retired). The other was a young kid who was hired by company who still had mainframes, and was trained by the old guys who knew how to operate and maintain them. The other several dozen people I've known throughout my career have no real world experience with maintaining them. I knew one guy who had to learn AS400 in tech school (this was only maybe 10 years ago), though never applied any of it and now works with Windows and Unix.
So the point is, how well do you think a piece of technology is going to work if you can't find anyone who knows how to work with it and maintain it? Sure, salaries are cheap in comparison to migrations.. but what are the costs of not being able to do what you want to do because you can't find enough people familiar enough with the technology to accomplish what you want?
Technology always has been, and always will be about the people. Someday all our modern technology, operating systems and the like will die not because it's not "good enough", or is "too expensive" but because the people of that era will have moved on to New Technology Z, and hardly anyone understands Old Technology Y.
AccountKiller
What kind of box was it? My guess goes for a VAX...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I bet IBM is mad they didn't spend more time on their BlackBerry integration piece to PROFS.
Final score
IBM: 0
Obama's BlackBerry: 1
The Cloud = Mainframe V2.0?
'scuse me while I try and calm down my hysterical laughter.
(what U smokin'?)
The concept is almost the same. Just switch away custom-made hardware for commodity hardware running clusterized applications and you have a sort of "virtual mainframe" called "cloud" just because it isn't in your datacenter. The final costs can be just as high, it all depends on how good at negotiating agreements the company is.
They didn't tell me that! I ran it on one of my production servers, and now it's sucking up all the resources it can get. I keep trying to kill the process, but everytime I do, it just takes even more resources. I'm eagerly awaiting the next patch. The 2000, 2004, and 2008 patches didn't help my problems. I'm hoping the 2012 patch is better.
SSC
when their dedicated cluster of Walmart E-machines dies on the next Windows update reboot cycle... haven't they heard of Bloated Capacitors!!!!
"Bloated Capacitors? Didn't they play just before the Stones at Altamont?" is about the level of reaction I'd expect from congresscritters.
While it's apparently a dieing concept, that's what on the job training used to be about. If you have even one well skilled mainframe person and someone else from the *nix world, you can have two skilled mainframe people in short order.
It wasn't just a mainframe, it was a quasi-celebrity mainframe. Whatever the fuck that means.
Comment of the year
Abandon all hope - it's a virus. You need to reformat and reinstall.
If you have even one well skilled mainframe person and someone else from the *nix world, you can have two skilled mainframe people in short order.
I've always wondered how mainframe people reproduce.
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
Like the moon-landing missions, it's just the last remaining one.
The age of the mainframe will rise again!
OK, seriously, I don't know if the mainframe will come back to the House of Representatives, but mainframes are particularly good at many 21st-century tasks, and it would be just as arrogant to presume they won't ever come back as to insist, as I jokingly did above, that they will.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's worth remembering, though, that they could have chosen to run up to 60 Linux LPARs on a mainframe. That way they'd get the five nines reliability of mainframe hardware, the lower power requirements and reduced maintenance pain from having everything on a single box, and they'd be able to maintain it all using familiar Linux tools.
There's also a 31 bit version of Linux for System z, so they might not even have had to replace the hardware.
I hope someone did some solid cost/benefit analysis.
[Opinions mine, not IBMs.]
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The article says the retired mainframe is from 1997 so it's almost certainly a G3 or G4-based model.
If it was a G4 then replacing it with a mainframe that wasn't end-of-lifed would have entailed all the complications of migrating mainframe apps from 31-bit to 64-bit that are described in this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2003/12/15/199268/mainframe-users-face-upgrade-dilemma.htm.
The article speaks of a "31-bit compatibility mode" in z/OS, but that's a mode that allows it to run on the 31-bit-address/32-bit-data pre-z/Architecture machines. Dropping that would be the equivalent of Windows 8 requiring x86-64 but still running 32-bit apps, or {pick your distribution} dropping its i386 version but still supporting 32-bit apps, or OS X 10.n, for some value of n > 6, running only on x86-64 Macs but still running 32-bit apps, or....
The article also quotes somebody as saying "Migrating in-house applications onto z/OS is almost like Y2K all over again."; I'm not sure what they mean by that - I'd be a little surprised if 32-bit-data/{24,31}-bit-addressing apps didn't largely Just Work on 64-bit z/OS.
That's fine, all the production has moved to China anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
They replaced it with an atom powered net-top -- twice the power
Does this mean that the pointy-haired boss can now fire Wally?
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Extracting sunbeams from
I'm sure the US government will just as efficient running our health care system :(
*sarcasm*You racist!*sarcasm*
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
That's your problem... it's not the 4 year patches that need fixing the most... it's the 2 year patches that you keep forgetting about...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.