Slashdot Mirror
The Eternal Mainframe
theodp writes "In his latest essay, Rudolf Winestock argues that the movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented the mainframe, as well as the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place. 'The modern server farm looks like those first computer rooms,' Winestock writes. 'Row after row of metal frames (excuse me—racks) bearing computer modules in a room that's packed with cables and extra ventilation ducts. Just like mainframes. Server farms have multiple redundant CPUs, memory, disks, and network connections. Just like mainframes. The rooms that house these server farms are typically not open even to many people in the same organization, but only to dedicated operations teams. Just like mainframes.' And with terabytes of data sitting in servers begging to be monetized by business and scrutinized by government, Winestock warns that the New Boss is worse than the Old Boss. So, what does this mean for the future of fully functional, general purpose, standalone computers? 'Offline computer use frustrates the march of progress,' says Winestock. 'If offline use becomes uncommon, then the great and the good will ask: "What are [you] hiding? Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?"'"
Wow, so deep. Computer is the Internet, Internet is the computer.
Mainframes are specialised equipment, server farms are almost generic computers with redundancies. The real difference is the cost. Today's server farms would cost many factors more if they were built with specialised mainframes, there is no other real difference, they are really there for the same purpose.
You can't handle the truth.
Just like the mainframe.
It's the usual argument. If you have something to hide, you're probably a bad person.
That "may" be true if the authorities are not abusing their power, or trying to gain more power than the people want them to have.
As soon as you have even a potentially oppressive regime, privacy becomes essential.
He is wrong, on pretty much every level, even the visual.
One of the points I found the most insightful is that the geeks don't like to take the time to make things work anymore. I remember a colleague saying that there was no better way to kill a hobby than to get it as a job.
The days of tweaking the OS and hardware as a common practice among the majority of geeks is gone. The field is too broad now. You have to pick which stack, and where on it, you want to hack.
Ok, I give up, why you?
..that have very big amounts of data, complex data structures and can't afford any errors (especially data corruption) caused by hardware limitations.
Banks is an example.
Mundus Vult Decipi
I suppose if you stand back from about 3 miles and never bother to understand the underlying architcture and how it scales while ignoring the flexibility of server farms as opposed to very much a box that mainframes put you in (with very minor flexibility) then yeah -- they're exactly the same.
It's easy to draw parallels between general functionality, but you have to reduce it to "a series of tubes" type descriptions to get there.
Are you making kiddie porn? Laundering money? Spreading hate? Do you want the terrorists to win?
Because I don't want every goddamn marketer out there trying to sell me their shit. I don't want to have to deal some horseshit like this because businesses feel entitled to stick their noses into my business.
No, you are NOT offering me "convenience" - you are prying.
As it is, I CAN create a dossier that would make an East German Stazi agent cream his pants by just hitting the credit bureaus, Google, ChoicePoint, ISPs, Cell phone companies, and every other business entity out there that has this need to collect consumer data.
Something to hide?
Well, just ask the atheist, gay or lesbian, peace protestor or Muslim who has their identity known what happens to them.
The uncle of the Marathon bombers who had his face plastered all over the place is headed for some serious shit. You just know that folks are going to vandalize his house, harass him, and give him a lot of shit just because he's related to those kids and a Muslim.
People are hateful, ignorant, cruel, shallow and just stupid - until proven otherwise. Therefore, it is imperative to keep one's secrets.
There was a time when we expected computers to become so easy that everyone could use them. We've given up that dream. Now it's all "managed" again. There are admins and users again, and the admins (or their bosses) decide what the users can do and how. Computing is no longer done with a device you own but a service that someone else provides to you. Yes, you still pay for a device, but that's merely an advanced terminal.
I blame the users. If they bothered to learn even a little about how things work, they wouldn't give up their freedom so easily. The complacency is staggering. Even people whose job depends on being able to efficiently work with computers often perform repetitive tasks manually instead of learning how to use more of the program they're working with. Of course, with users like that, who refuse to learn how to use what capabilities are already at their disposal, there's a market for the simplest automation performed as a service.
the most important of the world's business has always been done by mainframes, most of your money is information in a network of mainframes.
Also I want you to know I went to the toilet. I want you to know that too. I mean, no. I don't want you to know, but I did it and you said you wanted to know.
Sounds like a typical facebook post. People are giving this information away willingly. Some of us want privacy, while others want to tell us every last detail of their lives. I would like to not have to read about peoples every move, which is why I unfriend those that share too much.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Not networked, networked, not, networked, on and on. Each cycle begets a new cycle. Now it's just called "the cloud."
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The general thinking of comparing the two is that both systems are the ones running running the show, storing the data, and being accessed by dumb-clients that only serve as terminals.
Obviously server farms and mainframes are very different from a back-end technology standpoint, but from a viewpoint of the user they are identical in every single way. You log in with your user specific credentials, you do your work using the server's processing power and save your work in the servers storage medium. Your client likely is even set to network boot from a server supplied boot image via PXE. If your local machine is nothing but a terminal to access the backend machine, then you are for all practical purposes operating in a mainframe environment.
Someone in the industry realizes that computing is really iterative and what's old will eventually become new again.
I believe the origin of this periodic realizations is as follows:
(I intentionally used "jargon" instead of "technique", since the need to create a new term doesn't seem proportional to the actual change in implementation)
1. A college fresh out get hired at a I.T. farm armed with a new set of computing jargon that impresses human resources.
2. He applies his version of how things should work to the current workplace and things progress well.
3. Over the next few years the department grows and new hires are brought in to help meet demand.
4. The new hires start preaching their version of computing jargon that was created by academia to publish a paper.
5. The once college fresh out comes to the realization that the new computing jargon are practically synonyms for the previous generation's jargon.
6. The new hire proceeds to step #1 and the circle of I.T. begins anew.
The neat thing about this iterative process is that the difference in implementation of the jargon between generation N and N - 1 are small enough to not seem that much different. However the difference in implementation of jargon between the current generation and the people hired 5 to 10 cycles prior can and usually are dramatic.
I entered the field when distributive computing and storage with localized networks were being created and evangelized. Scientific computing had to be performed at universities and anything serious had to be done by renting time on a supercomputer connected via the internet. Medium sized businesses had to rent time on mainframes to perform payroll or hired firms specializing in payroll which still exists today. Small businesses had no access to computing until personal computers and single user applications came into use. Because of the newer businesses being more familiar with distributive computing than centralized computing, they scaled personal computers up to meet the new demands. This ability to scale computing power up allows the company to grow the computing infrastructure as needed. This was not possible with mainframes. Eventually the company grows to the point that it needs to have their data and application centralized and use data centers to handle the load.
If you step back and look solely at the physical structure (e.g. data center, clerical offices) it resembles the centralized computing from 50 years ago. However if you look at the actual data and computing flow you'll see that its a hybrid of central and distributed computing that was not imagined in the past 20 years. It's more fractal in nature. Your computing at any given moment can be centralized to your terminal, your home, your office, your department, your company, or even global (e.g. Google, Github).
I declare this to be known as BTE's law. ;)
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
IT needs some kind of an apprenticeship system or at lest more tech schools where you learn from people who have done real work and not so much people working on there academia papers and you have more hands on learning as well.
Mr. Winestock's parallels between server farms and mainframes are reasonable, if unoriginal, and the same can be said for his concerns over privacy and social control. His attempt to claim the former as the causative agent for the latter, however, goes wrong right from the start: 'Mini/micro-computers were supposed to kill the mainframe.'
Not so. They came about firstly because technological advances made them possible, and also because some smart people realized that they would allow us to do things that, in practice, we could not do before. The pioneers of these developments were not interested in reproducing, much less replacing, mainframe computing.
Turing showed us that the form of our hardware doesn't dictate what we can do with it. To understand the arc of privacy erosion and social control, we need to examine social history and human nature, not the artifacts of technological advance.
"Google, for example, has pretty full-featured job control layered on top of their server farm."
Google has never cared about errors.
Who gives a damn if what absolutely positively SHOULD have been the very first result is instead the fourth or the fifth result, or if it appears on page two of the results, or if it somehow magically disappears into the ether because commodity server #XJ42 in rack #43HB on aisle #521JJ in column #447F in building #QQZ1 in server farm #H61M happened to have crashed just as the query response was being assembled?
Especially if the query involved "Justin Bieber", "Lindsay Lohan", or "Natalie Portman Hot Grits".
IBM, on the other hand, has always cared about errors - has always, in fact, been FANATICAL about errors.
If you send a query to an IBM mainframe, then you're expecting umpteen-sigmas of confidence that the mainframe will actually be up and running, that you'll get an actual response, and that the response, when it finally arrives, will be 100% CORRECT.
Especially when the response is something along the lines of "DANGER: CHILD KNOWN TO BE ALLERGIC TO AMOXICILLIN. ALLERGIC RESPONSE INCLUDES ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK. PRESCRIPTION REQUEST THEREFORE INVALID AND REFUSED."
They weren't always. Some model 360's were pretty decent. The CDC 6600 while called a 'super computer' nowadays was really a 'Large Computer'. It was a mainframe. The problem with mainframes is the same problem with every computer out there. The latency wall. There were only a few companies that really pushed the physics. That stuff has stopped at the 'system' level to a large degree. You see a few companies playing with the interconnect topology but it's not really pushing the physics stuff.
If you take the ratio of compute to I/O of any typical modern server it's horrendously bad. To anyone out there who thinks their x86 rocks - a few simple questions:
1) What's the ratio of memory bandwidth at various levels to I/O bandwidth? Compare that to a Mainframe from the 60's.
2) How long on a typical server would it take to swap out all of memory? You can use SSD if you want.
Hint) You will find 2) is many seconds to minutes for a decent sized x86 server even with SSD's. That IBM mainframe could maybe swap out all its memory in less than a second or a second or two.
being abused by gov't. I don't think it really matters. Online is still just online, and I've said before and will say again that the Occupy Wall Street Movement showed that in the real world when the gov't wants something to go away it does.
Basically we don't really have the freedom he's saying we'll lose. Real freedom is economic freedom. You're not free as long as somebody controls your access to food, shelter and health care. Until then you'll do exactly what they say and so will everybody else.
If you want freedom stop bothering with all these surveillance scares and start asking what it takes to really be free. Ask yourself if you can ever be free in a world where 6 people have more money than 100 million others combined?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You haven't tried the IBM kool-aid yet. Those people whose jobs currently rely on mainframe expertise are very happy with them. They do have better error-checking but everything else is at least an order of magnitude out of whack with commodity hardware price/performance, and in many cases, several orders. You can reduce some of the costs on their zSeries by buying specialised processors for DB2, Java, and Linux (~100K a pop) so you don't have to may for MIPS usage but the costs are still astronomical for the performance. If it was cost effective, don't you think Amazon would be running its cloud services on them?
The last TCO I was involved with actually showed that the mainframe was the more cost effective approach for the use case at hand.
As for Amazon, well that is hard to say. If when they first started, they knew how successful they were going to grow and how quickly, maybe they would have gone with a mainframe solution.That's the nice thing of TCO analysis, it eliminates, or should eminiate, any platform bias the decision makers have. Then again, it also depends on really knowing what future growth patterns and expected use cases are or it is just more GIGO.
Have you read TFA? He's not advocating going back to the mainframe-terminal paradigma. He's warning against what is commonly perceived as the way things will inevitably go. If you're seen as "out of the norm", you're ostracized. This is reality. You don't do what everything does - and is recognized as "good" because that's what everybody does - you're "stranger danger". And in this day and age, being "stranger danger" may be a death sentence.