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The Mainframe Is Dead! Long Live the Mainframe!
HughPickens.com writes The death of the mainframe has been predicted many times over the years but it has prevailed because it has been overhauled time and again. Now Steve Lohr reports that IBM has just released the z13, a new mainframe engineered to cope with the huge volume of data and transactions generated by people using smartphones and tablets. "This is a mainframe for the mobile digital economy," says Tom Rosamilia. "It's a computer for the bow wave of mobile transactions coming our way." IBM claims the z13 mainframe is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day and has a host of technical improvements over its predecessor, including three times the memory, faster processing and greater data-handling capability. IBM spent $1 billion to develop the z13, and that research generated 500 new patents, including some for encryption intended to improve the security of mobile computing. Much of the new technology is designed for real-time analysis in business. For example, the mainframe system can allow automated fraud prevention while a purchase is being made on a smartphone. Another example would be providing shoppers with personalized offers while they are in a store, by tracking their locations and tapping data on their preferences, mainly from their previous buying patterns at that retailer.
IBM brings out a new mainframe about every three years, and the success of this one is critical to the company's business. Mainframes alone account for only about 3 percent of IBM's sales. But when mainframe-related software, services and storage are included, the business as a whole contributes 25 percent of IBM's revenue and 35 percent of its operating profit. Ronald J. Peri, chief executive of Radixx International was an early advocate in the 1980s of moving off mainframes and onto networks of personal computers. Today Peri is shifting the back-end computing engine in the Radixx data center from a cluster of industry-standard servers to a new IBM mainframe and estimates the total cost of ownership including hardware, software and labor will be 50 percent less with a mainframe. "We kind of rediscovered the mainframe," says Peri.
IBM brings out a new mainframe about every three years, and the success of this one is critical to the company's business. Mainframes alone account for only about 3 percent of IBM's sales. But when mainframe-related software, services and storage are included, the business as a whole contributes 25 percent of IBM's revenue and 35 percent of its operating profit. Ronald J. Peri, chief executive of Radixx International was an early advocate in the 1980s of moving off mainframes and onto networks of personal computers. Today Peri is shifting the back-end computing engine in the Radixx data center from a cluster of industry-standard servers to a new IBM mainframe and estimates the total cost of ownership including hardware, software and labor will be 50 percent less with a mainframe. "We kind of rediscovered the mainframe," says Peri.
The death of IBM's mainframes is happening. It was never going to be an overnight thing though. We just replaced our 2 IBM mainframes which cost us just over 10 million each plus licensing and maintenance costs each year with around 2 million of intel based servers. Yes each of those boxes is almost a little mainframe in itself with 80 cores per machine and 4TB of memory, but they run at a fraction of the cost (with more total processing power than the mainframes they replaced) even when providing full cold standby redundancy. There are 3 other places in town that I know that also run mainframes, 1 has 6 of them all of which they have a 10 year plan to phase them out, another has 2 which will be gone by the end of 2016 and the last is the only hold out in town which is waiting to see how our replacement has gone (so far 6 months in and they are happy, another 12 months and the mainframes will be completely turned off).
And yet, if you open up a mainframe, you will see that on the inside, it is exactly a vastly distributed system with thousands of nodes.
No it isn't. Even this latest monster doesn't have that many actual processors in it.
The main advantage to a mainframe is its ability to shovel around vast amounts of data very rapidly. IBM has offloaded a lot of the I/O work onto the peripheral data controllers ever since the System/360.
Technologically, mainframes are lagging. This is the first IBM mainframe that has had the ability to run multiple instructions at once on a single core the way Intel chips have done for many years now. The processor clock speed isn't anything outstanding for the day, either.
Eh... No.
The Z196 processor (2010) implements superscalarity (5 wide, 3 decode) and out of order execution at 5.2GHz.
The Z12 processor (2012) have 7 wide execution and runs at 5.5GHz.
They are top of the line products.
Funny, .. 10 ? [they come and go every few years ]
My companies (6000 employee) mainframe has 2 admins - thats all.
vs
The Windows Server Team ( UCS, AIX, standalone servers ) has
The storage Team has 2, neither here more than 3 years
The security team has 5
1 mainframe w/2 ethernet ports
vs
100 physical, 500 VMs, 3 UCS environments ( all the networking infrastructure - Nexus 5Ks & Fexes to connect it all )
Isilon, Pure, EMC , DataDomain,
2 vs 17 staff
2 NICs vs hundreds of ports in a data center.
0% downtime vs > 1%
Sure .. Windows 2012 R2 is easy from a gui standpoint ... but - WOW are there a shitload of people who have to be present to do crap with it.
VDI IS a green screen wrapped in RDP/ICA/remote X term type ...
Oh, those Intel & PowerAIX boxes take up around 50 to 60 racks in 2 data centers, ... Mainframe - 2 cabinets w/attached storage.
Doesn't it depend more what you do with those servers and mainframes instead of how large your company is? I've worked places where the mainframe was used to run decades old code that only had rare changes, and otherwise kept going doing mostly the same thing with minor hardware issues over the years and occasional big deals to make minor API changes. The regular servers on the other hand were always involved in new software, new web services, updates to both looks and functionality exposed to clients, new internal tools, tests of new tools that never became part of standard service, etc.
I've also been places where a single admin took care of all of both the windows and linux servers, as they were just used for generic office support, with people just needing shared resources and desktop computers that could manage basic terminals, text editors and IDEs. However, since the mainframes involved software undergoing active development, and testing on different systems, there was a whole team of admins keeping things going and dealing with subtle deployment issues, etc.