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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.
There was once a programmer who wrote software for personal computers. "Look at how well off I am here," he said to a mainframe programmer who came to visit. "I have my own operating system and file storage device. I do not have to share my resources with anyone. The software is self-consistent and easy-to-use. Why do you not quit your present job and join me here?"
The mainframe programmer then began to describe his system to his friend, saying, "The mainframe sits like an ancient Sage meditating in the midst of the Data Center. Its disk drives lie end-to- end like a great ocean of machinery. The software is as multifaceted as a diamond, and as convoluted as a primeval jungle. The programs, each unique, move through the system like a swift-flowing river. That is why I am happy where I am."
The personal computer programmer, upon hearing this, fell silent. But the two programmers remained friends until the end of their days.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The IBM pricing really is quite high (there are a ton of licensing fees for the hardware, maintenance, and software). But the systems work reliably. You get a giant system that can run a whole lot of VMs, with fast and reliable interconnects, transparent hardware failover (e.g. CPUs inside most mainframes come in redundant pairs), etc. To get a similar setup on commodity hardware you need some kind of "cloud" orchestration environment, like OpenStack, which can deal with VM management and migration, network storage, communication topology, etc. The advantage of an x86-64/OpenStack cluster solution is that the hardware+licensing costs are loads cheaper, and you don't have IBM levels of vendor lockin. The disadvantage is that it doesn't really work reliably; you're not going to get 5 9s of uptime on any significantly sized OpenStack deployment, and it will require an army of devops people to babysit it. The application complexity also tends to be higher, because failures are handled at the application level rather than at the system level: all your services need to be able to deal with non-transparent failover, split-brain scenarios, etc. Also the I/O interconnects between parts of the system (even if you're on 10GigE) are much worse than mainframe interconnects.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
IBM dude: It might look like a mainframe, but it's a high-capacity, legacy-compatible, fault-tolerant application server.
Me: What's the difference?
IBM dude: About 200 grand.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For example, the mainframe system can allow automated fraud prevention while a purchase is being made on a smartphone.
Because that's so much different than preventing fraud on a purchase being made from a desktop PC.
From a business point of view they can be similar.
From the perspective of the mainframe guys, the whole point of a mainframe is that it is a single machine handling all of your transactions. Basically, it is simpler to deal with all kinds of transaction problems when you are not using a vastly distributed system with thousands of nodes. Typically PaaS/SaaS are large distributed systems.
To reliably and consistantly handle a very large stream of very important transactions where you basically need 100% reliability, they are a real option. The business case for a mainframe is something like, it would cost 200mln per year for some bank to make a failure proof distributed system, and 100mln to do it with a a mainframe. Outside of this type of systems, it is hard to think of any use for a mainframe, given the cost and complexity.
.... the more they stay the same. :)
I keep telling my friends that "cloud computing" is not a new concept. We used to call them "dumb terminals." Not a precise analogy of course but close enough for our purposes. You just know that's going to come full circle in another decade or so.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No. PaaS is scale-out. while a mainframe is scale-up. A scale-out architecture is good at processing a lot of different requests, but does not offer very good results for high-frequency complex operations because by nature the distribution of workloads over a large network is costly. Anything similar to Newton's method would be a good example of a workload that doesn't translate well on a scale-out architecture.
I'm not saying that many mainframe applications couldn't be replaced by a cloud computing solution, but there are situations where latency and expensive orchestration are not acceptable.
lucm, indeed.
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).
Having to rewrite 4 decades worth of COBOL is also a prohibitive factor.
Mainframes are like really big industrial cars where everything is hugely expensive. They're stupid expensive, but far cheaper than trying to do massive amounts of work with thousands of pickup trucks.
It's like the transporter they use to move the space shuttle with rockets and all ready to go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It goes 1MPH, which sounds pretty wuss-tastic in car terms, until you consider how much capacity it has at that speed. It would be basically impossible to accomplish the same thing with any number of VW Beetles without spending years taking apart and reassembling everything each time you wanted to attempt a launch.
That's where mainframes make sense - problems which are really massive, but need to run on one computer. Any problem that can be broken down into smaller chunks can be solved much more efficiently with a network of smaller computers.
As the smaller computers continue to get more and more capable and the technology to break down problems and high speed interconnects become more common, the jobs that run better on a mainframe get more rare and networks of servers become more common.
Mainframes do have one cool thing going for them that is not respected on smaller machines - portability. There's code that's been in use for several decades on mainframes running in a stack of emulators. Each new mainframe gets an emulator to make it possible to act just like an an old mainframe. This means the customer needs to run their code on the emulator instead of having to tweak the code to work on the new mainframe. For jobs that justify mainframe costs, downtime is very expensive, so minimizing additional conversion efforts is huge. Also, it's entirely possible that the last person who knew how some mission critical code worked may have died 40+ years ago and business people aren't big proponents of hiring someone to figure out and rewrite legacy stuff.
"We kind of rediscovered the mainframe," says Peri.
Everytime IBM announced a new mainframe line of products they hired an "external" consultant to say exactly the same bullshit. Since 1990, they announced the rediscovery of the mainframe at least five times. IBM is addicted to the mainframe given the large chunk of revenues associated to it. So, they serve us the same marketing bullshit each time.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I found this in the Overview of the Announcement Letter
... the role of the mainframe in the new digital era of IT."
"The name change serves to signal
Us old farts are envious of the new digital mainframes - we were seriously handicapped back then, working on all those old analog mainframes.
It isn't that mainframes are eternal, it's that marketing wonks who write this sort of stuff are allowed to breed...
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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.
It really sounds a lot like the beginning of the end. There's a lot of interesting stuff that IBM has done to their big iron systems over the years, but it's pretty much stuff that didn't transport outside their own little world. Within that world, you have all sorts of interconnects, and one should never underestimate the benefits of having One Big Box when it comes to power consumption and real-estate needs, especially since IBM's reputation has always been that just because you have One Big Box doesn't mean Single-Point failure.
But in the end, I think they may simply fade away. There's no cheap way to get into the mainframe business, The closest thing to open-source is the Hercules emulator, but the licensing fees for any IBM OS release past 1986 mean that small businesses cannot leverage it. There are all sorts of specialized skills required that are no longer dime-a-dozen. Most software products and systems that run on mainframes have counterparts that run on commodity hardware and OS's - often cheaper, and considering what IBM has done to their workforce, often better supported.
So if you have lots of legacy code to support, or are willing to dedicate a lot of expensive resources to a totally-packaged system, this new box may be wonderful for you. For the computing world at large, it's likely to be hardly noticed.
The mainframe people I know, when they rarely refer to transactions, have a slightly different meaning from when windows or unix people do it. The mainframe people more often rever to messages, which is a whole discrete task, which can often require multiple database transactions, some computational passes etc. They usually talk about hundreds of thousands of messages per hour, so if it's 2.5 billion mainframe-style "transactions"(messages), it's pretty damn impressive.
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.
The reason that this is the first mainframe with SMT is simple. Prior to the previous generation (z12), most mainframe workload was z/OS, and z/OS has no support for SMT. Starting with z12, a whole lot of mainframes started being used for new workload (Linux). Now it makes sense to add SMT, so they did. It has nothing to do with 'technologically lagging'.
As for clock speed being 'not outstanding', looking around Intel's site for server chips I don't see anything clocked above 3.4GHz. This new mainframe runs at 5GHz (previous generation was 5.5GHz, but the new one is still faster).
The 'cheap way' to get into the mainframe business is Linux, and many companies are doing it.
The reasons customers are running Linux on mainframes is for the same reasons they run anything on mainframes. In many cases, it is just a better value. The 'legacy is the only reason for mainframes' mantra is really old and tired, and is only repeated by people who know very little about mainframes.
I've seen situations where trying to replace a mainframe with a server ended in bitter failure and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expense. We're talking batch processing millions of records on the Mainframe in a few minutes, while a server managed 30,000 in a day. Sometimes, the mainframe just has better hardware.
Mainframes are designed to take hardware and software upgrades without interrupting software processes. If we ever implemented Linux's user space APIs on Minix 3 (e.g. kevent, iptables), we could run udev, dbus, and other Linux-specific subsystems on a microkernel; it would be similar to a mainframe, in that you could upgrade the core OS without rebooting, yet dissimilar, in that it wouldn't be a virtualized cluster like OpenMOSIX in which the applications move onto another running OS when you want to reboot one VM.
Security policies on the mainframe are different than PC, too. High security means each application is so isolated as to effectively run in its own VM, from a practical standpoint. From a technical standpoint, the OS is just so good at confining applications to what they're allowed to do (and those privileges are so well-defined) that it achieves similar isolation to running in separate VMs. This drastically reduces down time. Some effort has gone into Linux on the GrSecurity side to apply kernel write-execute separation; and, again, Minix 3 or a similar OS could create strict memory policies to prevent drivers from accessing kernel RAM not related to the driver and the process invoking it; this plus process groups and containers (as in Linux) and mandatory access control policies would come close, if not parity, a mainframe.
I have enough understanding to know what must be done to create something, but not how. If I knew how, I'd have long ago added services to Minix 3 to run Linux desktop subsystems for systemd, udev, and dbus; created a policy manager which can define application access policies by contexts, user, and the user's container policy (e.g. Pidgin can access the user's configured $HOME/.pidgin/ and $HOME/download/pidgin/ for read-write, etc.); and modified some of the interfaces to store data relevant only to specific processes in separate pages, and only map those pages in the appropriate context, so that a bug writing all over memory would have limited-scope damage even in kernel (this is hardly ever an issue in Minix to start with). But nay.
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