7 ms·

That sounds like a whole lot of eggs in one very expensive basket. Plus we can get that density with standard kit I reckon.

creshal 11y ago
That's kinda the point of a mainframe, is it not?
- blackbeard 11y ago
  Spending money? Yep.
  - creshal 11y ago
    No, putting all your eggs into one (hopefully redundant) basket so you only need to yell at one person.
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      Oh, that works great when you lose power to the rack. Or the datacentre. Or the SAN fails. Or the core routers. Or any of the many other SPOFs that can and do occur in a datacentre.
      - easytiger 11y ago
        That's why you buy two and put them in different DCs
        creshal 11y ago
        And that's why IBM has their own bank branch to help customers figure out how to afford that?
        digi_owl 11y ago
        Well one of their big customers are the banking sector...
        easytiger 11y ago
        That would be most of their customers I imagine. I work with one who still runs mainframes.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        All of which are accounted for by having two or more of these, combined with the feature they call (I'm not kidding) Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS). You can hook up multiple IBM mainframes remotely and set them up to automatically ensure consistent replication of machine state to various extents depending on your reliability vs. performance tradeoffs and replication distance (latency being the issue), all the way up to active-active operation across systems. So in other words: It works far better than the failover options most people deploy on their off the shelf servers in their self-wired racks (and yes, I run my own setup across off the shelf servers; and no, they're not nearly as redundant as a pair of IBM mainframes).
        blackbeard 11y ago
        Problem is we kitted out two 42U racks in two DCs with HP and EMC kit on VMware and got four humans for five years for less than the comparable quote from IBM. And we've tested replication and failover to the same extent and didnt have to rewrite the 2 million lines or so of code we have...
        rodgerd 11y ago
        > All of which are accounted for by having two or more of these, combined with the feature they call (I'm not kidding) Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS). And it is an awesome thing - although I didn't realise it supported zVM these days, rather than just zOS. In any case, you've still got two baskets, which was my point.
    - makomk 11y ago
      Except that the OS is still provided by a different company to your actual hardware, so there's plenty of room for blame-passing, and most of the OS development is being done on x86 machines by people with no access to IBM Power hardware of any kind.
    - r00fus 11y ago
      If I never hear "one throat to choke" again, I'll die a happy man. This only works well if you can negotiate an acceptable SLA, your main vendor doesn't balk when integrating with subcontractors or other vendors and if you have a rock-solid vendor manager on your side enforcing the SLA. Needless to say, it often doesn't work that way.
vidarh 11y ago
It may be one basket, but IBM high end kit is the nuclear fallout shelter of baskets. E.g. we used to have an IBM Enterprise Storage System (aka the Shark) back in the day (around 2000), and it came in American fridge size, full of drawers of drives. You could just yank any drawer safe in the knowledge that all the raid volumes were distributed over multiple drawers. If a SCSI controller failed, you could yank a drawer of SCSI controllers and hotswap them safe in the knowledge they were fully redundant. The "brains" of the thing consisted of a fully redundant pair of two AIX RS/6000 servers, and you could yank either one of them without losing data (all writes were committed to at least non-volatile memory on both servers before being acknowledged). Either server also had at least hot-swap RAM (raid-like memory controller) and may have had hot swap CPU's (tell the OS to move all threads off a CPU, swap, switch back). On top of that, it had a phone connection and would dial out to report any early warnings of problems directly to IBM who'd send out a technician before anything even failed as long as you kept paying your support plan. So yes, you can get that density with standard kit easily, and probably much cheaper too. Assuming you have enough skilled staff to manage it. The reason IBM still manages to sell this kind of kit, on the other hand, is because what they are really selling is peace of mind that most issues are Someone Elses Problem. For some people it makes sense to pay a lot for that.
- blackbeard 11y ago
  I wish I had that much confidence. Back in the late 1990s I was involved in provisioning a large Sun e15k. Not indestructable but nearly. It broke. You know what happened? The factory roof leaked and poured water onto the DC sub-building which the roof then collapsed onto the e15k which promptly blew up and caused a spectacular fire, halon dump and about a month of work arguing with insurance companies and guys with shovels. In that circumstance, it doesn't matter what promises the vendor make. That's still all your eggs in one basket. Buy two and keep one somewhere else didn't help either as the network termination, switching and routing layers were down and all the people using it were about 300 miles away from the backup location anyway. So some poor fucker had to dismantle the backup e15k and disk arrays, bring them in a large truck[1] to the original location and erect a temp DC in a portakabin outside the building. Edit: We would have been better served with two smaller DCs with off the shelf kit on the same site but different buildings running a mirrored arrangement. All for pocket change compared to a zSeries... That's what the company I work for now do. We have off the shelf kit,SAN replication, ESX, redundant routing and multiple peers in different locations. [1] imagine the shit if that truck crashed.
protomyth 11y ago
We have an AS/400 (excuse me, iSeries) and the damn thing is rock solid. It also alerts us and IBM when it needs maintenance. Its basically a tank with a logistics chain.
- chiph 11y ago
  The AS/400 (err, iSeries) never gets any love. If you need line-of-business applications that just work all the time, it'd be a great choice.
- beauzero 11y ago
  This used to be my choice of integration. Microsoft web front end and AS/400 back end for warehouse. DB2 is a beast.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  I started out my career in IT as an AS/400 operator / Netware 3.12 admin, and while AS/400 / iSeries aren't "en vogue" these days, I have a lot of respect for those machines. As you say, they are rock solid. One of the places I worked for had an even older machine, an IBM S/36 (predecessor to the AS/400) and while ancient, it just kept plugging away, day after day after day after day... OTOH, you couldn't pay me to program in RPG/400 using SEU. Building menus, or playing around with a little CL on on the '400 is one thing. But RPG programming sucks. Well, it did anyway. Maybe things have gotten better. I understand the ILE stuff made RPG less column oriented and closer to a free-form language, but I had never had a chance to use that.
  - shawndumas 11y ago
    Who are you and how have you stolen my[1] early career history?! Let me guess you started in the early 90's, right? I remember looking at HTTP for the first time and feeling like it was 5250 display files writ anew. The y2k mess made me jump into web dev full time. ----- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816696
    - 11y ago

creshal 11y ago

That's kinda the point of a mainframe, is it not?

blackbeard 11y ago
Spending money? Yep.
- creshal 11y ago
  No, putting all your eggs into one (hopefully redundant) basket so you only need to yell at one person.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    Oh, that works great when you lose power to the rack. Or the datacentre. Or the SAN fails. Or the core routers. Or any of the many other SPOFs that can and do occur in a datacentre.
    - easytiger 11y ago
      That's why you buy two and put them in different DCs
      - creshal 11y ago
        And that's why IBM has their own bank branch to help customers figure out how to afford that?
        digi_owl 11y ago
        Well one of their big customers are the banking sector...
        easytiger 11y ago
        That would be most of their customers I imagine. I work with one who still runs mainframes.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      All of which are accounted for by having two or more of these, combined with the feature they call (I'm not kidding) Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS). You can hook up multiple IBM mainframes remotely and set them up to automatically ensure consistent replication of machine state to various extents depending on your reliability vs. performance tradeoffs and replication distance (latency being the issue), all the way up to active-active operation across systems. So in other words: It works far better than the failover options most people deploy on their off the shelf servers in their self-wired racks (and yes, I run my own setup across off the shelf servers; and no, they're not nearly as redundant as a pair of IBM mainframes).
      - blackbeard 11y ago
        Problem is we kitted out two 42U racks in two DCs with HP and EMC kit on VMware and got four humans for five years for less than the comparable quote from IBM. And we've tested replication and failover to the same extent and didnt have to rewrite the 2 million lines or so of code we have...
      - rodgerd 11y ago
        > All of which are accounted for by having two or more of these, combined with the feature they call (I'm not kidding) Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS). And it is an awesome thing - although I didn't realise it supported zVM these days, rather than just zOS. In any case, you've still got two baskets, which was my point.
  - makomk 11y ago
    Except that the OS is still provided by a different company to your actual hardware, so there's plenty of room for blame-passing, and most of the OS development is being done on x86 machines by people with no access to IBM Power hardware of any kind.
  - r00fus 11y ago
    If I never hear "one throat to choke" again, I'll die a happy man. This only works well if you can negotiate an acceptable SLA, your main vendor doesn't balk when integrating with subcontractors or other vendors and if you have a rock-solid vendor manager on your side enforcing the SLA. Needless to say, it often doesn't work that way.

vidarh 11y ago

It may be one basket, but IBM high end kit is the nuclear fallout shelter of baskets. E.g. we used to have an IBM Enterprise Storage System (aka the Shark) back in the day (around 2000), and it came in American fridge size, full of drawers of drives. You could just yank any drawer safe in the knowledge that all the raid volumes were distributed over multiple drawers. If a SCSI controller failed, you could yank a drawer of SCSI controllers and hotswap them safe in the knowledge they were fully redundant. The "brains" of the thing consisted of a fully redundant pair of two AIX RS/6000 servers, and you could yank either one of them without losing data (all writes were committed to at least non-volatile memory on both servers before being acknowledged). Either server also had at least hot-swap RAM (raid-like memory controller) and may have had hot swap CPU's (tell the OS to move all threads off a CPU, swap, switch back). On top of that, it had a phone connection and would dial out to report any early warnings of problems directly to IBM who'd send out a technician before anything even failed as long as you kept paying your support plan. So yes, you can get that density with standard kit easily, and probably much cheaper too. Assuming you have enough skilled staff to manage it. The reason IBM still manages to sell this kind of kit, on the other hand, is because what they are really selling is peace of mind that most issues are Someone Elses Problem. For some people it makes sense to pay a lot for that.

blackbeard 11y ago
I wish I had that much confidence. Back in the late 1990s I was involved in provisioning a large Sun e15k. Not indestructable but nearly. It broke. You know what happened? The factory roof leaked and poured water onto the DC sub-building which the roof then collapsed onto the e15k which promptly blew up and caused a spectacular fire, halon dump and about a month of work arguing with insurance companies and guys with shovels. In that circumstance, it doesn't matter what promises the vendor make. That's still all your eggs in one basket. Buy two and keep one somewhere else didn't help either as the network termination, switching and routing layers were down and all the people using it were about 300 miles away from the backup location anyway. So some poor fucker had to dismantle the backup e15k and disk arrays, bring them in a large truck[1] to the original location and erect a temp DC in a portakabin outside the building. Edit: We would have been better served with two smaller DCs with off the shelf kit on the same site but different buildings running a mirrored arrangement. All for pocket change compared to a zSeries... That's what the company I work for now do. We have off the shelf kit,SAN replication, ESX, redundant routing and multiple peers in different locations. [1] imagine the shit if that truck crashed.

protomyth 11y ago

We have an AS/400 (excuse me, iSeries) and the damn thing is rock solid. It also alerts us and IBM when it needs maintenance. Its basically a tank with a logistics chain.

chiph 11y ago
The AS/400 (err, iSeries) never gets any love. If you need line-of-business applications that just work all the time, it'd be a great choice.
beauzero 11y ago
This used to be my choice of integration. Microsoft web front end and AS/400 back end for warehouse. DB2 is a beast.
mindcrime 11y ago
I started out my career in IT as an AS/400 operator / Netware 3.12 admin, and while AS/400 / iSeries aren't "en vogue" these days, I have a lot of respect for those machines. As you say, they are rock solid. One of the places I worked for had an even older machine, an IBM S/36 (predecessor to the AS/400) and while ancient, it just kept plugging away, day after day after day after day... OTOH, you couldn't pay me to program in RPG/400 using SEU. Building menus, or playing around with a little CL on on the '400 is one thing. But RPG programming sucks. Well, it did anyway. Maybe things have gotten better. I understand the ILE stuff made RPG less column oriented and closer to a free-form language, but I had never had a chance to use that.
- shawndumas 11y ago
  Who are you and how have you stolen my[1] early career history?! Let me guess you started in the early 90's, right? I remember looking at HTTP for the first time and feeling like it was 5250 display files writ anew. The y2k mess made me jump into web dev full time. ----- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816696
  - 11y ago