Archaic to most people, IBM mainframes play a pivotal role in our everyday life. Behind the scenes, these state-of-the-art machines process billions of transactions every day. Announced in July of last year, IBM’s latest mainframe is the z14, succeeding the z13 which launched back in 2015.
Earlier this year at the 65th International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco IBM presented some of the architectural changes between the z13 and z14. The paper was presented by Christopher Berry, a Senior Technical Staff Member for the IBM Systems Hardware Development Team. Mr. Berry led the z14 physical design execution.
It is a beautiful architecture, so much more elegant than a rack full of Xeon server blades… I wish I had the chance to work with something like it, though I’m afraid that the Temple of IBM High Priests is no place for casual worship, and I am just not ready to sell them my body and soul — if they ever wanted them!
And, let’s be frivolous, I *LOVE* the Evil Empire style enclosures. They are just beautiful, while irradiating power and competence. I want a fridge that looks like a z14.
I want a z14 that looks like a z14, but, that will never happen.
Well, there is always this option. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
I work at a company that has a mainframe. And let me tell you, it is critical to the company operations. It also seems that everyone on the mainframe crew is very near retirement. This is a career opportunity for someone who wants to learn a lot of IBM stuff.
No, there isn’t, not even within IBM itself
Actually IBM is already trying to offload a lot of its mainframe development to companies like HCL (including the whole relocation excuse), and has done so for some financially sound but unsexy products.
That seems dumb, since IBM’s bread-and-butter has been the mainframe market since computers were first commercially sold. Heck, the Z series is still compatible with code written for the System 360 back in the 60’s
Compatibility is probably the only selling point I don’t think there are new solutions designed around Mainframe in the center. I guess that any Mainframe workload can be offloaded to datacenter and response could come back sooner that Mainframe can provide. Although the mainframe “book” is hell of a beast of a computer, the sheernumber of systems available at datacenter can provide better number crunching and throughput at way cheaper price than an Mainframe can do. And that without IBM tax.
IBM sees this inevitable shift to cloud computing and therefore in a long term does not see a point to deal with mainframes. Instead they buy RedHat to get a piece of the growing cloud business.
The time when you needed a massive mainframe at the corner is over and if you still happen to have that 60’s COBOL or mainframe assembly program lying around, I believe there are emulators that can execute the task for you.
Mainframe hardware is top notch. IBM just doesn’t want to develop software for it, not because it’s hard, but because it’s not sexy.
Mainframes can give you better-than-datacenter reliability without the cooling cost. A lot of work done by datacenters are not number crunching, but all of the redundancy required to keep it running. The problem is mainframes are not easy to program for. They’ve tried to by porting Java to it, but that just kills performance, reliability and verifiability.
They could just invest in the platform by investing real effort into simplifying the obtuse bits, but they don’t, and choose to paper over the cracks with Java and Websphere.
It is dumb. But they’re going ahead with it. They even have a “metric” that says if a product doesn’t make 10% yearly profit growth, they would have a company like HCL take over the development.
Not profit. Profit growth.