
IBM z14 mainframe - rbanffy
https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/z14
======
Athas
Can recommend this link; it's a one-click victory in buzzword bingo:

> As businesses adapt to capitalize on digital, trust will be the currency
> that drives this new economy.

> With z14 you can apply machine learning to your most valuable data to create
> deeper insights.

> In the digital economy data is the differentiator. IBM z14 can rapidly
> derive actionable insights and enable progressively smarter decisions for
> better customer experiences and new revenue streams.

> IBM z14 can help you accelerate development and delivery of secure, scalable
> services with new economic models.

With such key features as:

"100% encryption is 100% mainframe"

"Trust – the foundation of digital relationships"

"Facilitate new secure services with Java"

I actually like IBM mainframe tech, but this page is hilarious.

~~~
le-mark
The one important part in all the buzzwords:

> New software pricing tied to business value

So, it's like a tax on your business, if you succeed, so do they!

All joking aside, has anyone used mainframes for a greenfield project in the
last 20 years? I'm genuinely curious. I've been under the impression the only
reason they're still around is because of the massive 20 Million LOC cobol
apps hanging around.

I've often thought I'd much rather have a cheap, featureful "walled garden"
PAAS for side and small projects, as opposed to wrangling vms and containers
all the time. Mainframe could fit this use case.

~~~
bluedino
They make some capacity and performance claims when it comes to modern
software:

>> it can run the world's largest MongoDB instance with 2.5x faster NodeJS
performance compared to paltry x86-based platforms. It supports 2,000,000
Docker containers and 1,000 concurrent NoSQL databases.

~~~
dx034
Don't you use mainframes to have one very powerful machine? Like the central
system of a large bank that needs to ensure transactions for millions of
accounts book correctly.

If you run VMs anyway, aren't x86 server cheaper? (honest question, don't know
much about that)

~~~
chinathrow
Mainframes used to be a lot about concurrent I/O for transaction processing -
e.g. booking/check-in/handling of airline passengers or yes, batch
transactions in the millions (e.g. end of day calculation within banks or
financial information providers).

TCO might be lower with x86 these days, it all depends on your workload.

------
rbanffy
One of the cool things of machines like these is they have a "presence".

Your generic server sits somewhere on a rack. Your supercomputer is a
seemingly endless field of racks.

This one is a large black box that exudes computing power.

I only wish they made the front panels more distinctive between iterations.

~~~
aruggirello
I wish they sold the case separately ;-)

~~~
rbanffy
A couple years ago I saw a gutted ES/9000 case for sale. I imagined suspending
a Raspberry Pi with metal wires in its middle and let it run Hercules.

------
krylon
Fair warning: I am going to ramble a bit.

I kind of wonder. From what I know (which is fairly little, I guess, but bear
with me), IBM's mainframe business has profit margins that would even make
drug dealers drool. The corollary is, of course, that these machines are very,
very expensive.

I wonder what the fincancial pro's and con's would be if IBM tried to loosen
up a little on the margin and increase their potential market in return, in
other words, sell cheaper mainframes.

I vaguely remember they tried something along those lines during the S/390
era, which culminated in a 4U rack-mountable machine. (I assume, naively, that
the smaller physical size and capacity corresponded to a smaller price).

From what I've heard and read over the years, IBM invests a lot of money in
its mainframe line, and at least on the hardware side, a lot of really cool
technology and research goes into these machines. It's kind of a shame that
all this cool technology gets cooped up in relatively small market niche.

~~~
omarforgotpwd
The simple fact of the matter is that hardly anyone needs a mainframe. Most
computing tasks these days can be accomplished better / cheaper with big racks
of commodity hardware that you can source from anywhere. In addition the huge
price tag (starting at $500k I believe) serves to reinforce the marketing
message to the corporations that purchase this stuff that is product is much
more advanced, reliable and feature packed than the alternative, and that you
want it if you can afford it. Why else would it be so much more expensive,
right? IBM has likely done these calculations and figured out that their
pricing is optimal for extracting the maximum profit from their customer base.

------
scrumper
Marketing message is all about 'trust'. Then you see the product images! They
clearly forgot to tell their industrial designer what they were going for. It
looks like a Terminator's shower stall.

------
youdontknowtho
I see a lot of people knocking these things in the comments...but if you want
guaranteed employment you would be trying to get experience with COBOL. I'm
telling you.

Truth is, these things are so much more stable and secure that most projects
running on large hardware (think Oracle anything) would end up saving money by
running on a mainframe.

~~~
Chaebixi
> Truth is, these things are so much more stable and secure that most projects
> running on large hardware (think Oracle anything) would end up saving money
> by running on a mainframe.

Stable, maybe, but probably not secure. The software stack on these was
designed _well before_ anyone had any real interest in network security. I saw
a youtube by a security researcher who took a look at one and found all kinds
of inadvisable stuff. He also said there were very few people looking at these
from a security perspective.

~~~
youdontknowtho
I saw the same presentation. You're right, they could use a penetration team
in the release development cycle.

I was referring to the access control model that's built in to Mainframes.
They were pioneers of mandatory access control's and fine grained security.

Having fewer people working on them is a definite issue, though, when it comes
to the kinds of exposures that Mainframe integration to a corporate
environment entail.

------
bluedino
Who's buying these things?

Compuware has 2,200 customers worldwide. I'd guess most of them have at least
one IBM mainframe. They're based in Detroit so I'd say their largest customers
are the big three automakers.

eBay was a big IBM customer at one point weren't they? I'm sure there a lot of
banks and financial institutions, and big manufacturing companies. Most of the
Fortune 1000 then?

~~~
emersonrsantos
Banks, government, reservation systems (like airlines) and the odd company
that had tech at the seventies.

~~~
Caveman_Coder
Utility companies as well

------
abtinf
Disclosure: I work at IBM.

Mainframes are not my area, but what I've learned makes me salivate. The next
time I launch a startup, one of these Z systems is going to be on the CapEx
plan.

The lowest end tier of these systems is something that could be easily
afforded post series-A, and the stunning computational power is almost the
least important benefit. These systems provide incredible redundancy,
reliability, fault tolerance, and transaction processing speed. Decades of
engineering experience have gone into building these.

You _could_ hire engineers to figure out to make systems run reliably on a
cloud provider, but unless you are one of a tiny handful of unicorns that
specialize in this, you are going to do a second-rate job of it. And hiring
the staff with the skill set to do that is incredibly expensive and doesn't
create differentiating value.

~~~
jclulow
Frankly, when was the _last_ time you launched a startup? Why would you waste
money on a technology stack which is essentially the physical manifestation of
vendor lock-in and rent seeking, all but guaranteed to grow in cost in lock
step with the size of your wallet? It's hard enough to find superlative
software engineers and operations staff to work on more mainstream
technologies; where are you going to recruit staff proficient in a technology
stack alien to most everybody, who also want to shoulder the risk of joining
your startup venture?

No matter how much IBM wishes it were not so, we've reached a point where you
absolutely _can_ (and should) do your computing on a substantially more open
platform -- where more than one vendor can provide each layer of the stack
that you build on!

~~~
abtinf
> when was the _last_ time you launched a startup?

6 years ago. After that, I was an early (< 10 headcount) engineering hire at a
couple companies.

> all but guaranteed to grow in cost in lock step with the size of your
> wallet?

Check your premises. My general understanding - again, mainframes are not my
area - is that IBM almost guarantees falling per-transaction costs over time
with Z.

> a technology stack alien to most everybody

Let IBM maintain the mainframe and let your engineers build on top with
whatever tech stack or platform they are comfortable with. IBM invented
virtualization in the 60s. And there are quite a few more mainframe engineers
out there than you might think.

------
tluyben2
They used to have these easy to understand metrics like 1 mainframe can run
1000 Linux VMs at such and such hardware spec. And that almost made it worth
the price. Now I see only blahblah.

------
zdw
From a physical design perspective, it really looks like they glued a few
supersize nVidia Sheild TV's onto the front of it: [https://www.nvidia.com/en-
us/shield/shield-tv/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/)

~~~
krylon
Maybe they did. I remember reading that one particular Cray Supercomputer had
a MacBook embedded in it just to display a shiny 3D animation.

------
syntaxgoonoo
How much do one of these things cost?

~~~
bluedino
Bare bones? Probably $200-300,000. Most companies will spend a couple million.
And I'm sure if you loaded it to the gills with RAM and disk you could spend
$25,000,000 USD.

Sounds like a lot, but it's cheaper than re-writing all the software you're
running on your current Z10/Z11/Z12.

~~~
criddell
Do they come with an engineer?

~~~
fredsted
_That 's_ when it starts to get expensive.

------
filereaper
I expect a nice boost in revenues and stock coming up, happens with each z
series launch.

------
verdverm
I wonder about the timing of the release with Q2 earnings report tomorrow...

~~~
balozi
I predict t'will be 21 straight quarters of declining revenues.

~~~
KMag
For the record, balozi earned +1 clairvoyance point.

------
Quequau
Every time I see something on these mainframes I'm filled with the idle
curiosity about what the minimum quanta of a Z system might really be.

~~~
marktangotango
Hercules emulator on a raspberrypi running a bootleg copy of z/os is about the
minimum. Maybe not what you had in mind though.

~~~
Quequau
I was thinking more of a minimum reasonable (or perhaps plausible)
configuration of actual Z system hardware.

------
codeape
How powerful is a Z-series mainframe?

~~~
cyphar
Very.

They are also built like a tank, and have so many levels of redudancy and
reporting that if any component breaks in your machine they guarantee there
won't be any downtime (and a technician is dispatched to fix it
automatically). That includes things like CPU cache line bridges, complete
cooling failures, storage failures, etc. Also they guarantee that every new
version of the mainframe will not increase power consumption (which is
absolutely insane).

Oh, and the bill will make you dizzy.

~~~
hal007
They also ship with a small eolic propeller and the case is made with
photovoltaic cells. All in case of power shortage. And of course the case
contains few pigeons for ip over avian carriers in case of network shortage.

~~~
cyphar
I would not be surprised if that were the case. They might even start doing
IP-over-technician while they repair the problem with avian flu that spiked
the packet loss in the ip-over-carrier-pidgeon channel.

------
mavhc
Do you still have to interact with it with the worst UI in the history of the
world though?

~~~
krylon
As a sysprog/admin? Yes.

I can understand perfectly well why they kept JCL around, what I do not
understand is why they have not come up with some successor.

------
grabcocque
Blockchain! Machine learning! Cloud! This is the most Buzzword Compliant
mainframe we've ever made!

~~~
coldcode
IBM invented Buzzword Compliance. It's probably patented. There is likely an
IBM Buzzword Compliance team. I bet they leverage Watson to ensure compliance.

~~~
framebit

      I bet they leverage Watson to ensure cognitive compliance for strategic solutionings.
    

Fixed it for you.

~~~
flavio81
This just in, after the Buzzword Quality Assurance process:

    
    
       I bet they leverage Watson to ensure world-class, mission-critical cognitive compliance 
       for strategic cloud-aligned, value-added, blockchain-enabled solutionings.

~~~
framebit
That is horrible and beautiful, well done.

I'm going to go listen to Mission Statement now:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4)

