By trade, I am a mainframe systems programmer at a large financial institution. My group is responsible for mainframe operating systems: z/OS (it may also be referred to as MVS), z/VM (the mainframe hypervisor), and z/Linux (Linux on a mainframe) and many of the software components that go along with these.
I'm really excited about this announcement. I think IBM finally realized they need to be more open if they want to grow the Linux on z community. I just hope they are not too late to the game.
There's a lot of mystery and misconception behind mainframes, so I am happy to answer any questions about mainframes that I can.
What kind of demand do you think there is for a Linux-only mainframe?
My limited understanding is that most mainframe customers are locked-in, e.g. they have legacy COBOL code running their ledger system and the expense to switch off of it is simply prohibitive. That plus the fact that the system is reliable, low-maintenance, etc. preserves the status quo, despite the fact that if you were to write the same applications today, you'd choose a newer platform because it would be more cost-effective.
As such, IBM has historically offered z/Linux and co-processors only to hold onto data and processing that was being pulled off of the mainframe because it was too expensive/too onerous to do on the mainframe using z/OS and the like. So customers, unable to completely shut down their mainframe, could kind of make the best of a bad situation and at least get some cheaper Linux cycles out of their expensive iron.
If the above is true (and correct me if it's not) what is the appeal of a Linux-only mainframe? Or is it only interesting if it is radically cheaper than a z13?
OK, I'll start. I'm a former IBM-er (IBM Cambridge, Lotus building what up!). I worked mainly on the software side of things, and had some intermittent exposure to AIX and WebSphere which I found to be fascinating both from the historical evolutionary perspective as well as the functional perspective. I'd consider myself competent if someone were to call me in and save an iSeries POWER setup from complete meltdown. If I wanted to, I could get an old POWER5 on eBay with AIX 6L for less than a grand, or better yet rent a VM to learn on for $100/mo.
It seems like, except for "Cracking the Mainframe" or whatever, there's no easy (or even moderately accessible) way of simulating a mainframe setup to learn. Again, I love this stuff. I read Redbooks in my spare time. I have Hercules and z/OS setup, and that took a long time to setup compared to an Arduino or firing up a Linux VM. An average HNer is probably like me -- he/she might want to fire up a z/OS instance and play around with it. But he has no way of doing it though.
These are the tinkerers who end up deciding what platforms to use down the road. The high school kids playing with those free STM32 micro-controllers that TI gave out was a brilliant move. When they choose to do their semester project junior year, they might stick with TI because that's what they know. AVR was lucky Arduino took off too for the same reason. 10 years from now, those high school kids are going to be choosing what to buy 10k units of to throw into the pick'n'place machine.
There are some interesting big-data cloud IaaS/SaaS offerings you've put out to keep up with the times but outside of alliances with large incumbent vendors (say, SAP in ERP; EPIC in Healthcare) to sell large modules, you're not going to see much traction.
Offer something the tinkerers can play with. Make that the gateway drug. Amazon did it perfectly with AWS - easy to roll out, pretty predictable pricing schemes, pay for what you need, and scale up (more VM's/larger VM's) or out (other products within AWS). Every other vendor is chasing their tail trying to capture that market.
Linux on the z community offers me nothing as a decision maker. If I was already vendor-locked into you guys, then the prospect is appealing. But even with low latency (operating within the u-seconds, m-seconds and people start losing jobs/panicing), five-nines SLA (healthcare, HFT prop trading) requirements, what does the Z platform have to offer? How can I even evaluate prospective costs when pricing this out to pitch to the (hypothetical) board?
"IBM said LinuxONE Emperor can scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers, which would be the most for any single Linux system."
I wish article (or IBM) provided some specs. Thousands of containers is just too broad of a statement- what are these containers doing? Running just a bash script hello world program or minting bitcoins?
In an article which states "..IBM's z13 mainframe computer, which had been designed for high-volume mobile transactions.", all bets are off with respect to reality. I mean, what does 'designed for high-volume mobile transactions' even mean in the context of having Linux running on the hardware?
From my experience with zLinux environments I would be inclined to scrutinise any density claims very, very carefully.
Interesting they're working with Canonical on this - the Z has historically been a SuSE stronghold, with a lot of the development of Linux-on-Z happening in Germany, and Red Hat trailing behind. I'd be wary it will be another increasingly typical adware effort from them.
(I follow the main zLinux mailing lists for my day job, and I see a lot of folks from SuSE, some folks from Red Hat, a bunch of people from IBM, and basically no-one from the Ubuntu/Canonical world. Usual disclaimers apply.)
I can think of two good reasons. One is if they want to offer these for virtual desktop environments (as an alternative to the VMWare on Cisco UCS setups many current IBM mainframe customers run) The other to offer an alternative platform to EC2 where Ubuntu seems to be very common. Both would indicate that they are probably aiming at the desktop/user/development side with this product.
IBM's focus is on growing its alternative platforms - more users - not more tech. Tech is necessary but not sufficient. It makes sense to partner with Ubuntu if you want to focus on growing communities.
"typical adware" - heh heh! Seriously, in the consumer space everyone wants "free" so affiliate marketing is a sensible route - see the consumer internet for evidence. In the enterprise markets customers are focused on delivery outside the pure bits - open source bits are necessary but not sufficient - subscriptions such as Ubuntu Advantage with SLA's, management frameworks and consulting are viable there.
Frankly, my experience on mainframes is that UNIX is a stronghold there for a reason. I'd be far more interested in this ecosystem opening up by having strong mainframe vendor support for running Illumos and/or FreeBSD, and less concerned with running Linux. Among other things, Zones are more useful than lxc, and in this type of environment you often need strong kernel support for specialized high-speed interconnects and real-time operations, which Linux only has experimental support for but is integrated well in the UNIX world. I love Linux and what it's done for the world, but UNIX isn't dead for a reason, there are still many things it is superior at.
This is an odd remark - apparently AIX/ESA, the AIX version for mainframe hardware was discontinued "in the late 1990s", roughly the same time when IBM started to invest in Linux.
It's about time. This is long overdue. The combination of the mainframe architecture's strengths with Linux's API/ecosystem could be pretty awesome. Anyone wondering why buy a mainframe should focus on these areas:
1. Reliability. Some have gone 30 years without downtime. Probably strongest selling point.
2. Channel I/O [1]: dedicated I/O processors plus scheduling that lead to high utilization (80-90+%) and throughput vs commodity servers. Second strongest point in mainframe's favor. I wish my desktop & servers had this rather than a knockoff.
3. Hardware partitioning that's more robust and rated at stronger security than most virtualization. Certain cutting-edge projects in INFOSEC are doing similar things at CPU and I/O layers. Mainframe's version, although not as cool, is decent and field-proven.
4. Built-in, proven software virtualization.
5. Hardware acceleration for some things such as databases and crypto.
6. IBM's ecosystem of apps, third-party providers, and services. This might matter to existing IBM customers.
So, those are a few advantages I hear from people who use mainframes. The z/OS-based mainframes have extra benefits in terms of software reliability, security through obscurity (obfuscation), and seemingly better use of both security (eg memory key) and functional (eg decimal) aspects of mainframe processors. The z/VM product has also been doing for decades what modern virtualization systems only recently do, even self-virtualizing since 70's.
So, there's some things to ponder. Whether it makes since financially vs other setups is a whole, different discussion. However, mainframes do retain strong, technical advantages over commodity architectures. They were doing cloud in one box before it was a thing. Their reliability is still unmatched with only VMS clusters and NonStop architecture getting close. So, it's a sensible choice for a business to spend extra $$$ to get high-throughput with no downtime and strong isolation of logical partitions.
So for a business with a complex AS400 system still in place, would this be a replacement for that or an augmentation of that? Their page isn't very clear.
I wonder if the KVM on zSeries thingy is actually open source and upstream. From what I can see they (IBM) say it's "based on open source" which is market droid speak for "actually it's not that open".
When would this type of thing become cost effective? Let's say if you compare it with your typical X amounts of Dell servers also capable of running 8,000 virtual machines.
At the last user conference for some iSeries-based software that we run, IBM had a booth where they displayed a 2U server with dual 16-core Power7 CPUs. They bragged that it only ran Linux and would save us a ton of money. They started out at about $20,000 US.
How small is this market? You'd have to have apps that were written to take advantage of Power7. Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price.
I think the horsepower on those machines shouldn't be underestimated, because they are not entirely as equivalent as you think... I was thoroughly surprised when an unoptimized (but correct!) ChaCha20/8 implementation I wrote on a 3.0GHz POWER8 little-endian machine was about as fast as the latest 3.5gHz Xeons @ AES-256 with AESNI (about 1.3cpb vs 1.0cpb IIRC, but the latter has a dedicated hardware unit for it!) On that same Xeon, the ChaCha20 code only hit somewhere around 5cpb - that's software vs silicon!
It also has 170 cores and was actually a QEMU instance (w/ hardware virtualization extensions) vs raw dedicated metal. If you're doing any kind of numerical or analytic workloads (even databases), I wouldn't throw them aside so quickly. You can even get CUDA for them these days, and certain physical addons like CAPI allow you to map and coherently share physical CPU address space with FPGAs or GPUs. If I could get those things in a reasonable workstation configuration, I'd probably go for it tbh.
(I'd be more than willing to repeat this and post some more accurate numbers if anyone cares. I also need to get around to benchmarking AESNI vs that POWER8 machines _actual_ dedicated AES unit. The benchmark above was only flexing its vector/integer unit capabilities. ;)
You're severely underestimating the cost of dual-proc 16-core Xeons (about $3500 each for the E5-2698v3), and by the time you add memory, storage, I/O, networking, and other necessities, you're easily in the $15-20k range.
Hypervisor is built-in. Single-core up to 2x faster clock than x86 per core. Double the cache. Decimal support built-in is great for financial calculations. Security advantage in that about every malware and attack tool is written for x86 with some attention shifting to ARM.
> (The story was refiled to correct the name of the server to "Emperor" from "Empire" in paragraph 4 and names of software to "MariaDB" and "PostgreSQL" from "Maria" and "Posture" in paragraph 5)
These are the journalists specialized in IT news for a giant like Reuters?
[+] [-] aus_|10 years ago|reply
I'm really excited about this announcement. I think IBM finally realized they need to be more open if they want to grow the Linux on z community. I just hope they are not too late to the game.
There's a lot of mystery and misconception behind mainframes, so I am happy to answer any questions about mainframes that I can.
[+] [-] nonsequ|10 years ago|reply
My limited understanding is that most mainframe customers are locked-in, e.g. they have legacy COBOL code running their ledger system and the expense to switch off of it is simply prohibitive. That plus the fact that the system is reliable, low-maintenance, etc. preserves the status quo, despite the fact that if you were to write the same applications today, you'd choose a newer platform because it would be more cost-effective.
As such, IBM has historically offered z/Linux and co-processors only to hold onto data and processing that was being pulled off of the mainframe because it was too expensive/too onerous to do on the mainframe using z/OS and the like. So customers, unable to completely shut down their mainframe, could kind of make the best of a bad situation and at least get some cheaper Linux cycles out of their expensive iron.
If the above is true (and correct me if it's not) what is the appeal of a Linux-only mainframe? Or is it only interesting if it is radically cheaper than a z13?
[+] [-] iheartmemcache|10 years ago|reply
It seems like, except for "Cracking the Mainframe" or whatever, there's no easy (or even moderately accessible) way of simulating a mainframe setup to learn. Again, I love this stuff. I read Redbooks in my spare time. I have Hercules and z/OS setup, and that took a long time to setup compared to an Arduino or firing up a Linux VM. An average HNer is probably like me -- he/she might want to fire up a z/OS instance and play around with it. But he has no way of doing it though.
These are the tinkerers who end up deciding what platforms to use down the road. The high school kids playing with those free STM32 micro-controllers that TI gave out was a brilliant move. When they choose to do their semester project junior year, they might stick with TI because that's what they know. AVR was lucky Arduino took off too for the same reason. 10 years from now, those high school kids are going to be choosing what to buy 10k units of to throw into the pick'n'place machine.
There are some interesting big-data cloud IaaS/SaaS offerings you've put out to keep up with the times but outside of alliances with large incumbent vendors (say, SAP in ERP; EPIC in Healthcare) to sell large modules, you're not going to see much traction.
Offer something the tinkerers can play with. Make that the gateway drug. Amazon did it perfectly with AWS - easy to roll out, pretty predictable pricing schemes, pay for what you need, and scale up (more VM's/larger VM's) or out (other products within AWS). Every other vendor is chasing their tail trying to capture that market.
Linux on the z community offers me nothing as a decision maker. If I was already vendor-locked into you guys, then the prospect is appealing. But even with low latency (operating within the u-seconds, m-seconds and people start losing jobs/panicing), five-nines SLA (healthcare, HFT prop trading) requirements, what does the Z platform have to offer? How can I even evaluate prospective costs when pricing this out to pitch to the (hypothetical) board?
[+] [-] mozumder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm-t|10 years ago|reply
See http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/ibm-teams-with-canonical-on...
[+] [-] cm-t|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gauravphoenix|10 years ago|reply
I wish article (or IBM) provided some specs. Thousands of containers is just too broad of a statement- what are these containers doing? Running just a bash script hello world program or minting bitcoins?
[+] [-] otis_inf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonewhite|10 years ago|reply
I don't see how this is any different from a regular server rack.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux-one.html
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blackbeard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
Interesting they're working with Canonical on this - the Z has historically been a SuSE stronghold, with a lot of the development of Linux-on-Z happening in Germany, and Red Hat trailing behind. I'd be wary it will be another increasingly typical adware effort from them.
(I follow the main zLinux mailing lists for my day job, and I see a lot of folks from SuSE, some folks from Red Hat, a bunch of people from IBM, and basically no-one from the Ubuntu/Canonical world. Usual disclaimers apply.)
[+] [-] kokey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slgeorge|10 years ago|reply
"typical adware" - heh heh! Seriously, in the consumer space everyone wants "free" so affiliate marketing is a sensible route - see the consumer internet for evidence. In the enterprise markets customers are focused on delivery outside the pure bits - open source bits are necessary but not sufficient - subscriptions such as Ubuntu Advantage with SLA's, management frameworks and consulting are viable there.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|10 years ago|reply
Ubuntu's distributions are the reference root FS for Cloud Foundry, to which IBM is the second largest contributor of treasure and engineering effort.
Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, who are the first.
[+] [-] wglb|10 years ago|reply
Any specifics you can share?
[+] [-] tristor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_why_of_y|10 years ago|reply
http://www.lookupmainframesoftware.com/soft_detail/dispsoft/...
There was also Amdahl UTS, which was sold to a company UTS Global around 2000 that appears defunct now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_UTS
So where is this stronghold of AT&T descendant UNIXes on mainframes then?
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
1. Reliability. Some have gone 30 years without downtime. Probably strongest selling point.
2. Channel I/O [1]: dedicated I/O processors plus scheduling that lead to high utilization (80-90+%) and throughput vs commodity servers. Second strongest point in mainframe's favor. I wish my desktop & servers had this rather than a knockoff.
3. Hardware partitioning that's more robust and rated at stronger security than most virtualization. Certain cutting-edge projects in INFOSEC are doing similar things at CPU and I/O layers. Mainframe's version, although not as cool, is decent and field-proven.
4. Built-in, proven software virtualization.
5. Hardware acceleration for some things such as databases and crypto.
6. IBM's ecosystem of apps, third-party providers, and services. This might matter to existing IBM customers.
So, those are a few advantages I hear from people who use mainframes. The z/OS-based mainframes have extra benefits in terms of software reliability, security through obscurity (obfuscation), and seemingly better use of both security (eg memory key) and functional (eg decimal) aspects of mainframe processors. The z/VM product has also been doing for decades what modern virtualization systems only recently do, even self-virtualizing since 70's.
So, there's some things to ponder. Whether it makes since financially vs other setups is a whole, different discussion. However, mainframes do retain strong, technical advantages over commodity architectures. They were doing cloud in one box before it was a thing. Their reliability is still unmatched with only VMS clusters and NonStop architecture getting close. So, it's a sensible choice for a business to spend extra $$$ to get high-throughput with no downtime and strong isolation of logical partitions.
Channel I/O [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_channel
[+] [-] arca_vorago|10 years ago|reply
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux-one.html
[+] [-] jwildeboer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|10 years ago|reply
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/s390/kvm/
[+] [-] sgt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
How small is this market? You'd have to have apps that were written to take advantage of Power7. Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price.
[+] [-] thoughtpolice|10 years ago|reply
It also has 170 cores and was actually a QEMU instance (w/ hardware virtualization extensions) vs raw dedicated metal. If you're doing any kind of numerical or analytic workloads (even databases), I wouldn't throw them aside so quickly. You can even get CUDA for them these days, and certain physical addons like CAPI allow you to map and coherently share physical CPU address space with FPGAs or GPUs. If I could get those things in a reasonable workstation configuration, I'd probably go for it tbh.
(I'd be more than willing to repeat this and post some more accurate numbers if anyone cares. I also need to get around to benchmarking AESNI vs that POWER8 machines _actual_ dedicated AES unit. The benchmark above was only flexing its vector/integer unit capabilities. ;)
[+] [-] McGlockenshire|10 years ago|reply
You're severely underestimating the cost of dual-proc 16-core Xeons (about $3500 each for the E5-2698v3), and by the time you add memory, storage, I/O, networking, and other necessities, you're easily in the $15-20k range.
Source: I work for an integrator.
[+] [-] aus_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ska|10 years ago|reply
That doesn't sound right to me. What are you considering an equivalent x86 machine?
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ilaksh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefantalpalaru|10 years ago|reply
These are the journalists specialized in IT news for a giant like Reuters?
[+] [-] zymhan|10 years ago|reply
Also, I know this is a newswire/business site, but this is super skimpy on the details.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dijit|10 years ago|reply
also, they have a history of supporting linux, why so bitter?