IBM z14 mainframe

[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.

[cesarb]

I have a better link. Scroll down to the end, and click on "Redbooks"; there you'll find the technical information we HN readers tend to be more interested in.

In particular this one: "IBM z14 Technical Introduction" https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248450.pdf (I'm still reading it, but page 5 already has a short list with "the main technical enhancements in the z14 over its predecessor platforms").

[zitterbewegung]

You forgot that they mention blockchain technology.

[rbanffy]

> one-click victory in buzzword bingo:

https://vimeo.com/12112636

[jordache]

machine learning.. ok what ML platform would one run on it? Doesn't it make more sense to use a cloud ML provider? scale infinitely?

Or does it only apply to companies that doesn't want its data to get out to the cloud?

[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.

[protomyth]

On a funny note, a city government built a new building and the architect must have badly misunderstood the server requirements for the cities AS/400 (smaller sibling to the mainframe). The AS/400 sat alone in a corner office with an nice view given the copious amounts of windows. I think IT finely got it moved, but it certainly had a "presence".

[edit] the architect did get the power and cooling requirements correct although the cooling did have to work a little harder given the direct sun light.

[aruggirello]

I wish they sold the case separately ;-)

[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.

[Rjevski]

I'll keep my "non-guaranteed" employment any day over COBOL.

Those might be reliable but you could achieve the same reliability on commodity hardware for a lower price if you write distributed software and plan for failure.

My SIP server software (for a startup I hope to launch soon) can have its power cable pulled and nobody will realise because the server besides it just took the process over. For the price of a single mainframe I can put hundreds of servers all around the world and still come out cheaper.

[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.

[Chaebixi]

> Who's buying these things?

Probably most of companies that were doing anything requiring scale and reliability before the 1990s. These were something like the big data tech of that era.

[kawera]

Government agencies, think tax and social security infrastructure.

[lostboys67]

BT in the UK used to be one of the biggest IBM users

[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.

[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/

[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?

[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.

[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.

[codeape]

How powerful is a Z-series mainframe?

[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.

[Aardwolf]

It doesn't mention XML, is it no longer a thing? :)