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IBM is launching what it calls a "skinny mainframe" for cloud computing. The system is built around IBM z14 mainframe technology, and it features a 19-inch industry standard, single-frame case design, allowing for easy placement into public cloud data centers and for private cloud deployments.
[...] With the mainframe in high demand and more relevant than ever, IBM worked closely on the design with more than 80 clients, including managed service providers, online banks, and insurance firms, to reinvent the mainframe for a whole new class of users.
The new z14 and LinuxOne offerings also bring significant increases in capacity, performance, memory, and cache across nearly all aspects of the system. A complete system redesign delivers this capacity growth in 40 percent less space, standardized to be deployed in any data center. The z14 ZR1, announced today, can be the foundation for an IBM Cloud Private solution, creating a "data center in a box" by co-locating storage, networking, and other elements in the same physical frame as the mainframe server.
The z14 ZR1 delivers 10 percent more capacity than its predecessor, the z13s, and, at 8TB, twice the memory. The system can handle more than 850 million fully encrypted transactions per day.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/09/ibm-launches-skinny-mainframe-for-the-cloud/
Also at The Register
Technical Introduction(IBM Redbook)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Thursday April 12 2018, @04:09PM (3 children)
Disclaimer: I worked at IBM testing updates to their VM Operating System [wikipedia.org] in the 1980's; things have likely changed a bit since then.
The thing that struck me about IBM Mainframes was not phenomenal computing resources, but the tremendous amount of data that could flow through their system.
A device, such as a 3270 terminal, was not connected directly to the mainframe. Nope, it would be connected to a concentrator (IIRC). Back in the day, one of these could handle inputs from something like 64 different terminals. It would gather up and buffer multiple requests into a single 'chunk' of data.
So, the concentrator was connected to the mainframe, right?
Nope.
You see, the mainframe was so efficient at performing transactions on the data, that it could sit there waiting for data to process if all it had was data fed in from concentrators.
So, concentrators were not up to the task by themselves, that's why multiple concentrators would feed into a single channel. And, you guessed it, there were multiple channels feeding into the mainframe itself.
From ancient memories, an IBM mainframe with two processors, 32MB of main memory, and 256MB of extended memory could support on the order of 1,000 terminals. Oh yeah, along with a whole array of disk and tape drives hanging off the system, too.
To put this in perspective, this is around the same timeframe that IBM released the IBM AT [wikipedia.org] personal computer which came with PC DOS 3.0 and sported a 6 MHz Intel 80286 microprocessor. Though it supported up to 16MB of RAM, the base configuration came with just 256 KB. The introductory price was $6000.
tl;dr: Mainframes were important in large part because of the huge volume of data that they could rapidly and reliably process.
PS: Forgot to mention that the other big thing about mainframes was legacy support. IBM took exceptional pains to make sure that its latest processors in the 360/370/etc. line were fully backward compatible with prior versions. One's investment in legacy code would carry forward in newer hardware releases.
PPS: I would love to hear from people with more recent experience as to how well those traditions of throughput and backward compatibility have been maintained!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday April 12 2018, @04:26PM (2 children)
It's been about a decade since I worked on them but what you said still hold/held true back then. You don't buy a Mainframe to crunch numbers (it would probably be a horrible machine for cryptocurrency and such), you buy (or rent) one to crunch transactions -- obscene amounts of them. That is what it was built for and that is what it's superior at -- today and for the last half decade
If the concern is that you are stuck in z\os that isn't much of an issue anymore with the z\vm you can launch everything from old classics to solaris (it might not be that common anymore, don't know if that is even maintained anymore -- could be some opensolaris I guess) and linux (yes there is linux for the mainframe). That said if you wanna do what the machine is built for I don't see why you would really run any of that, but as noted every single user or program can live happily in it's own little VM and chug along. But it really doesn't take away from the fact that it's a machine built for processing all while maintaining total legacy and security. I don't think I have ever actually seen one really crash, sure disks break and power fucks out sometimes etc but the machine just ticks on with the redundancy -- the only thing you notice is the little message notification that it's time to replace some faulty components.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:15PM (1 child)
I've seen them crash several times (mostly z26, I think?) ... but every time because of operator error, which is pretty much the same on all hardware/OS these days (non-Windows) Redundancy gets you that cheaper, and with more power. Data throughput has caught up as well. It's a very bad solution to all but an extremely small set of problems. Even the remaining ones are generally solved in other ways using OTS stuff, especially for availability of people/knowledge.
As I've said before, the worst thing about it in my experience, is the "mainframe attitude". Nothing can change ... ever. There is an *insane* amount of process that has no value other than "because that's the way we've always done it". I think they're having trouble indoctrinating a new generation, but the money is getting temping for working on the dinosaurs.
COBOL ... *shiver*
(Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:44PM
I'm unsure where most of them are these days but it's probably still the backbone in banking, finance, insurance and some transaction heavy commerce.
I can't deny the attitude or mindset, it's a lot of "this is how it has always been" which might sound bad at first but there are also positive aspects such as you don't have to jump from trend to trend like some others seem to do. Which naturally might clash with this whole skinny cloud mainframe salesrep talk.
I'm going to wait a decade or two then brush off my ibm-suit before ever thinking about doing it again -- upside being that NOTHING will have changed.