from the bringing-the-mainframe-into-the-21st-century dept.
IBM Introduces Two Open-Source-Only Mainframes
IBM is introducing two mainframe servers that run only on the open-source Linux operating system.
The new hardware will make it easier to run technology like the MongoDB database and the open-source software Spark. Presently more than a third of IBM's mainframe clients are running the Linux operating system. IBM also said it will release mainframe code to the public and join a new cohort of less than a dozen academic, government and corporate entities in what's called the Open Mainframe Project, an open source endeavor devoted to helping companies using mainframe computers.
IBM is sweetening the pot by contributing 250,000 lines of mainframe code to the Linux community, hoping to attract a new generation of developers to their platform. To help coax new users, IBM will be offering free access to the LinuxOne cloud, a mainframe simulation tool it developed for creating, testing and piloting Linux mainframe applications.
Some of the specs for the machines can be found in this article from Reuters, including a partnership with Canonical Ltd. to distribute Ubuntu on the LinuxONE and zSeries systems.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by kaganar on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:53PM
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:00PM
open hardware and open source are NOT the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:46PM
The Stallman/GNU explanation. [gnu.org]
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:22PM
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:00PM
Are they charging for "MIPS" for using your own processors or requiring you to buy their IFL processors? There are very good reasons why many people don't use mainframes any more. Both up-front costs and operating costs are utterly ridiculous. They are very fault tolerant, but almost all business are way better off just getting three or more of whatever hardware you're running and using and handling it that way. Running Linux instead of zOS goes a long way towards making them usable though.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:31PM
I don't think pricing has been announced, but no one who isn't already a mainframe shop would buy one of these. Name any new company since Amazon or Google that has adopted a mainframe platform. There aren't any that I know of. New companies use redundant commodity hardware that's cheaper and easier to deal with. Amazon has made a business out of supplying computing power like this.
But mainframe shops will. Most true-blue IBM shops are using their mainframe as a data warehouse and transaction processing back-end, and writing a lot of stuff in J2EE. They'll eat these machines up if they're cheaper and faster than running Websphere on a z/OS instance. Anyone who already has IBM hardware will love this to move processing off of their mainframe. It could save them a lot of money.
My guess is IBM is doing a controlled burn. They know their big clients are using J2EE on Intel commodity hardware, and don't want them to abandon the mainframe, so they're selling them what amounts to an Amazon cloud in a box.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:10PM
The new mainframe is explained (somewhat) here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/13/the-new-ibm-z13-is-not-your-fathers-mainframe/ [techcrunch.com] and more detailed specs here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_features.html [ibm.com]
Its not what you think it is. It is a massively parallel processor platform with a chipset of their own design, and huge numbers of cores per processor (up to 141 cores per processor, but each machine can have many processors of different types).
And its pretty small compared to the mainframes of yesteryear. Its heavy in Cryptographic processing at every step in the transaction process, on each core in the machine.
It is designed for a different work load than Google's concept of massively parallel cheap computers.
Contrary to the summary, these things are not Linux only. There are a bunch of different OS's that it can run, including Windows Server 2008 and 2012, and AIX.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:19AM
Good stuff from frojack. Continue to mod him up.
these things are not Linux-only
It appears that patella.whack is trying to steal away my Linux Fanboy crown.
a chipset of their own design
...but I see nothing that says the processors have an architecture that is not x86-compatible.
...though, if they were to stop funneling bucks to an outside silicon vendor|"intellectual property" gatekeeper, that could do good things for IBM's bottom line.
I had heard rumors that Visduh10 would drop support for ARM(v7).
While M$ appears to be distancing itself from its ARM-using Surface line, "10" still appears to support ARM.
So, even if IBM had gone with ARM architecture for this, Windoze wouldn't be aced-out.
Supported architectures, Windows NT [wikipedia.org]
...and for comparison: Supported architectures, GCC [gnu.org]
The line above 3.18 in the ToC is the nugget.
There are a bunch of different OS's that it can run
z13 Features (your 2nd link)[1] [ibm.com]
Now, IBM -has- been playing down the Windoze angle for quite some time.
[1] IBM needs to use HTML accessibility features in their pages to make them more useful.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Funny) by miljo on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:02PM
I always wanted a mostly POSIX compatible Brontosaurus.
One should strive to achieve, not sit in bitter regret.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:09PM
Mainframes are really architecturally very sophisticated, and after all these years pretty good.
You can view pretty much every cluster of crud as a (bad) attempt to reinvent the mainframe. The only true competitors which spring to mind are VMS/VAX clusters, and they're pretty much gone.
The computer industry will move ahead once we realise that decades of improvements in hardware and miniaturisation and packaging will enable us to build modular mainframes which can live in a shoebox.
Until then, we're at the mercy of the philosophy of enforced adequacy (not even mediocrity) which Bill Gates and Steve Jobs left us.
(Score: 3, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:12PM
IBM is introducing two mainframe servers that run only on the open-source Linux operating system.
How does hardware run on Linux? Is it actually hardware they are selling? Is the "mainframe" referring to the hardware, or does it refer to the software (Linux) than runs on the hardware and provides the mainframey goodness?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:26PM
This is the big one for me:
SUSE Easing Linux on the Mainframe with KVM for IBM z Systems Support
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suse-easing-linux-on-the-mainframe-with-kvm-for-ibm-z-systems-support-300128794.html [prnewswire.com]
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47474.wss [ibm.com]
Wow, no more z/VM or CMS! It's like they finally said "we get it, no one wants this ancient crud" and provided an alternative. This is almost as shocking as Microsoft creating an open source .NET platform. Linux has been available on mainframe hardware for as long as I can remember, but you had to define instances using z/VM and that had to be a huge impediment to adoption. No one wants to touch that crud. But IBM had their not-invented-here thing going strong, pushing their z/VM.
If you have never seen z/VM, be glad. It's some of the most awful crud ever created. It's essentially an operating system for defining virtual machines, but was done back in the 1930s or something and is hideously terrible to use. Imagine the most unproductive environment you've ever seen and double it.
The big drawback here is that you're not running on Intel hardware, so you have to recompile the source for everything you're going to use to the Z series architecture. Some mainframes have Intel add-in cards to spawn virtual images of Intel-based OSes, but that sort of defeats the point of having a mainframe. If you're worried about EBCDIC, I believe the hardware can handle either EBCDIC or ASCII as a setting, but it's been a long time. z/OS has to use EBCDIC, but the hardware doesn't care. (Don't quote me on that, but I think I'm right.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:33PM
I'd forgotten about EBCDIC. What a frikkin' nightmare. Even the various flavours of EBCDIC aren’t compatible with each other and a couple of them actually have errors in them.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:42PM
And then you get terminal emulator programs which try to implement EBCDIC, often in interesting and incompatible ways, which screw things up even more.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:47PM
"It's essentially an operating system for defining virtual machines, but was done back in the 1930s or something and is hideously terrible to use. Imagine the most unproductive environment you've ever seen and double it."
It is a system designed for all that nasty back of house business stuff that actually runs the world, like inventory, payroll, bank transaction processing, airline reservations
and isn't pretty, but is necessary for the world to work.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mendax on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:15PM
Oh, now let's be fair. IBM invented hardware-assisted machine virtualization in the late 1960's! The operating system as we understand it today was still being invented. ALL operating systems, even the venerable but unsuccessful Multics which inspired the development of Unix, were terrible to use at that time. Furthermore, the computers of that day were god-awful slow by today's standards. z/VM may be "some of the most awful crud ever created" but it's also some of the most successful crud ever invented, and the hardware it runs on has a similar legendary history. How many computers do you know of that can run programs written in 1965 without being recompiled? Only descendants of the IBM System 360 series mainframes can make that claim.
Yes, IBM's mainframe operating systems are awful, and unfortunately JCL, originally designed to start up programs using decks of punched cards, is still alive and well and still the only way to go using IBM's ancient operating systems. But they have done an excellent job in hiding that ugliness. I remember seeing a demo of an IBM-branded IDE for COBOL. When you ran the program, it created the JCL "card desk" and submitted them without any additional user intervention.
So, you may ask why people tolerate these ancient and out-of-date things? It's simple. The code is old and rock-solid, changed infrequently, rigorously tested, and extremely reliable. The mainframes also are also rock-solid and extremely reliable. These OSes and the ancient utilities that use them are also blindingly fast. CICS, the transaction service for IBM mainframes, is written in assembly language. How many more cycles more do you think they could squeeze out of CICS? Also, a lot of old and well-established companies have been using these machines and their predecessors for decades. Their IT culture is comfortable with them. That comfort means a lot to companies.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:12PM
"Some of the specs for the machines can be found in this article from Reuters"
Really? Where? Because the only vaguely relevant line I see is: 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.
That's not really a spec, so much as some upper limit on the most kitted out version.
Even the "spec sheet" for the Z13 it *might* be based on is nothing but vague: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_specs.html [ibm.com]
But I found a line somewhere that says: "In its maximum configuration, z13 is powered by up to 141 client characterizable microprocessors (cores) running at 5 GHz" and up to 10Tb of memory. That's a spec. But's it not at all clear why that's "mainframe" rather than just, say, a rack.
Hell, I can get that at ~3.5Ghz in a 42U, no problem at all. With more than enough room to spare, and maybe even a ton of other junk.
Obviously, mainframes are specialist and you design your workload to the mainframe not the other way around, but to me a huge expensive mainframe giving "up to" 141 cores at 5Ghz and 10Tb isn't all that impressive. A few BladeCenter-style things, fully kitted with the GPUs and all sorts of junk in them would seem to provide much more power in a much more conventional box, with more than enough room for runtime redundancy and not cost anywhere near the same.
(Score: 2) by schad on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:57PM
You buy a mainframe because you need reliability. Everything else a mainframe offers can be gotten in other ways, and usually for a lot less money.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:52PM
It IS a rack.
A rack of custom processors, each with costume numbers of multiple Cores, married with custom IO channels (of monumental bandwidth) and power and cooling etc, etc.
I'd recommend reading http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13.html [ibm.com]
or taking the virtual tour https://dqtl7hbb9l3l0.cloudfront.net/4882011/product.html#10/1066;40 [cloudfront.net] (works in firefox, but maybe not in chrome).
IBM has been selling Linux racks for a long time. Whats new here is the horsepower (they've abandoned x86) and the packaging/integration and versatility. True: I hate to think about the cost, but, hey, its IBM: goes with the territory.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.