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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday January 15 2015, @08:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-iron dept.

The death of the mainframe has been predicted many times over the years but it has prevailed because it has been overhauled time and again. Now Steve Lohr reports that IBM has just released the z13, a new mainframe engineered to cope with the huge volume of data and transactions generated by people using smartphones and tablets. “This is a mainframe for the mobile digital economy,” says Tom Rosamilia. “It’s a computer for the bow wave of mobile transactions coming our way.” IBM claims the z13 mainframe is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day and has a host of technical improvements over its predecessor, including three times the memory, faster processing and greater data-handling capability. IBM spent $1 billion to develop the z13, and that research generated 500 new patents, including some for encryption intended to improve the security of mobile computing. Much of the new technology is designed for real-time analysis in business. For example, the mainframe system can allow automated fraud prevention while a purchase is being made on a smartphone. Another example would be providing shoppers with personalized offers while they are in a store, by tracking their locations and tapping data on their preferences, mainly from their previous buying patterns at that retailer.

IBM brings out a new mainframe about every three years, and the success of this one is critical to the company’s business. Mainframes alone account for only about 3 percent of IBM’s sales. But when mainframe-related software, services, and storage are included, the business as a whole contributes 25 percent of IBM’s revenue and 35 percent of its operating profit. Ronald J. Peri, chief executive of Radixx International was an early advocate in the 1980s of moving off mainframes and onto networks of personal computers. Today Peri is shifting the back-end computing engine in the Radixx data center from a cluster of industry-standard servers to a new IBM mainframe and estimates the total cost of ownership including hardware, software, and labor will be 50 percent less with a mainframe. “We kind of rediscovered the mainframe,” says Peri.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 15 2015, @09:43AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Thursday January 15 2015, @09:43AM (#135050)

    yet my money transfers still takes 3 business days to complete. Fucking banks make a fortune on interests with that...

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  • (Score: 1) by radu on Thursday January 15 2015, @10:25AM

    by radu (1919) on Thursday January 15 2015, @10:25AM (#135062)

    yet my money transfers still takes 3 business days to complete

    You know that doesn't have anything to do with computing power, don't you?

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday January 15 2015, @11:17AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday January 15 2015, @11:17AM (#135070)

      It has to do with the mainframe "batch" mentality. MQ Series is kind of helpingthe old folks get past it, but many even run stuff over MQ in batch.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15 2015, @02:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15 2015, @02:35PM (#135124)

        Nah, it has to do with banking protectionism. Money transfers happen instantly in many countries that are not the USA.

      • (Score: 1) by TheRealMike on Thursday January 15 2015, @03:09PM

        by TheRealMike (4989) on Thursday January 15 2015, @03:09PM (#135139)
        More specifically, banks have a lot of very complicated algorithms and code bases that inherently assume batch processing. The calculation of interest makes everything insanely complicated. Interest calculations and payments can have knock-on effects throughout the banks entire set of accounts. For example maybe an account is relying on the interest payment to avoid going into overdraft that day. You have to ensure that everything happens in a specific order and the databases aren't changing whilst all these calculations are in flight. Making all that 1970's era COBOL work in a fully concurrent environment that works when the database is fully live is ... hard. Means a rewrite, pretty much.

        But it gets worse. Banks can roll back transactions, for example due to a court order from a bankruptcy court. Let's say a company makes a payment to a supplier and that supplier then gets paid the interest on the size of that payment in their account. Then a few days later a bankruptcy court decides that the company went bankrupt as of a week ago, and the payment to the supplier is to be rolled back in order to pay creditors instead. Then the interest payments must also be rolled back ... recursively! It's madness.

        And finally, all the people who wrote the insanely complex business logic for this, wrote it in long since obsolete languages that didn't place a premium on good documentation and style, 90% of them are retired and the only ones left who had a clue were then outsourced to India to save money. So these banks often cannot evolve their IT infrastructure at all.
        • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday January 15 2015, @04:27PM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday January 15 2015, @04:27PM (#135165)

          That's it. These systems need to be rewritten with this stuff in mind up front, in modern languages, and in a maintainable way. At this point people are terrified of touching stuff.