Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

IBM's customers have been slowly transitioning from proprietary IBM OSs (AIX, z/OS) to Linux for a lot of their workloads

Yes, but that’s only a coincidence. What they have really been doing is transitioning from proprietary to commodity hardware. Which IBM no longer makes. Where does IBM make money? Mainframe sales. There can be only one winner here... IBM will need to kill off their mainframe business to justify this purchase, something they have proved very reluctant to do.

View on HN

There is no reason to discontinue their mainframe business. Banks and other institutions have applications running successfully on those platforms. The industry has learned that it is better to integrate applications than to replace—especially when the replacement is a 40 year old app that runs the business.

IBM’s mainframe margins are safe for decades to come.

But, don’t you see the paradox there? If customers are happy with their mainframe why would they switch to Red Hat? And if they don’t want to switch why did IBM buy it?

They may not want to get rid of the hardware, but they may want to run something other than z/OS on it. RHEL is well supported on both IBM midrange and mainframe systemd.

mainframes can run rhel vms which are basically standard rhel installs that you assign RAM/CPU/storage to, with the benefits of mainframe hardware (eg. massive I/O bandwidth) so you can be happy with your mainframe because you are running rhel on it :)

But realistically mainframes are a small part of IBMs business so there are lots of reasons for IBM to buy Red Hat that are entirely unrelated to mainframes or POWER hardware

IBM makes most of their revenue from their global technology services division, followed by their software division and then global business services division. A small fraction of their revenue comes from their mainframe/hardware business now. In essence that business only lives for legacy purposes.

Mainframes were driving growth as recently as last year https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/ibm/mainframes-continue-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com