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Comment by OldHand2018 | Hacker News Reader

OldHand2018

If it aint broke, don't break it.

In a business context, the outcomes that your software enable are the things that matter. If your legacy platform still works and your business can still accomplish the things it wants to accomplish, why add a huge expensive distraction?

IBM still makes mainframes. You can still buy OpenVMS systems. There is no reason to believe that you will wake up one day and your technology will no longer exist. Don't hire people from Stanford or MIT. Recruit at 2nd tier schools and get them a year or two before you need them. They can learn all they need on the job, and they cost less, too.

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Ah yes, outcomes like payments taking over a day to go through and people not being able to receive unemployment.

Mainframes are not slow. IBM's POWER architecture has some downsides but it is no slouch in transactions/second.

> payments taking over a day to go through

That's due to the protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network "when a real-time transfer is required, a wire transfer using a system such as the Federal Reserve's Fedwire is employed instead".

> people not being able to receive unemployment

That's probably not due to the mainframes. https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/new-jersey-unemployment... That's probably an administration issue. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/04/unemployment-benefits...

Z and POWER are two distinct architectures.

I know you can get different architectures in a mainframe, including Power. What's Z like?

https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248851.html

and

http://publibfi.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dz9zr011.pdf

Should pretty much cover it :)

Edit: missed http

Power is way closer to a Xeon than a mainframe.

payments taking over a day to go through

Consider that when you swipe your credit card and get payment approved in a store, that’s a round trip to the mainframe back at Visa HQ. Or when you withdraw cash from an ATM. Mainframes are perfectly capable of near-real-time operations at massive scale. The problems you mention are not technological.

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