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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but then you need to engineer the 99.99999% uptime yourself.

If it were actually cheaper, IBM wouldn’t be selling these machines so well.

They are mostly selling to the captive audience who is 40 years deep into COBOL and can't pull out until it falls on top of them.

Well, you know what to do - just sell a system that runs COBOL on an x86 cluster or Kubernetes or whatever, and you'll make billions!

Be sure to allocate me a bunch of shares for giving you the idea.

Many of those machines are running Java workloads, also COBOL isn't the only mainframe language, and the best thing in terms of security is that they don't use C as systems language, rather saner stuff with proper arrays, strings and bounds checking.

That is why Unisys ClearPath MCP is still a thing, tracing back to its Burroughs 1961 heritage, security above all.

Java workloads might be easier to port away from but aren’t MCP machines x86-based nowadays? Unisys did a ton of work for Microsoft making itself obsolete by adding a lot to their secret multiprocessor stuff to Windows.

It’s amazing how Microsoft convinced so many companies to shoot their feet.

They still use NEWP as systems language, there is no C stuff to exploit.

I had a lot of trouble with the idiosyncratic ways of MCP, and I have no doubt Tron's villain was named after it.

Not just COBOL, but also CICS, IMS, Java, and DB2 (although the last two are easier to migrate away from).

That's demonstrably untrue. The "mostly" audience you made up is a shrinking set, and the sales of huge mainframes has CAGR more than PCs. If your claim were true the sales numbers for these mainframes would not be what they are.

This is an expanding market, due to the needs for more and larger and faster data processing uses for new tech, new markets, new transactions, new capabilities.

I don't think they are actually selling those machines so well. They have a captive legacy customer base, who else is buying those?

From TFA: "Overall, Z is growing very healthily. LinuxONE is the fastest area of growth for us right now."

However, he didn't elaborate or give any examples. If I were the interviewer, I would have followed it with: "Oh?! Can you provide some examples for the readers who believe that you only sell to captive audiences?"

If I had the need to ridiculously scale up a Linux workload, I’d immediately think LinuxONE or POWER.

If I had the R&D budget for an on-prem VM hosting box, I’d seriously consider their smaller Express 4, which is not much pricier than a similarly capable x86 machine.

Because I've covered that in a previous video :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVO55oxJ464

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