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Comment by memset | Hacker News Reader

I interned at IBM writing mainframe software in 2008 or so. One thing I remember them saying - there used to be TV commercials - that a single mainframe could replace a rooms worth of commodity hardware.

I would have assumed that someone would have started a cloud provider with Linux VMs running on mainframes instead of racks of pizza boxes. What was missing - are the economics of mainframes really that bad?

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Mainframes are the polar opposite of commodity hardware. Those pizza boxes are commodity because they're plentifully available, and you can mix-and-match if needed, there's nothing cheaper for you to run your VMs on. Running them on a mainframe would put IBM as a middle man between you and your business.

Also, mainframes/midranges are all about stability, security, and robustness, not performance. For example, IBM i (the OS, not the machine) has a hardware dependent layer, and a hardware-independent one. This allows for drastic hardware changes without affecting the high-level applications. A monolith would be arguably more efficient, but it matters more that the hardware-independent layer stays rock-solid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#Architecture

IBM offer a cloud to open source folks already, not sure if they have a commercial one though.

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/get-started-with-ibm-linu... https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted#Other

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