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Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

That is the certificate I earned upon completing community college. Their Linux curriculum was originally designed around Debian, but when IBM acquired RHEL, redesigned to offer this foot-in-the-door.

IBM still seems to do alright in the legacy mainframe/mini market. It is quite strange how the AS/400 and zOS stuff all goes without notice of ordinary IT guys like me, as if it didn't exist, but still powers a lot of machine rooms that aren't AI data centers.

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System z machines come with special AI processor modules these days, so it's clear IBM wants a piece of that pie also.

They come with very fast inference in the core processors as well. Telum is a very impressive family of chips. Their cache architecture is pure madness.

When you need to do fraud detection with extremely low latencies, this is the way to go.

A lot of old mission-critical banking or commercial software systems have been running on those machines for decades. Before the AI age, it'd seem impossible to migrate those programs off. Now with the AI help, there might be a glimpse of hope.

Honestly, a lot of it was not that hard to port if you really wanted, it's just that the ROI of replacing the entire stack including physical machines was not necessarily good. The parts where ROI was good got replaced already.

I guess you could line-for-line duplicate functionality, but that's just like running the binary in an emulator with extra steps.

Part of the value of a migration would be the opportunity to to unwind some of the details that are contradictory, mis- or non-documented, or wrong-but-unfixable.

The logic changes can be done without destroying investment in the current ecosystem though. So they are really handled separately in terms of planning/budgeting.

Also, a lot of the problematic issues are related not to fixing the local code, but dealing with stuff like external systems or pre-existing legacy data that you need to be able to read back after 30 years from cold storage.

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