IBM's product line just seems completely irrelevant to modern tech companies.
If you'd like to view them more from a hardware deployment perspective, you can think of them more like the Dell Poweredge VRTX series than your usual decoupled stacks of network, pizza box servers, and SAN chassis. Cisco UCS is more connection-oriented with the emphasis upon making your network topologies far more flexible than with mainframes, so mainframes are compute-oriented versions in that respect with historically weaker support for scaling out with interoperability across the rest of your network infrastructure (not sure if anyone at IBM or CA has seriously taken standards like BGP and OSPF into account for mainframes, that is). People still remote into mainframes with TN3270 commands, I know we had customers still asking for that as of 7 years ago with no expectation of sunsetting.
The mainframe market is still $10B, and the fact that you can't think of a good use for one does not mean that IBM's product lines are irrelevant. The market should be addressed by major hardware manufacturers, there is still profit to be made here.
The fact that you are comfortable as a "hardware person" saying things like this publicly is a pretty clear indication that your world is much, much smaller than you think it is, relative to the size of the real world.
> At any rate, the mainframe is a hugely profitable business for IBM. Only around 4% of the firm’s revenues come from mainframe sales. But once additional hardware, storage, software and all kinds of related services have been factored in, the mainframe accounts for a quarter of IBM’s revenue and nearly half of profits, estimates Toni Sacconaghi of Berstein Research.
Read that again. HALF of profits. A QUARTER of revenue.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...
If you have any suggestions about how I can phrase this in a way that makes you both comfortable, and that still makes it clear that I do not believe you have any business speaking on this subject, then I am 100% happy to listen to you. :)
I'm sure you're otherwise intelligent, but this is an area where you should probably just listen.
You first write:
"The mainframe market is still $10B" and then
"the mainframe accounts for a quarter of IBM’s revenue" (that would be about $25B).
Which one is it? :)
$10B are spent each year on sales of actual mainframe computers. [1]
The article quoted in the last article claims that everything you sell around mainframes, like services, is a quarter of revenue.
Now, it's your turn to do something for me. Don't respond if you're not willing to read before you speak. I should not have had to explain this to you.
> IBM Hursley laboratory director Rob Lamb says: “There are 6,900 tweets, 30,000 Facebook likes and 60,000 Google searches per second." The mainframe CICS runs 1.1m transactions per second, which equates to 10bn per day [0]
[0] http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Can-the-mainframe-rema...
The mainframes have their own CISC type architecture and typically have massive amounts of cache and a high clock speed (5Ghz and above)
Their instructions sets are also different in that its not strictly of the von-Neumann variety. Mainframes can do things like memory copies directly in memory without requiring copying via registers. This kind-of attacks the von-Neumann bottleneck directly and is good for batch and high volume transaction processing.
The software for mainframes is also typically fused into their kernels, things like CICS and DB2 are not "user" programs, they're part of the OS so I/O is handled much better and things don't "block" as much.
Mainframes are overpriced and inefficient, but they are the only option for a F500 without the in-house talent to build any kind of distributed, fault tolerant system.
But people have been predicting the death of big iron for several decades now, yet they live on.
I don't doubt mainframes might be overpriced, but I also suspect the reason they persist is they have yet to come up with a cheaper option, offering the same performance figures.
Also, there is a remark that in major parts of the financial industry, running an IBM mainframe is nearly a necessary condition for compliance.
I'm don't doubt that is a major factor. Add to that the major risk that what every new system you move to might actually fail to work or end up costing more.
But isn't that what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing? Using massively distributed commodity x86 hardware to eat away at incumbent businesses that would outsource their IT services to mainframes? Last I read, Google is about to go into auto insurance, and all three companies I listed do payment processing.
If software is eating the world, SV behemoths are eating business verticals.
Second, since I assume, most of the programmers here don't have access to mainframes, it is hard to testify those numbers. Also, since it is a benchmark it will be useful to revel what exactly the task they are using here, otherwise I would simply throw this claim into my 'pure PR mess, don't take it seriously' bin :)
One use of CICS was for heads down medical claims processing, across all four US time zones. The site our team from IBM Research visited wanted high reliability: If the site was down for, say, an hour, then the data entry staff would have to be called back on a Saturday, for at least half a day, at a higher rate per hour. One such outage in a year, and the CIO could lose his bonus. Two and he could lose his job. The site was very uptight. Getting into the glass house was not easy; might have been easier to get into the White House Oval Office.
At one time to make CICS more secure, there was some interest in having processor hardware support for address sub-spaces. Another idea was cross memory where a program could call and execute, say, a function in another address space. There were also data spaces, that is, address spaces with just data and no code but that could be accessed by other address spaces with code.
Net, the IBM mainframes are not really simple things. Cloning one would not be easy, and at IBM's next version of hard/software, the clone could be unable to run the newer software and suddenly be a boat anchor.
96 of the world’s top 100 banks, 23 of the 25 top US retailers, and 9 out of 10 of the world’s largest insurance companies run System z Seventy-one percent of global Fortune 500 companies are System z clients Nine out of the top 10 global life and health insurance providers process their high-volume transactions on a System z mainframe Mainframes process roughly 30 billion business transactions per day, including most major credit card transactions and stock trades, money transfers, manufacturing processes, and ERP systems.
The new mainframe delivered in 2010 improved single system image performance by 60 percent, while keeping within the same energy envelope when compared to previous generations. And the newest mainframe which shipped in 2012 has up to 50 percent more total system capacity, as well as availability and security enhancements.
It uses 5.5 GHz hexa-core chips – hardly old technology. It is scalable to 120 cores with 3 terabytes of memory.
[1]
if you want reliability and solid software you don't go anywhere else other than mainframes and minis from IBM (z, i, and x)
The companies that run these do so because they are proven, the languages they support are all business oriented (math is a specialty), and the code bases are vast and stable. Oh, they all do Web-centric work just fine too.
db2 is just fine with SQL and highly optimized as well. Modern is what they are, quit thinking small is modern
Also people seem to forget IBM invented SQL.
Edit: I believe that the linux server lines have recently been moved to Lenovo though
High throughput transaction processing with ~100% uptime guarantees, and someone to call who will Fix It Now should anything go wrong.