What Do IBM Mainframe Computers Look Like Today? | Hacker News Reader

What Do IBM Mainframe Computers Look Like Today?

nanalyze.com

45 pointsCaveman_Coder30 comments

The hell did I just read?

> This thing runs so hot that they need a fcuking radiator to cool it down:

> IBM’s mainframe in production today can encrypt data 18X faster than x86 platforms at just 5% of the cost. Then there’s the topic of blockchain, something we’d really like to get some investment exposure to while avoiding the complete and utter isht show that is today’s ICO space.

Ah, there we go, in the last paragraph:

> If you pay more than $4.95 a trade, you're paying too much. Ally Invest is one of the lowest-fee brokers around so you spend less money on transaction fees and more on stocks. With more than 30 trades a quarter it drops even lower to $3.95 a trade. Open an account and begin trading today.

So, this is some strange mix of decent information, someone who drops swearwords to look hip but can't spell them, and a "come trade with us" sponsored article. It felt like a badly written SEO article from the early 2000s.

It certainly didn't feel like something written by someone with an in-depth understanding of IBM's current offerings and what they are capable of.

I almost feel like upvoting it so that more HN readers can laugh at it...

tbh from what little I know about IBM mainframes they're actually quite interesting, like some parallel universe where servers work a bit differently to the rest of the world. I wouldn't mind reading a more in-depth article on them.

z/OS and IBM's mainframes are fascinating, and great pieces of engineering. Probably the only thing I like about the company.

But I guess that's how they were drawing people in, people like you and I hope for something interesting, and get some strange marketing fluff instead.

I found it fascinating to see this. Ally is really pushing this new product hard.

The site’s down, so I don’t know the context, but is your point of quoting the radiator sentence that pretty much all desktops and laptops need radiators to cool them down?

My point was the way they were trying to hype it up, even feeling the need to swear, which tends to be reserved for the truly shocking. Compared to some better writing like:

> IBM's mainframes integrate water-cooling, as air-cooled systems don't tend to be sufficient.

It's water cooled, so somewhat different from the heatpipe-based cooling systems in our desktops and laptops.

But it can run 1000 NoSQL databases „in parallel“ ;)

So I guess it's web scale?

EDIT: Just discovered my MacBook is actually a mainframe:

  for run in {1..1000}
  do
    bdb &
  done

I'm gonna be rich.

How many football fields is that?

This reads like an Enron financial statement. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is the unintelligible gobbledygook that IBM actually uses to sell their stuff. Between stuff like this and "Watson curing cancer", I continue to be amazed IBM still exists, but the IBM name and reputation will likely allow them to float along for quite a bit longer. Just a few weeks ago I was speaking with a relative about their employer -- a large Fortune top 10 company -- buying into some IBM Watson b.s. because their CTO was an "IBM guy". It is really amazing.

This is incredibly shallow analysis, if it's even anything beyond poorly regurgitated sales decks. What does that "points of entry" chart even _mean_?

I think it has to do with network connections - that is, you need 1000 x86 servers (or whatever) to match the capabilities of a z-series mainframe, which means 1000 times the number of potential points where an attacker can enter your network and thus 1000 times the number of things you have to monitor for break-in attempts.

Or something like that. It really should've been explained better.

These performance figures cited in the article are utterly meaningless: 12 billion transactions a day and 1000 NoSQL databases.

What does that even mean? I'm sure even modest x86 hardware can spin up 1000 MongoDB instances, and perform 12 billion transactions in a day.

“We had our MBAs do our analysis of the latest hi-tech computer systems.”

I guess IBM knows this and tosses such ridiculous numbers for such MBAs looking for PowerPoint bytes.

Later it does talk about credit card transations. I am not sure why they are so complicated, but there you go.

> I am not sure why they are so complicated

Uh, the business rules alone. Want to compute scheme fee and interchange on a cross-domain DCC refund reversal, be my guest. Then add the kludges and hacks you have in financial services software.

How did they determine that "OTHER" had 898 "Topology Points"?

"if you don't speak nerd", I dislike that kind of speak.

"if you don't speak nerd"

Usually used by people who want to pretend like they have deep technical knowledge. It's a big red flag that a lot of bullshit is coming next.

Yeah, that kind of thing has me crying like an anime fan on prom night.

Especially when following a meaningless statement like "Can run 1,000 concurrent NoSQL databases." It's one thing if you're just trying to be cute, it's another if you actually are technologically clueless about a product you are legitimately pitching. I imagine some broey sales guys pulling this off 30-40 years ago, but these days even non-technical executives understand that tech strategy is anything but hand-wavy commodity.

"if you don't speak nerd" ... seriously "fcuk" you you mouth-breathing Biff Tannen wannabe.

Eesh. Please don't stoop to that level here, even if an article contains an annoying phrase.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This feels like a weird "Mainframes are making a comeback", submarine article[1] targeted at people likely to buy stock, especially the "Mainframes Today" section.

There also seems to be a (legally obligated?) disclaimer at the top that they're a stock holder, quickly moving on to why you should buy IBM stock, with enough "build a GUI in visual basic to track their IP address"[2] tech-speak gobbledygook to confuse/convince the average investor.

That's the only sense I can make of it...

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

I’ve worked with them 10 years ago and haven’t touched them since. Do they still charge the customers for the big iron and then send recurring bills based on how much they use “their” CPs?

They had labelled general purpose CPUs as CPs while processors woth specialized microcode that lets them run Linux were called zFLs. All the fancy security verbiage they advertise are for when you run IBM DB2 or CICS on Z/OS. Not just running your Linux applications.

The writing was engaging, although the “1000 NoSQL databases” was a nail in the tire. Although I feel the encryption almost for free as part of the platform is rather cursory in evaluation. I’m not as worried about some process poking around in dev mem as I am of a general API that was added to ease cross team barriers, which is later found to be publicly accessible.

The worst of the clickbait?

It still not show how it look today!

I was expecting at least a photo of a mainframe...

The article includes an image of the z14, which IBM describes as a mainframe:

https://www.ibm.com/ms-en/marketplace/z14

True. The images not load for me and only see the text. I recheck later and it show...

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