Mainframe Revival

esj.com

2 pointsmsredmond3 comments

I'm curious, why? I havent worked with mainframes for a couple of decades. Is it because they are running legacy apps in Cobol? Or havent they figured out how to parallelize the apps to run distributed? (Going from serial Cobol to Erlang would reduce the hardiest HNer to tears.) Or are they conservative enough to not to want to risk $B if they screw up? I suppose all the govt. failures would be a cautionary tale.

Hiya -- This may help: http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/07/ibm-mainframes-c... -- Basically, organizations are finding it easier/cheaper to keep the mainframes and transition only partially instead of moving it all over (although yes, Cobol still needed). Also, the manufacturers/software are making it much easier to do just that (e.g., Windows is coming to the IBM mainframe later this year: http://esj.com/articles/2011/05/24/ibm-windows-on-mainframe.... )

Why distribute apps and deal with network latency when you can use Hipersockets to run at memory speeds. Even if it's been a couple of decades you should know that there are certain workloads that the mainframe excels at. Check out the z196 sometime. :)

I'm a Unix/Linux Sysadmin with 10 years experience and recently took the plunge as a mainframe software system programmer. It's taking some getting used to but I really like the platform. I had no idea how much tech that is old hat on a mainframe is thought to be so new in the distributed world.

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