IBM Cloud To Offer Z-Series Mainframes For First Time (theregister.com) 38
The 111-year-old tech institution today announced it will offer the Z mainframe platform on the IBM Cloud, by offering virtual machines running z/OS as-a-service. The Register reports: These VMs are intended for mainframe test and development environments, rather than have Big Blue care for and feed virtual production mainframes in the cloud for you. The service will be tied to Wazi -- an IBM development environment for mainframe applications. Test and dev was one of the first workloads suggested as an ideal candidate to run in the cloud. Before elastic infrastructure-as-a-service, organizations often found themselves building and operating replicas of their production stacks for their developers. Renting such environments as and when needed in the cloud was often -- and often remains -- cheaper than owning and operating the necessary infrastructure.
This infrastructure-as-a-service offering is therefore pitched as a way to reduce the time and resources required to develop mainframe applications. IBM said the new offering is currently a "closed experimental" technology -- we think that means closed beta. It's certainly not mentioned in the catalog of the IBM Cloud account your correspondent maintains, so information on cost or specs is not available at the time of writing. The service will become generally available in the second half of 2022 -- after IBM's 112th birthday.
This infrastructure-as-a-service offering is therefore pitched as a way to reduce the time and resources required to develop mainframe applications. IBM said the new offering is currently a "closed experimental" technology -- we think that means closed beta. It's certainly not mentioned in the catalog of the IBM Cloud account your correspondent maintains, so information on cost or specs is not available at the time of writing. The service will become generally available in the second half of 2022 -- after IBM's 112th birthday.
Mainframe? (Score:2)
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Be thankful it is not a "metaframe"....
Re:Mainframe? (Score:5, Informative)
No, mainframes are different beasts all together, almost alien when you compare them to pc hardware. You have binaries written for the S/360 system in the 1960s? Good news you can still run them natively without a recompile. You think virtualization and containers are a hot topic? IBM was running multiple OS instances inside a VM in the 1970s. I used to think IBM stuff was boring beige boxes doing boring business things but the engineering is incredible.
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What a tease! "They are totally different!"
What are the differences?
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Cost
Re:Mainframe? (Score:5, Informative)
The OS is geared towards batch jobs instead of interactive jobs. Hardware wise you could run dozens or even hundreds of instances of Linux and z/OS concurrently. Totally different cpu architectures and the OS is tied incredibly close to the hardware. If the hardware could offload some function from the cpu they implemented it because dedicated hardware is always faster than software. Early on the cpu microcode was loaded from floppies and then later sent via the support element (desktop pc) so the cpu could even change endianness if needed. Tons of I/O channels for storage or terminals and it was all on dedicated processors. Hundreds or even thousands of users would require no overhead for the main cpu. Start reading up with the S/360 which led to the S/370 and finally the Z platform.
Malware and ransomware would stop overnight if 3270 terminals made a sudden comeback.
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not always. way back when i worked on mainframes i wrote some code that performed exactly the same thing as the MH machine instruction using an optimization of multiply i came up with in high school. my code ran faster than the MH instruction itself. i should have sent it to IBM at the time.
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HPC-like (Score:2)
So, in a nutshell:
Architecture-wise, a single mainframe looks much more closely to a HPC with high resiliency, than a single server.
To the point that some feature now popular in datacenters have been inspired by the way mainframe used to be designed.
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Hundreds? ROTFL!
About 20 years ago or more, someone maxed out a mainframe... with 48,000 instances of Linux, under VM. The mainframe ran quite happily with 32,000 individual instances of Linux.
You kids just aren't use to *scale*.
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The service will be tied to Wazi
Great, we're being offered a service run by Wazi's. No doubt policed by the Gazpacho.
Re: Mainframe? (Score:1)
I saw a guy suggesting another mainframe admin run a binary utility to get stuff done.
Happens every time right? The utility binary he suggests is dated 1983.
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Who even says mainframe anymore? It's a server right?
Also, Mainframes have resiliency and I/O capabilities far beyond most "normal" servers.
Cloud or timesharing? (Score:2)
The 70's called and they want their timesharing system back. Wasn't this available as TSO in 1974?
Mainframes we're the original cloud.
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TSO is just the interactive shell for z/OS. It has nothing to do with virtualization or cloud.
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that is not how SQL injection works ...
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For starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Is that "closed experimental" tech (Score:2)
the mainframe emulator for Linux maybe?
Bad title (Score:5, Informative)
IBM has offered Z mainframes in their cloud for years, running Linux. The new thing is z/OS in the cloud.
Why bother? (Score:2)
Why bother, when you can build a mainframe from the things you find at home?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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... or in your Android phone using Hercules.
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One of my big regrets in life was that my grandfather was a "pioneer" computer guy, starting on big old valve monsters long before most people in this forum where born and then some. Later down the track he ran a VAX installation for BHP and he *loved* that thing. Like , right up to his death bed it was all he wanted to talk about (Well that and asian elephants, he friggin loved those things).
Anyway, I had a plan when I knew he was dying, that I was gonna get a raspberry pi, install a Vax emulator and get i
But will they let you write and run (Score:2)
370 assembler?
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Can think of no reason they wouldn't let you run assembler code. IBM has more experience running virtual machines than anybody. There's nothing special about assembler code. Whether anybody would want to write it in preference to high-level languages is a different question. If the service is being sold as a development productivity tool, I'd suggest not.
Why? (Score:2)
Why would anyone want z/OS? .. Talk about vendor lock-in for no reason! I mean, going to jail voluntarily actually makes more sense than z/OS .. at least you get free meals and unlimited gay sex. But what do you get out of locking yourself into a z/OS prison?
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At least they wouldn't be bombarded with adverts, unlike Windows....
This isn''t new (Score:2)
IBM has offered this sort of "cloud" computing for decades. Back in the 1980's IBM in Europe (don't know about the US) offered the IBM Bureau Service, a time-sharing online system, and the VM and MVS Productivity Services, both remote development environments.
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Who said anything about migrating to z/OS? It says 'develop and test', not 'migrate'.
What is so awful about ISPF or REXX? JCL can be complicated, but it is made to be used by trained professionals, not script kiddies.
How many security vulnerabilities do you hear about with Linux? How many with z/OS?
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Are you somehow under the delusion that all systems hosted on z/OS are frozen in time and never modified? That is just moronic. Obviously changes happen, which means you need a development and test environment (organizations running mainframes don't generally use the 'just put it in production and see what breaks' method certain other environments use). Traditionally the dev/test environment was another LPAR on your system. More recently they offer things like zPDT so you can emulate the system on a PC