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IBM Technology

The Venerable Mainframe Rolls on at IBM With the Release of the z16 (techcrunch.com) 101

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Today IBM unveiled the latest mainframe in its storied history, the z16. It runs on the IBM Telum processor, which the company released last summer. The chip has been optimized to run massive workloads, processing 300 billion high-value financial transactions per day with just one millisecond of latency, according to the company. From a report: That's for customers who have a serious need for speed with heavy volume. The primary use case the company is selling for this monster machine is real-time fraud prevention. Financial institutions in particular are the target customers, but Ric Lewis, SVP for IBM systems, says it's for just about any company processing a lot of business-critical transactions. "It's still banking, insurance, public sector, government, healthcare, retail -- anywhere where you really have high transaction throughput, where you need security, reliability and the world's best transaction processing," Lewis said. That comes down to the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos, which are using mainframes, according to data provided by IBM. Most of those machines come from IBM.
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The Venerable Mainframe Rolls on at IBM With the Release of the z16 More

The Venerable Mainframe Rolls on at IBM With the Release of the z16

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  • fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even cables or transceivers. Also for M.2 cards / pci-e cards and more. And you better pay for the monthly visit from the IBM tech.

    • Yeah because IBM doesn’t want to help you figure out why your 100% authentic parts from Amazon cause the occasional error. It’s been like that for decades with vendors.

      • Re:fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @03:41PM (#62420510)

        Once upon a time, IBM actually sold some repair parts over the counter. The printing function of an 026 keypunch used a machined metal plate as the dot matrix character "ROM" and an array of steel pin wires in sleeves to neck down the matrix from code plate dimensions to print character dimensions. We (local government function on a tight budget) had an old 026 off maintenance that had broken some of the pin wires and damaged the code plate. I learned of the IBM parts counter somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, bought the parts, fixed the keypunch, and wrecked my back trying to move the thing.

        Possibly apocryphal tales exist of replacement or upgrade mainframe TCMs (Thermal Conduction Modules: multilayer ceramic hybrid circuit assemblies integrated with water cooling structures) arriving at customer sites in armored cars.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by bws111 ( 1216812 )

          That was due to the 1956 consent decree, which was specifically about the availability of service and parts. IBM was forced to provide access to parts to pretty much anyone who wanted to service an IBM machine.

          One small correction about TCMs - they did not have integrated water cooling. The water cooling was provided by a 'cold plate' which was bolted on to the module after it was installed. The 'thermal conduction' came from copper spring-loaded 'pistons' that sat atop each chip and carried the heat to

          • IBM J. Res. Dev. 1982 issue 1 (Jan.) has the TCM articles. I probably have a copy in the garage. Sadly, IBM pushed journal archive online access to IEEE, behind the IEEE paywall. This, and IEEE journals balkanization making independent current and historical research infeasible, is why I quit IEEE. Visual memory recalls a diagram within an article describing thermal modeling and design, including the heat transfer pins.

    • Re:fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @02:42PM (#62420268)
      The mainframe world is not at all like the x86 server world. Yes, it is expensive, for both hardware and support, but these are companies that can afford it and are willing to pay for the ultimate in reliability. It does not pay to cheap out when you are processing billions of dollars.

      • Re:fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jenka ( 1295437 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @04:40PM (#62420666)
        I worked for IBM doing support for Workstations back in the late 90s. Because "Workstations" at the time included anything smaller than a AS400 I got to go to a bunch of Amazing places. The 6th and 7th floors of the CNA building Downtown Chicago. before I came there a full floor and a half, Almost a full city block was filled up with 1 mainframe. the other half floor was staffed with 20 to 30 IBM employees just to maintain it. The CNA staff were much higher up in the building. They replaced that huge monster with a unit that was a 6 foot Cube. the IBM staff would have stayed but CNA had a contract dispute with IBM it was in the process of losing I got left alown in that huge office for 9 months to repair CNA's laptops. Froze my behind off because the AC on 7 was designed for all the people and Machines that were not there anymore. CNA had a "Ford" manufactured by Ford which was a automated Tape library, at the time brand new. It was 30 feet long and went from floor to ceiling. It could operate dozens of tapes at once. It was cool watching the robot arms move back and forth at frightening speed. Oh don't forget the Dot Matrix printers that spit out green-bar reports so fast that they had thick metal plates to catch the paper and stacked it. Then there was the Chicago Board of Trade. In the Annex behind the main building, Behind a armed guard and several doors that scanned your hand was the server room. While there were servers in there the real reason for the place were 2 Tape library's called "The Silos" 3 Stories tall and truly the diameter of the Grain Silos they resembled. I have no Idea who made them. Main frames are so far from PCs and racked servers that they aren't comparable in any way.

      • The mainframe world is not at all like the x86 server world. Yes, it is expensive, for both hardware and support, but these are companies that can afford it and are willing to pay for the ultimate in reliability. It does not pay to cheap out when you are processing billions of dollars.

        Just curious, is COBOL still the dominant programming language?

    • People buying these high end IBM mainframes are not concerned about getting aftermarket parts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wiggles ( 30088 )

        Tell that to the guys forced to support 20+ year old mainframes still in production somewhere.

        Hell, I left a company in 2010 that was still running PDP-11/94's.

        • PDP-11/94, while an awesome machine in and of itself, does not a mainframe make.

        • Tell that to the guys forced to support 20+ year old mainframes still in production somewhere.

          Hell, I left a company in 2010 that was still running PDP-11/94's.

          Tell that to the guys forced to support 20+ year old mainframes still in production somewhere.

          Hell, I left a company in 2010 that was still running PDP-11/94's.

          So what?

          How many people live in a house/apartment that is more than 20 years old? How many office buildings are more than 20 years old? How many 20 year old cars/trucks are still in use? Should we be required to tear everything down after some arbitrary number of years?

          If it works and does what you need, there's nothing wrong with "old". You still need to support it? Well boo-fucking-hoo.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            My truckette is now 20 years old, a 2002 Tacoma 5 speed with the smallest 4-banger they sold, which does exactly what I need it to. My wife occasionally tells me that I need a new truck, and I ask her, "Have the wheels fallen off? No? Then I don't need a new truck."

            • You don't need one, but if you get t boned by a drunk, you might wish you had one. Cars are one area where your can get substantially better safety systems than 20 years ago.

              With safety out of the way WTF is up with modern cars? I don't own one, I felt every few months btw.

              The only good ones seem to be either cheap or very expensive. Anything mid range has shit knockoffs of the fancy automated expensive features that just work badly. Take the automated hand brake. Seems like av pointless thing, but I guess

        • Quite sure that IBM would still provide parts and support for it.

        • Tell that to the guys forced to support 20+ year old mainframes still in production somewhere.

          That's not even very old.

    • Re:fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @02:52PM (#62420324)
      That's not an IBM thing, it's a corporate service contract thing. The contracts encompass the entire servicing of the equipment. You're thinking M.2 / PCI-e cards, you're thinking consumer level hardware that you can get at Best Buy. It's different than what you put in big iron, even where the electrical interfaces are similar. It's an entirely different class of building hardware that doesn't correlate to your budget box brainwave. The pricing alone on racks of gear at the bottom of the barrel start where consumer pricing stops, on the high end. They pay for it because while you can do a lot on that budget box, there are real hardware limitations that you aren't going to get around without upgrading to rack gear. And when you're building out racks, you pay for the guy who builds out the racks, not the guy who cobbles together the budget PC boxes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Mod parent Funny and negative Happy (= Sad). Pretty good FP, though I wish it had been better crafted.

      The quality of the FP itself sadly reminds me of the old IBM principles of (1) Respect for the individual, (2) Customer service, and (3) Quality. Can't remember what the new IBM principles are. I think there were eight of them? Or was that a list about dimensions of employee fealty or something?

      (Do I need a disclaimer for having spent most of my career in the Big Blue food chain?)

      • I spent a few years as a mainframe computer operator. Basically the person who babysits the machine, submitting unscheduled jobs, collecting output, feeding tapes to the drives as requested, and the occasional IPL. It was low on the IT totem pole and did not pay that well, and I moved on to other things, but in retrospect I am glad to have had that experience. Most of my peers in IT these days have never even seen a mainframe, and as a result they just.don't.get.it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Get what in what sense? I'm not saying the days of big iron are completely behind us, but still...

          But I only spent a few weeks as an operator. Early days of offshore hiring? I was actually covering for a Filipina who had gone home for a funeral or something. Only time I ever heard of the Phase IV clones of IBM mainframes, but mostly I remember special print jobs with various weird forms. Maybe end-of-month billing? I was working the graveyard shift and that's when they ran most of those jobs.

        • I once worked as an operator for a CDC 170/750. The thing I most remember about it is that the boot code was a roughly eight by eight foot panel of toggle switches.

        • Re:fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even (Score:5, Interesting)

          by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian@bixby.gmail@com> on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @11:43PM (#62421470)

          I was an operator for a couple of years on a midrange system in the late '90s, it was my second IT job and I really learned a lot about the business.

          One task that I was handed was to replace the data transfer system that we had, which consisted of FedEx-ing 9-track tapes around the country to various vendors. We ended up with a combination of methods, including modem transfers, mailing CDs, encrypted email attachments. There was one that we couldn't change though, our transfer to American Express. They wanted us to drop an unencrypted text file on their FTP site. Connecting as Anonymous with no password, I was supposed to drop it in a folder named with our customer number. As soon as I connected I did an ls, and found that I could see, and then browse, every other customer's folders. Some of them had two years worth of files in their folders. I showed this to my boss, and he said, "No way in hell."

      • Can't remember what the new IBM principles are.

        1. More money
        2. More money
        3. More money
        4. Lower pay for you, more money for us
        5. More money
        6. More money
        7. More money
        8. More money

    • fraud detection = can't use non ibm parts even cables or transceivers. Also for M.2 cards / pci-e cards and more. And you better pay for the monthly visit from the IBM tech.

      You know literally nothing about mainframes, you would have been better served to just write "First Post!" and collect your geek points.

      That you think IBM mainframes use commodity m.2 SSDs and PCI expansion cards is staggering...

    • If companies donâ(TM)t do this then they get flooded with support requests because of 3rd party accessories. Some companies want to ensure a flawless experience and do not want the experience ruined by such a low cost part. It also wastes their debug time.

  • They forgot (Score:3)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @02:32PM (#62420246) Journal

    Bitcoin Mining! :)

  • If it can't boot DOS so I can use edlin to edit the system configuration files then they need to go back and redo it.

  • Global market for 5 (Score:5, Funny)

    by djb ( 19374 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @02:47PM (#62420286) Homepage

    I think their might be a global market for 5 of these computers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      Said no-one ever

      • "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

        Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

        • Re:Global market for 5 (Score:5, Informative)

          by bws111 ( 1216812 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @03:29PM (#62420466)

          Never said it. Quite the opposite. He believed there WAS a decent market for computers, and to prove it he had his engineers design (not build) one. Then he took that design (not a working model) to 20 potential customers around the world to judge interest in it. His actual statement was 'out of those 20 presentations, I was hoping to get 5 orders (as that would demonstrate a viable market), I got 18'. That is a far cry from 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers'.

          • Never said it. Quite the opposite. He believed there WAS a decent market for computers, and to prove it he had his engineers design (not build) one. Then he took that design (not a working model) to 20 potential customers around the world to judge interest in it. His actual statement was 'out of those 20 presentations, I was hoping to get 5 orders (as that would demonstrate a viable market), I got 18'. That is a far cry from 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers'.

            In support of never said it: https://geekhistory.com/conten... [geekhistory.com] Conclusion at the end of the article: "Thomas Watson was one of the richest men of his time, a leading self-made businessmen [sic] and often called one of the world's greatest salesmen. If there was a time and place where Watson made the statement, 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,' it would be logical to assume there would be some record of it. Without a credible source of when the alleged quote was made we can only con

          • I agree that the quote is mis-attributed to Thomas Watson senior in 1943. Seems it was his son who said they didn't think they'd get more than 5 orders for their first computer at a shareholder's meeting in 1953.

            However, I take issue with the claim that Thomas Watson senior was convinced of the market. Yes, he built a single scientific computer in the 1940's as a kind of demo but it was his son Thomas Watson junior who pushed IBM into the computer market. Thomas Watson senior was not convinced of it and IB

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              To be fair, in 1943 computers were science fiction and nobody had built a fully electronic working one. The electro-mechanical machines of the era were somewhat unreliable and limited. From that perspective it was probably hard to see what they could develop into.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by hawk ( 1151 )

                that depends upon what you mean by "fully electronic."

                The ABC was designed in 1937 and working in 1942.

                Computation was electronic (tubes) and memory was on rotating drums of capacitors.

                It wasn't programmable, though, in the sense we normally mean it.

    • Re:Global market for 5 (Score:4, Funny)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @03:16PM (#62420422)

      "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them."

  • So not a mainframe guy , see a lot of people arguing on the OS (if they even have one) can someone ELI5 how these things run? Do they have an OS, is it like one computer or a cluster?

    • Nearly all run z/VM as the hypervisor and then many instances of Linux and z/OS. Containers and virtual machines are standards now but IBM was doing the exact same thing on the S/370 series in the 1970s!

      You can try z/OS yourself with the Hercules emulator. Get the images from bit torrent.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        z/VM isn't used all that much anymore. The systems support enough LPARs (up to 85) that it isn't really necessary. Most Linux users use KVM to provide virtualization in a Linux partition. In fact, if you want to use Secure Execution for Linux you must use KVM, although in that case the virtualization is not actually provided by KVM (it just sets up the guests) but by an ultravisor in the firmware.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vbdasc ( 146051 )

          z/VM isn't used all that much anymore. The systems support enough LPARs (up to 85) that it isn't really necessary.

          It depends. On current hardware, z/VM can easily scale to tens of thousands of VMs. Some customers need this.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bws111 ( 1216812 )

            The person I responded to said 'nearly all' mainframes run z/VM. That is not true. I did not say nobody uses z/VM.

      • I looked but didn't find zOS or zVM images. What should I search for?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      Most mainframes run either z/OS or Linux, although there are still some users of VSE.

      The mainframe operator defines between 1 and 85 'logical partitions' (LPARs). Each LPAR has a defined configuration (number and type of processors, memory, I/O devices, usage weighting , etc). The partitions are isolated from each other (EAL5). Each partition appears as a real machine to the operating system running in it. This allows one machine to look like up to 85 independent machines.

      Multiple systems (up to 32) can

  • Most people and so called experts have NO CLUE what or why mainframe is better. It is a very long list. Maybe if I said NVIDIA is to graphics is what IBM is to data bandwidth. The game is all about throughput, and to do this there are hundreds of helper cpus moving stuff about. IBM has hardware memory protection, and keyed subpools. Unlike PC rubbish, the IBM will catch all memory leaks. It has hardware for VM's and moderm pc vmwares are frankly a sad joke. Here is a thought about X86 processors. The reason

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Unlike PC rubbish, the IBM will catch all memory leaks.

      Not *all* leaks. Some of our LPARs had to be IPLed at least once every three months before memory leaks filled certain critical OS-related storage areas (areas sometimes referred to loosely as 'oscore').
      The leaks were typically due to badly behaved third-party system software (CA, I'm looking at you!), so not IBM's fault as such; these products would leave small orphaned storage areas which z/OS had no means to tell were not in use any more. z/OS did no

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