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OK, I'll start. I'm a former IBM-er (IBM Cambridge, Lotus building what up!). I worked mainly on the software side of things, and had some intermittent exposure to AIX and WebSphere which I found to be fascinating both from the historical evolutionary perspective as well as the functional perspective. I'd consider myself competent if someone were to call me in and save an iSeries POWER setup from complete meltdown. If I wanted to, I could get an old POWER5 on eBay with AIX 6L for less than a grand, or better yet rent a VM to learn on for $100/mo. It seems like, except for "Cracking the Mainframe" or whatever, there's no easy (or even moderately accessible) way of simulating a mainframe setup to learn. Again, I love this stuff. I read Redbooks in my spare time. I have Hercules and z/OS setup, and that took a long time to setup compared to an Arduino or firing up a Linux VM. An average HNer is probably like me -- he/she might want to fire up a z/OS instance and play around with it. But he has no way of doing it though. These are the tinkerers who end up deciding what platforms to use down the road. The high school kids playing with those free STM32 micro-controllers that TI gave out was a brilliant move. When they choose to do their semester project junior year, they might stick with TI because that's what they know. AVR was lucky Arduino took off too for the same reason. 10 years from now, those high school kids are going to be choosing what to buy 10k units of to throw into the pick'n'place machine. There are some interesting big-data cloud IaaS/SaaS offerings you've put out to keep up with the times but outside of alliances with large incumbent vendors (say, SAP in ERP; EPIC in Healthcare) to sell large modules, you're not going to see much traction. Offer something the tinkerers can play with. Make that the gateway drug. Amazon did it perfectly with AWS - easy to roll out, pretty predictable pricing schemes, pay for what you need, and scale up (more VM's/larger VM's) or out (other products within AWS). Every other vendor is chasing their tail trying to capture that market. Linux on the z community offers me nothing as a decision maker. If I was already vendor-locked into you guys, then the prospect is appealing. But even with low latency (operating within the u-seconds, m-seconds and people start losing jobs/panicing), five-nines SLA (healthcare, HFT prop trading) requirements, what does the Z platform have to offer? How can I even evaluate prospective costs when pricing this out to pitch to the (hypothetical) board? |
Mainframes gradually exited academia in the mid-80s. It was a terrible mistake by IBM, because they essentially eliminated the next generation of mainframers. They've since come to their senses with a program called the IBM Academic Initiative [0] which promotes the use of mainframes in Computer Science courses. It's only about 20 years too late.
But I think they could do a better job. Up until recently, the only way to try z/OS without accessing million dollar hardware was to break the law. You literally had to torrent a pirated copy of z/OS. And it's not easy to find. A few years ago, IBM changed this with their tool: Rational Developer and Test for System z [1]. It's essentially Hercules but you get a legal copy of z/OS. And it's $9500 per year per CPU. And there is some stupid hardware license usb key.
And regarding your questions, your points are valid. Vendor lock-in is a concern. IBM is the only player in the business, and they know it. But look at every major industry that's been around at least 30 years: all the mission critical stuff runs on a mainframe. Maybe it's because it's the only thing that runs their legacy COBOL code. But it works and it's rock solid.
The poster child of migrating to Linux on z is Nationwide. They successfully moved almost all of their x86 processing to Linux on z and saved a ton of money. There's the definitely-not-vendor-biased white paper out there. Do some googling on "Nationwide Linux on z".
[0]: http://www-304.ibm.com/ibm/university/academic/pub/page/acad... [1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratideveandtesten...