[qwerty456127]

Why? I could never understand why do simple financial formulae coded in COBOL need some colossal computers and still choke on laughable volumes of documents.

I believe my almost-decade-old smartphone has more than enough computing power and bandwidth to process all the unemployment applications even if all the Americans would file them on the same day.

[krylon]

If you can deal with the price tag, mainframes are very nice machines in a lot of ways (scalability, availabity, storage). And if you're a large-ish bank or other financial company, chances are the amount of data you need to process and the requirements on availability you need to meet mean you're going to need something mainframe-sized anyway.

Plus, IBM and assorted companies treat backward compatibility religiously, so a random update to the OS or the DBMS breaking your application is pretty much unheard of. That kind of reliability is worth a lot to some companies.

The price tag is rather harsh, though.

[wedowhatwedo]

Mainframes aren't just about computing power. In a mainframe, almost any component or subsystem can fail with no downtown to the applications at all. That is worth the money and complexity to some people.

You don't understand mainframe systems well if you think they "choke on laughable volumes of documents".

The mainframe isn't the bottleneck in systems like this. It's all the stuff around it that wasn't designed to the same specifications.

[bitwize]

Because those simple financial calculations need to be done reliably, for many, many clients at once, without falling over. You can requisition redundant cloud instances equivalent to tens or hundreds of real-world x86 computers, or you can do it on a mainframe. My guess is the cost works out about the same either way.

(Insert image here of IBM System z as Omni-Man, pointing to two fighter jets in the distance marked "AWS" and "Azure" and saying "Look what they need to mimic just a fraction of our power!")

[pankajdoharey]

Costs probably dont work out the same, if it were true why is IBM offering its cloud solution on x86 hardware and not mainframe?

[rovr138]

Why is their cloud on x86?, an easy argument is because mainframes don’t run x86 or ARM instruction set, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

How will people use it?

[qwerty456127]

Why would anybody need actual x86 or ARM or any other specific low-level instructions set on a server? I doubt server side developers program in assembly often. As long as there are a performant JVM, a HTTP server and a database management system available, everything is possible and almost nobody (but system programmers and also those who pay for the spare parts) really have to care about whether it is x86 or what.

[HomeDeLaPot]

Of course you have to care about architecture. ARM has been in the making for a long time now, and I can only imagine how far behind z is in terms of software support. To succeed, IBM would have to get Linux, Postgres/MySQL, Nginx/Apache, Java/Python/NodeJS, and the rest of the whole modern x86 ecosystem to work on z—that project would never be done. Or they could build their own, different tools—but they kind of already have, and why would anyone switch to those? To catch up with the other cloud providers, IBM needs to start with what everyone's already using—x86—and use their capital to build an advantage from there.

[pankajdoharey]

Its not about the complexity of the solution its the scale, mainframes batch processing was the go to solution before the advent of modern hardware. Mainframes were build for resilience but nowadays we have embraced fail early, fail fast to circumvent those scenarios.

[scott_s]

Rock-solid reliability for large-scale transaction-heavy workloads.