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by dillab2 1320 days ago
The thing is, there aren't really any successful greenfield developments in these types of business spaces. So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into (which I think is at least partially true), or the type of computing they do actually benefits from being done on a mainframe (which is also true given that there is a lot of record processing for these industries, and not too much serving lots of web requests to users).

Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
3 comments
StillBored 1320 days ago
Yah, given my experience, you buy the mainframe for one of the native zos/etc flavors, and then the IBM sales people basically throw in the IFL's which will never get used for the zos/etc workloads effectively for such a nominal price, they might as well be free.

Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it.

I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective.

PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.

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artificialLimbs 1320 days ago
Or case 3: You still have ancient RPG code running that makes the business go $.
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zozbot234 1319 days ago
> So either these are industries that are exceptionally difficult to break into

AIUI, Oxide Computer is targeting the "private cloud" space which is sort of adjacent to this stuff and could easily intrude on it. Of course they're based on AMD EPYC hardware, but the rest of the system is custom designed for ease of management and reliability.

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