Analyse this: IBM moves Watson machine learning to mainframes

IBM is adding the machine learning technology from Watson to its z/OS mainframe for smarter, faster analytics of transaction data. Big Data analytics is typically applied to unstructured data in the Hadoop world. By contrast, older data warehousing and business intelligence (DW/BI) products are applied to structured data in …

[Pascal Monett]

"develop insights instantly and dramatically grow the[ir] business"

As usual these days, for anything to be positive it has to be instantaneous.

Contrast with reality : this week I put in place some stat reporting agents on the size of a customer's databases and the number of new/changed records. The code works fine, the results are gathered daily.

Insights, however, will only be available (at best) beginning of March.

You can have the fastest, most intelligently-programmed platform in the world, you still have to wait for the data points.

That said, as the articles mentions, there is certainly room to improve data analysis. But let's cut the instant gratification crap, shall we ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can have your breathless hype in realtime !

[John Savard]

Good or Bad?

If IBM is taking the technology used in Watson, and turning it into a commercial product so as to make it more widely available, that's a good thing.

But - as the article seems to be saying - if what IBM is really doing is finding a way to get people to use more expensive mainframe CPU cycles in preference to x86 - or PowerPC - CPU cycles by making software to use Watson's techniques that outperform Hadoop's only on z/OS and not elsewhere... well, the limitation to IBM mainframes, rather than to competitively-priced IBM products, is a bad thing.

Basically, I have nothing against IBM using IBM technology to get people to buy IBM products.

However, I am dismayed that an IBM mainframe doesn't have the same price/performance as commodity x86 hardware. With a price premium, of course, reflecting the marginal cost of manufacture of the additional features that IBM mainframes do offer.

Of course, that's economic nonsense, because IBM has to amortize its costs of developing mainframe hardware... over the number of mainframes it sells. So, for IBM to get into my good books, basically it should dump the PowerPC, and start using z/Architecture compatible chips in everything... including the IBM PC Mark II, both desktops and laptops, which is intended to replace the Wintel platform as the preferred place to play Crysis and Witcher 3... well, maybe not those games, but their successors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clock cycles

This is no different than in the past. IBM built clock cycles in it Power and Mainframe for years. They would then take out these clock cycles in the next release of the product. So the latest version was always the best. Why do you think they held onto AS/400 so long, the software partners were really good at building workloads.

[hpe_webmaster]

Thank you for this great read, especiall the part about combining nw and old data to get real time results.