Posts by old lag

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

24000 VMs - so inefficient compared to mainframes

In the good old days, a large org would have a couple of IBM mainframes running production and test. All the system and platform services would be administered by a bunch of sys progs with an ops team to run it. I know IBM kit was expensive but it was efficient in use of resources and people. Today, virtual estates (on prem just as bad as cloud, if not worse) have truck loads of VM cruft many of which no one has any idea what they are for (I've seen this in large clients), because the CMDBs didn't match the VM reality. Nightmare. This has been going on since the 90's.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Logica

BART system software was created by Logica in the mid 80s. I just missed out on that gig and was jealous of my Logibod colleague who had done a stint out in SF.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/197870/similar#similar

IBM files IP lawsuit against mainframe migration firm

Re: Modern platforms?

It's always about money. IBM are desperate to protect their hardware revenue and related service revenues.

If customers can port their mainframe applications away from an IBM silo to a soft mainframe at much lower cost they will do it. That will open the door to cloudy interoperability scenarios where IBM is only involved on the software licensing side, CICS, DB2 etc.

IBM confirms new mainframe to arrive 'late in first half of 2022'

Amazing efficiency unappreciated by those who've never worked on them

25 years ago when I last worked at a large Fortune 500 company nearly all the main business processes were running on a few S/390 mainframes. Online and batch.

It's a testament to the operational efficiency of Z/OS, MVS etc. Because it's all consolidated in one place it might well be cheaper than thousands of disparate servers and teams designing and managing infrastructure. I now make my living do the latter, so better not bite the hand the feeds me!