[email protected] (David Crayford) writes: > It's a risky business migrating large systems and many have failed. I > know of one bank that spent $350M trying and they failed > miserably. There are just so many complexities and it's just too hard > for most. > I heard an amusing analogy that it's like trying to replace an engine > on a jumbo jet mid-flight. And the quality of service and RAS on > mainframes is still unmatched. HP are marketing converged > systems and claiming 99.999 availability which for many enterprise is > more then enough.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017d.html#97 IBM revenue has fallen for 20 quarters -- but it used to run its business very differently http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017e.html#94 Migration off Mainframe to other platform http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017f.html#9 The Mainframe vs. the Server Farm: A Comparison the initial wave was in the late 80s & early 90s, sort of the low-hanging fruit ... and as a result the company goes into the red. The company was being reorganized into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company. The board then brings in a new CEO to reverse the breakup and resurrect the company. In the mid-80s, the top IBM executives were predicting the world-wide revenue would shortly double, mostly based on mainframe revenue and there was big internal bldg program to double mainframe hardware manufacturing capacity. There was also huge uptik in "fast track" MBAs being rotated through mid-level executive positions (apparently getting ready for doubling the workforce). Late 80s, senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at internal, annual world-wide communication group conference, supposedly on 3174 performance, but opened the talk that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The issue was the communication group was fighting off client/server and distributed computing trying to preserve their (emulated) dumb terminal paradigm and install base. The disk division was seeing data fleeing the mainframe datacenters to more distributed computing friendly platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with a number of solutions, but they were constantly being vetoed by the communication group. One of the major mainframe strongholds was the financial industry. In the 90s they spent billions of dollars to convert legacy financial transactions that did settlement in overnight batch window. They were under increasing pressure from globalization that was cutting the size of the window and increasing the work that needed to be done. They were going to convert to straight-through processing using parallelization on large numbers of "killer micros". However, they were using some industry parallelization libraries that had 100 times the overhead of batch cobol. When this was pointed out (including by me), they just ignored the input. It wasn't until they started deploying large scale pilots that they could see that the overhead increase totally swamped any throughput increase they anticipated from large numbers of killer micros ... with things going down in spectacular flames. The industry retrenches to safety of the running legacy mainframe systems. The dependency of financial industry on legacy mainframes may have played a major role in bringing in new CEO to resurrect the company. The new CEO had been president of AMEX ... and about the same time that new CEO was resurrecting IBM, AMEX spun off a major part of its mainframe dataprocessing in the largest IPO up until that time. The unit would roll over something like $1.5B in mainframe hardware, no mainframe older than 18months ... by itself accounting for significant percentage of IBM annual mainframe hardware revenue. For ten years up through z196, IBM financials for mainframe sales showed about the equivalent of around 100-150/yr max. configured mainframes. This was around 5% of revenue ... but the whole mainframe group (including software) accounted for 25% of revenue and 40% of profit (mainframe software & services is major cash cow). Since then hardware sales seems to have dropped to about half that (but the overall mainframe group still accounts for significant profit). some recent posts mentioning straight-through processing effort: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#3 We need to talk about TED http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#22 US Federal Reserve pushes ahead with Faster Payments planning http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#90 Why do bank IT systems keep failing ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#10 Can the mainframe remain relevant in the cloud and mobile era? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#69 Is end of mainframe near ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#78 Over in the Mainframe Experts Network LinkedIn group http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#71 Decimation of the valuation of IBM http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#119 Holy Grail for parallel programming language http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015.html#78 Is there an Inventory of the Inalled Mainframe Systems Worldwide http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015h.html#2 More "ageing mainframe" (bad) press http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016.html#25 1976 vs. 2016? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016b.html#48 Windows 10 forceful update? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016d.html#84 The mainframe is dead. Long live the mainframe! http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016g.html#23 How to Fix IBM http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016h.html#72 Why Can't You Buy z Mainframe Services from Amazon Cloud Services? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017.html#82 The ICL 2900 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017c.html#63 The ICL 2900 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017d.html#39 The Pentagon still uses computer software from 1958 to manage its contracts -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
