29 October 2023

The Current State of IBM Mainframes - Yes They Are Still Being Produced

These were always amazing machines, and they still are. Today you can find them running z16, the operating system that follows a chain from OS/360 and LinuxONE 4, IBM's Unix/Linux variant.

These machines still reign in the financial arena. Credit card processing, air line ticket purchasing, etc. are still handled at the back end by mainframes.

Just one example: availability. In the video he says that they achieve 7-nines of availability, but in the description he corrects that to 8-nines. That is 99.999999% availability, or 315.58 milliseconds of downtime every year. If you are processing credit card transactions for Visa or MasterCard that is important.

This is an interesting video (if you're a technology nerd like I am) about the current state of the IBM Mainframe. It is about 23 minutes, so plan accordingly.

This is Dave's Garage video Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more!

I don't think people recognize what an achievement OS/360 was. I still had a copy of Principles of Operation, which grew out of the original design documents for the IMB 360, on my desk well into the 1990s, even after I had moved out of a hands-on job.

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