[HN Gopher] New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express - Rack-mounted pre-config...
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New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express - Rack-mounted pre-configured Linux
mainframe
Author : rbanffy
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-02-06 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ibm.com)
| gottorf wrote:
| Yours for only $135k (starting)! Supposedly it's designed for
| eight nines (99.999999%, or ~30 seconds of downtime a year) and a
| MTBF in the decades. I'm curious if at that point, assuming it
| lives up to it, if other factors outside of it, like DC power and
| cooling availability or internet connectivity, won't also be
| difficult to achieve.
| neverartful wrote:
| The $135k is just the hardware price for the base
| configuration. I'm sure you're required to license several
| software SKUs that are not cheap and that you have to pay
| annually for maintenance.
| Yasuraka wrote:
| 30s a year is 6 nines, 8 would be 300ms
| gottorf wrote:
| I believe the ninety-nine before the decimal point counts as
| two of the nines, but I'm sure different people word that
| differently.
| Yasuraka wrote:
| Yes they count and were included
|
| https://www.globalcallforwarding.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022...
| jhallenworld wrote:
| or, especially, software
|
| It's a z-series mainframe and I don't doubt these reliability
| numbers.
|
| The world's financial system runs on these mainframes. An
| undetected bit error at the federal reserve might cause IBM to
| appear in the news, in a bad way, like Boeing..
|
| It will not have the fastest single-threaded performance, but
| that's not why you buy it.
|
| The mainframe mindset: Of course each core is running at 100%
| all the time... I paid a lot for it, so I want my money's
| worth. z/OS is designed to make this feasible. Not sure how
| well that works in Linux.. but it's where the market is.
| bitwize wrote:
| The LinuxONE line is, I believe, a series of Linux-only
| mainframes; z/OS is not an option on them. They're IBM's
| entry-level option for businesses who salivate at those
| mainframe reliability numbers but don't have any
| OS/360|OS/370|z/OS apps and don't want to pay for the support
| on those systems.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I think you're right it can't run the apps, but I see it's
| running z/VM as the hypervisor.
| coolkil wrote:
| Only for Linux guests. It is also possible to run kvm
| dalemhurley wrote:
| So one month of AWS costs.
| wmf wrote:
| A single box of any type absolutely cannot deliver eight nines.
| Maybe a sysplex running very limited software...
| billforsternz wrote:
| 30,000,000 (ish) seconds in a year, 99.999999% of that is ....
| let me see, 99.999999% of 100,000,000 is 99,999,999 I suppose.
| So downtime is what's left over, about 1 second every 3 years
| or 300 milliseconds a year not 30s a year. I think.
| cameron_b wrote:
| "Compared IBM LinuxONE 4 Express Model consisting of a CPC drawer
| and an I/O drawer to support network and external storage with 12
| IFLs and 736 GB of memory in 1 frame, versus compared 3 x86
| servers with two Xeon Sapphire Rapids Platinum 8444 processors
| with 32 cores each (2ch/32c) with a total of 384 cores"
|
| I'm not a math major, but that's a bit strange to me.
| stonogo wrote:
| That adds up to 192 cores, so they probably mean 384 threads.
| bitwize wrote:
| Lol @ the marketing gymnastics. "Hybrid cloud" and of course a
| namedrop of AI.
|
| What this is is a _mainframe_ , a solution with decades of proof
| behind it in terms of reliability and I/O throughput. In other
| words, the advantages of cloud without the cruft and BS. Maybe
| that's what they mean by "hybrid cloud"?
|
| I wish IBM would come out and say what they mean, but maybe they
| wouldn't be IBM if they did.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| Isn't "hybrid cloud" mixing "on-prem" servers with remote
| servers at a cloud provider?
| bitwize wrote:
| Usually, but a mainframe is an on-prem solution and can only
| fill that part of a hybrid cloud strategy. I get the feeling
| IBM thought they'd lose the CTO crowd if they didn't say
| "cloud" every now and then.
| subpixel wrote:
| And good that they do, otherwise I would not get so much
| evergreen enjoyment from the cloud-to-butt browser
| extension I've had installed since forever.
| neverartful wrote:
| Would be curious to know how it compares in power consumption and
| heat output; licensing cost of z/VM; is PR/SM (allows you to
| create and configure LPARs) available? licensing cost?
| coolkil wrote:
| I worked on multiple LinuxOne systems. You can run z/vm and
| pr/sm. it will also run kvm if you like.
|
| Power consumption (of our box z13 based)is 3kwh regardless of
| configuration (give or take) but also consider you need a lot
| less san switches and networking switches to achieve the same
| goal as a large rack of individual servers
| abtinf wrote:
| I previously led a significant chunk of developer evangelism at
| IBM. Mainframes are unbelievably powerful, feature-full, and
| cost-effective. You are almost certainly better off buying a low-
| end mainframe than hiring a team of engineers to build yet
| another not-great data replication/recovery/HA system. Imagine
| being able to hire engineers to work on your core value add
| instead of basic computer management problems IBM solved in the
| 60s.
|
| The reason you don't is because it is basically impossible to get
| access to a mainframe you can play with and learn on. And IBM's
| internal incentives and financial metrics ensure that can never
| happen.
|
| * My views are my own and not those of my former employer.
| tines wrote:
| What even is a mainframe, exactly?
| abtinf wrote:
| A modern mainframe is a system specialized in extremely high
| transaction throughput at extremely low cost-per-transaction,
| while guaranteeing data durability and computational
| correctness.
| tines wrote:
| Sounds like a computer. Why would getting access to one to
| play around encourage people to buy one? In other words, it
| sounds like a quantitative difference rather than a
| qualitative one.
| jsight wrote:
| True. I find it interesting how difficult that they find
| it to put the benefits into words that don't sound like a
| brochure.
|
| Surely there should be some specifications behind this?
| Benchmarks?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Anandtech ran a story when the z16's CPU was announced:
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-
| preview-th...
| zeroCalories wrote:
| My understanding is that Z mainframes have a number of
| unique features to support those use cases. Stuff like
| hot swapping CPUs, and hundreds of IO coprocessors to
| avoid the main cores from getting blocked. Don't think
| they're just rebranded x86 machines, but not an expert.
| dgacmu wrote:
| The other definition you got isn't bad, but I think it misses
| the point for this discussion: it is a rack or multi rack
| scale computer with built-in and centrally managed features
| for redundancy, failover, job allocation, scaling, etc.
|
| As an example, in many main frames, you can configure them
| with a spare set of CPUs, and if one of your CPUs fails, the
| replacement is brought online automatically and
| transparently, the code you write doesn't have to know about
| anything related to the failure.
| rbanffy wrote:
| One neat thing is that the hot spares can be used during
| boot to shorten the time to availability. Not sure LinuxONE
| boxes are bought like that, but for the Z-series you can
| buy the machine with more capacity than you pay for and pay
| for it to be enabled at a later point.
| zjaffee wrote:
| It's essentially a very large single clocked machine.
| beAbU wrote:
| I see it as similar to an on prem mini AWS cloud, with
| dedicated hardware for things like WAF, storage, compute,
| networking, lambdas and databases.
|
| I've heard it said a couple of times that working in cloud is
| closer to working on a mainframe than most want to admit.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Dave Plummer recently did a tour:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouAG4vXFORc
|
| It's definitely intriguing if it were.. I don't know,
| available to tinker with?
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Well you can run Hercules, the emulator. But you will then
| discover that the mainframe 3270 terminal user interface
| experience is terrible. A funny thing is this: there is a
| mainframe plug-in for Visual Studio Code. The idea is you do
| your COBOL development in Code, and only the plugin actually
| talks to the mainframe.
|
| A decade ago there was an Eclipse version of this..
|
| This guy is showing all three ways:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CYUYnKim7U
| bitwize wrote:
| This kind of thing goes back five decades, actually. One of
| the earliest versions of Unix was PWB/Unix, for "Programmers'
| Workbench". It was designed as a system for AT&T engineers to
| author programs for the mainframe in a more sensible (for the
| time) environment and included software to submit jobs to the
| mainframe once the programs were written.
|
| The idea of "Unix as your IDE" is a deep, deep cut into Unix
| lore.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _the mainframe 3270 terminal user interface experience is
| terrible_
|
| [... for new users]
|
| For expert users? I'd pit it against any interface you want.
|
| No-mouse + hands-on-keyboard + tab is hard to argue with.
|
| Sadly, the number of people who remember when GUIs could be
| driven from memory by keyboard-only has dwindled.
|
| Watch a 10-year veteran insurance employee use a green
| screen.
|
| Or as a counter-example, try to tab through your modern app
| du jour. (Modern developers often don't even bother to set
| indexes correctly)
| pmontra wrote:
| Except when you must set tabindex="0" or "-1" or
| Bootstrap's modals won't work. /grin
| jl6 wrote:
| > Watch a 10-year veteran insurance employee use a green
| screen.
|
| Yes! I knew an Insurance customer service op who self-
| described as having no computer skills, but when I saw her
| using Reflection it was like watching a speedcuber savant.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| And that lack of access is exactly why there's such a minimal
| ecosystem for open source tooling for mainframes.
| fweimer wrote:
| Open source software shouldn't be a problem. Pretty much
| anything that has been ported to 64-bit big-endian also works
| on s390x. The architecture is otherwise pretty non-
| challenging: always 4K pages, strong memory model. Pre-built
| binaries are a different matter, of course.
|
| The problem with access is not access as such, but the fact
| that the community hardware that you can access for free
| tends to be heavily oversubscribed (or maybe connected to a
| mismatched storage system).
| rbanffy wrote:
| That is something that concerns me, but much more on the Z
| side than on the LinuxONE. On the Linux side, it's just a
| very fast computer.
| genmud wrote:
| > Mainframes are unbelievably powerful, feature-full, and cost-
| effective.
|
| Maybe things have changed in the last 10 or 15 years, which is
| the last time I had a legit mainframe at a day job, but back
| then none of those things were true if you looked at it more
| than 20 minutes.
|
| I seem to remember nothing being included in the base
| mainframe... when you started to add things like DR and data
| duplication and virtualization, it became extremely expensive.
| Like on the DB side, effing Oracle was much cheaper.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Software licensing is expensive on them, but the people to
| keep your 99.999% uptime on your Kubernetes cluster aren't
| cheap either.
|
| And software licenses are one of the reasons why LinuxONE
| machines exist - they don't run z/OS, so you don't pay those
| licenses. You can even start a dozen VMs under an LPAR and
| run your Kubernetes cluster as if it were running on more
| common hardware that just never, ever fails. IIRC, you can
| run a special version of z/VM to manage your Linux VMs if you
| don't want to run Linux on the LPAR and use KVM for your VMs.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Why bother using an LPAR if you're just gonna use
| kubernetes anyway? Why not just use one fat machine?
| rbanffy wrote:
| LPAR isolation happens on a lower level than z/VM or KVM.
| sonnyOrullivan wrote:
| Sorry to say that your previous "evangelism" shows. It would be
| very interesting to hear what "unbelievably powerful" means (as
| in facts and numbers) compared to what a hyperscaler can
| provide. E.g. SPEC for CPU, GFLOPs, Tensor-ops for inference,
| latency and so on. Last I checked the consolidation story that
| claimed factors of savings took underutilized ancient Intel
| boxes as baseline.
|
| "feature-full" is also quite a stretch when it comes to
| software when most modern software needs to be ported or run in
| a Linux LPAR.
|
| In addition I'd question that not getting access easily is the
| main reason for the lack of adoption. It might be part of the
| problem but the other problem is that the thing is a niche
| product and IBM doesn't seem to be utterly successful in either
| explaining what the niche is nor how to extend it.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Last I checked, the Teliums had some pretty impressive
| numbers for memory bandwidth even compared to NVidia.
| wmf wrote:
| It doesn't. Mainframe terminology is so obfuscated that
| it's impossible to tell for sure but it sounds like less
| memory bandwidth than Genoa.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They are tailored to the traditional mainframe workloads
| (they do a lot of hardware/software co-design in their
| mainframe lineup), so I wouldn't expect a mainframe
| designed for the generic cloud hyperscale workloads.
|
| In any case, I have played with their LinuxONE Community
| Cloud service (running on the previous-gen z15) and it's
| _very_ fast. The impression I get is that it doesn 't
| need to wait for IO. There is a ton of very clever
| engineering on those machines and the z16 is a
| technological wonder.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-
| preview-th...
| sonnyOrullivan wrote:
| Telum is attached to the L2/L3 so it's that bandwidth as
| long as the model fits into it. Afterwards you go to memory
| and you really don't want to compare DDR4 modules with RAIM
| against HBM3 or the likes that a current compute GPU uses.
| Latency might be closer but you mentioned bandwidth.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, with 32 MB per core (8 per die - a Telum package
| has two of them), one socket has 256MB of cache for 16
| cores. L1 and L2 are in-core, but L3 is on-die unused L2
| from other core and L4 is unused L3 on the other die.
|
| I am not sure if that continues off-package, but if it
| does, a drawer with 4 chips of 16 cores each will have 2
| GB of off-chip cache and a full-sized Z with 5 drawers
| would have 10 GB of off-drawer cache (at this level it's
| probably not that much faster than same-drawer memory).
|
| As for the RAIM, I think it's safe to assume it has a
| very wide path (n-1 modules) to the sockets and that
| aggregate bandwidth will not leave the 4 sockets starved
| (even if latencies suffer because of the redundancy, but
| you can replace a defective memory module with a running
| computer without it having to pause.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Being able to spare a couple of cores as a new partition and
| moving a partition to it to replace the memory and even the
| processor of the faulty partition with zero downtime is
| great.
|
| Consider that partitions are completely isolated from each
| other. Not some pesky soft isolation either, it's all done in
| hardware. In practice, every partition in a mainframe is a
| different logical yet isolated mainframe.
|
| Mainframes are built for different kinds of workloads. They
| are not cloud machines. They are batch machines with 6 or
| more nines of uptime.
|
| In my current job, a mainframe would be useless. However,
| fore mission critical core services which needs predictable
| latencies (bank transaction engines, central big databases
| etc.) I'll take a mainframe all day, every day.
| sonnyOrullivan wrote:
| > Consider that partitions are completely isolated from
| each other. Not some pesky soft isolation either, it's all
| done in hardware. In practice, every partition in a
| mainframe is a different logical yet isolated mainframe.
|
| "Completely isolated in hardware" as in isolated by a
| software hypervisor (PR/SM) that doesn't have a whole lot
| of hardware support?
|
| > Mainframes are built for different kinds of workloads.
| They are not cloud machines. They are batch machines with 6
| or more nines of uptime.
|
| That's kind of the point. What exactly is the niche, i.e.
| which new customer with exactly what software and latency
| requirements would switch from their current system to a z?
| IBM won't tell you apart from buzzword bingo.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >buzzword bingo
|
| I'm guessing that many of the terms in this thread are
| buzzwords for many of us reading it :), since relatively
| few people work on mainframes.
|
| I had not heard of the term buzzword bingo before, so I
| googled it:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
|
| Interesting. It aligns with my corporate experience in a
| few cases.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> Mainframes are unbelievably powerful, feature-full, and
| cost-effective._
|
| I really doubt they are any more powerful than the best x86
| rack servers. Their featurefulness is super dated. They are
| definitely not cost effective (good luck buying it from IBM
| without a huge contract).
|
| I pity the company that gets into mainframes today. Does that
| even exist?
|
| It's a proprietary nightmare.
| cbsmith wrote:
| IBM's proprietary nightmares have, historically, often been
| quite cost effective. AS/400 did eventually get too long in
| the tooth, but it had an amazing run for decades where it was
| extremely competitive for TCO.
| rbanffy wrote:
| AS/400 is alive and well. It's now called IBMi and runs on
| POWER hardware.
| coolkil wrote:
| I also think most cloud providers are at least a vendor lock-
| in and maybe a proprietary nightmare. This way you at least
| got your own iron and ibm comes to fix parts when they break.
| (Without disabling your system)
|
| I do agree it is debatable whether it is beter than x86 most
| of the time cost savings projected when using a LinuxOne it
| is based on licensing. In the past oracle licenses where per
| core and we did a project where 8 ifl's replaced 140 x86
| cores
| 656565656565 wrote:
| this
| Thaxll wrote:
| Cost effective is a stretch, I'm going to take a dumb example
| but the reliability of AWS step functions and S3 is good enough
| for 99.99% of most use cases for a 1/100 of the price.
|
| Mainframes are really powerful for some specific domain which
| most people on HN don't work in.
|
| Another take is that the most valuable company in the world (
| tech one ) don't run their core businesses on mainframes.
| wmf wrote:
| _You are almost certainly better off buying a low-end mainframe
| than hiring a team of engineers to build yet another not-great
| data replication /recovery/HA system._
|
| To be clear, this only applies to regular mainframes running
| z/OS. LinuxONE machines, as the name implies, only run Linux
| where you'll have all the usual devops/SRE responsibilities.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The machines are still incredibly reliable, much more than a
| rack full of Dells.
| madmulita wrote:
| One huge problem is you then have to deal with IBM.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| ...and you can check-out, but you can never leave (aka vendor
| lock-in).
| rbanffy wrote:
| LinuxONE is just one big Linux machine. There's very little
| to lock you in.
| shrubble wrote:
| Note that IFL = cores that only run Linux and cannot run
| mainframe OSes. The Telum CPU is 5Ghz and has some level of
| builtin inferencing accordong to their specs.
|
| However the emphasis is going to be on single system image... you
| won't need to run/manage stuff, you just kick off VMs as if it is
| a single huge ESXi host, as I read it.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| This feels like it's strictly a brochure for management types.
|
| Maybe I'm missing some larger context as to why this is on the
| front page.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Have lots of on-prem hardware. Zero mainframes. Looks like just a
| computing device that has high uptime? Can see the value in that,
| but I prefer building reliability on many less-reliable machines.
| The incremental cost of failure is lower and unused load factor
| is higher.
| swozey wrote:
| What exactly is considered when putting a dc together that jumps
| you from knowing that instead of maybe a very large/massive
| cluster of whatever 1024 core servers your project needs a
| mainframe?
|
| I've been in cluster infra for like 15 years and couldn't tell
| you pretty much anything about mainframes other than a few names
| of them and processors.
|
| Is it some sort of determined raw performance metric, teraflops
| of some processing work?
| jl6 wrote:
| The #1 reason by far for buying a mainframe is that you already
| have mainframe-based applications that you need to keep
| running.
|
| I'm not sure what kind of orgs (if any) are buying mainframes
| today as new customers, but I imagine it would have to be a use
| case something like... a niche scaling challenge, or an
| outsourcing arrangement where the relationship with IBM is not
| just vendor lock-in but is some kind of partnership, or you
| have specialist compliance requirements, or contractual service
| level obligations, or you need to provide absolute guarantees
| about the performance/availability/security of the whole stack
| from hardware up. Some organizations will pay $$$$$$$ to have
| one ass to kick rather than herd multiple vendors.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I thought it was weird IBM didn't mention quantum computing to
| win the buzzword bingo, but it's at the end.
| trackofalljades wrote:
| What on earth does "cyber resilient" mean?
| gary_0 wrote:
| I think this is the result you'd get if Oxide Computer went
| through IBM's digestive tract.
| kjuulh wrote:
| I've previously worked on mainframes (building business software,
| and worked quite low level with crypto libraries on them), and
| now do some of the same but for "cloud" based software instead.
|
| Mainframes are such a weird subject to me, on one hand, the
| results we got out of the mainframes were pretty amazing, but the
| experience was painful, absolutely, painful. The tooling is some
| of the worst you've ever seen, official tools feel like something
| people dreamed up in winforms. I worked mostly with PL/1 which
| was a great language, stuck in the 80s but great nonetheless, I
| actually prefer it to C.
|
| What killed it for me was the restrictions, you had to either
| dynamically or statically link programs, but do it in the IBM
| flavor and build system. Which made it extremely cumbersome to
| do, so files were 20k SoC with a single entry (main) and function
| calls, because creating files was a pain. Line limits of 72
| characters, we even had to send in our programs to get syntax
| checks because the IDEs weren't capable enough (this was in
| 2018), now I could whip up something to emulate it in docker and
| neovim, but the people that taught me had no idea there was
| something better out there and neither did I. We had to release
| once a week on saturday mornings because the execution model used
| had to have downtime during the deployment.
|
| Mainframes are cursed because of the lack of tooling, and the
| restrictions. I think Mainframes and the execution mode it uses
| could be useful in a bunch of other places, but IBMs business
| model just continuously tightness the screws and scared people
| away. It doesn't have wide spread appeal either, it is "Business
| machines" after all.
|
| It should be said that I worked in IBMs version of Serverless
| (not what it was called but it was pretty much what it was),
| mainframes support Linux, Java, etc, etc. But you give up a lot
| of benefits and performance if you move off, of the native way of
| doing things.
|
| I'd also argue that with todays tooling and hardware you can get
| comparable performance to a mainframe, the only reason that
| mainframes are as performant, and was so dominant, is because of
| the restrictions it places on the developer. You have to write
| low level C, PL/1 or Cobol, so often by proxy your software is
| just fast. Kind of like Rust or C++ is nearly always quite
| performant out of the box. Most business software just don't need
| that level of latency control and performance today.
| vibepaaac21 wrote:
| The fact that it sorta forces you to a lower level of
| abstraction is actually a very interesting topic and something
| I think about a lot in the context of how mainframes have
| remained relevant.
|
| If there were a way to restrict non-mainframe ecosystems in a
| similar way, I think it could provide a lot of value.
| Especially for large organizations where standardization and
| prevention of IT churn is a serious problem. I just don't see
| how you do that in an open platform, and so I don't really
| think it's viable outside of the mainframe space (although it
| certainly explains part of why a lot of orgs still choose
| mainframes despite knowing all of inherent difficulties the
| platform presents). It's a people problem not a technical one
| at the end of the day.
|
| I'll add that a lot of the tooling deficit has been resolved in
| the mainframe space, but often in a way I'm not comfortable
| with. It's normal these days for mainframe developers to not
| use the old school ISPF development environments, but the thing
| about the awful old tooling, is that it was brutally efficient.
| Now you are likely to be giving up a significant amount of that
| efficiency because you've replaced it with a bunch of JVMs
| running web services.
|
| There is in some sense an unavoidable tradeoff between modern
| conveniences and efficiency that I don't think there are any
| easy ways to get around. We can't have our cake and eat it too,
| and you cannot have mainframe level performance without it just
| being a bunch of COBOL and C.
|
| This applies just as much to Linux servers as it does
| mainframes. I'm not really even commenting about the
| architecture. There are similar tradeoffs involved in how we
| choose Linux distributions, although perhaps a little less
| extreme.
| azinman2 wrote:
| "As businesses move their products and services online quickly,
| oftentimes, they are left with a hybrid cloud environment created
| by default, with siloed stacks that are not conducive to
| alignment across businesses or the introduction of AI."
|
| Word smithed to death corp speak.
| 462436347 wrote:
| The linked page doesn't once contain the word mainframe.
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