Other than the obvious buzzword compliance does anyone know what this actually means?
> With z/OS V2.5, IBM is introducing new high performance AI capabilities that are tightly integrated with z/OS workloads, designed to give clients business insights for more informed decision making.
Maybe there's going to be new AI specific hardware on new Mainframe processors or AI accelerators in the future that will require z/OS 2.5 to run but they are not ready to announce the hardware? I think buzzwords is more likely though.
I think they have been making a push on this front with POWER so maybe this is leading up to a similar hardware push for z systems. Still guessing buzzwords
If you’re doing transaction processing on the mainframe I could imagine wanting to score something (eg fraud) mid transaction, which might call for some additional platform capabilities. But it’s also plausible someone in marketing demanded more AI.
I can see that, but mainframes are perfectly capable of calling out to external services, and that's not new. I guess I really don't know what they are saying in regards to AI and mainframes.
AI inference on existing model instances need not be very compute-intensive at all. The "training" (i.e. model fitting) phase is what requires a lot of compute resources.
They are talking about customers spinning up Linux instances on their existing (mostly not Linux) mainframes, and special software to allow SIMD calls from Tensorflow to work, etc. I think that making a remote call out to a commodity box is probably easier in most cases.
I do not know if IBM will do this with the AI work.
but in many other similar circumstances they give the option
of buying Application Assist Processors.
That takes the work away from the main processor.
It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP
optimized for running the AI workloads.
> but in many other similar circumstances they give the option of buying Application Assist Processors. That takes the work away from the main processor.
zAAPs, zIIPs and IFLs are exactly the same hardware as main processors. The difference between them is purely at the licensing level. The firmware sets a flag saying "don't run classic z/OS workloads". z/OS sees that flag set and then will only schedule "new" workloads (such as Java and XML) to that processor. Actually there is an undocumented API you can use to schedule any (enclave SRB mode) workload to the zAAP – IBM keeps it under NDA, and ISVs have to agree to obey IBM's rules about what workloads are allowed to run as part of that NDA. (One ISV, Neon, started selling a tool to run an arbitrary workload on the zAAP, called zPrime, IBM immediately sued them, and Neon settled the lawsuit in 2011 and agreed to drop the tool). Other operating systems, such as z/Linux, ignore that flag completely and to them a zAAP is just the same as a normal main processor (CP).
> It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized for running the AI workloads.
Yes but that wouldn't be a zAAP. They do have hardware accelerators for various functions (crypto, compression, sorting) but those aren't zAAPs (or zIIPs or IFLs). Crypto acceleration is CPACF (extra CPU instructions on main CPUs) and Crypto Express (external accelerator card). Compression hardware acceleration is zEDC. Sorting hardware acceleration is the Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort.
If this was the old IBM, back when they had an internal science journal just to keep track of their own accomplishments, I'd say they came up with something like z/TPF[0] - but for AI. But I would be extremely surprised if the new IBM actually started pushing the envelope of computer science again. Not until they reverse course on the whole "Lets get rid of all our hardware expertise and just focus on software" thing.
IBM is still making deeply custom chips for the z-series mainframes, running them at a higher clock rate than anybody else, and applying water cooling at the system level. Also they have a bus that intermediates between the CPU and RAM, someday the rest of the industry will catch up
I'd love to do mainframe development. Sounds like it would be fun. I could never afford one though and my industry doesn't use them either. Uptimes of decades is seriously impressive.
I used to fix compilers for IBM and we worked on (older versions of) these machines. They were awesome! Coming to the PC business after using mainframes was a sad joke. You should see what it's like working with VM, IBM's virtualization environment. It was amazing and that was 25 years ago.
Just like the PC, they didn't realize it was important until it was too late. In my experience, mainframes are a superior way to develop and run every kind of software. The PC is a crippled, stupid stepchild by any reasonable comparison. Just the idea that you need to setup and manage 1,000 of them to come close to a small mainframe is ludicrous. Who needs the overhead and maintenance? Sure, you can swap machines and distribute loads between them, but who wants to? Yuck. It's a lot nicer to have that stuff handled automatically.
Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes could be used for this new funky thing called the internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web product was an abomination they inherited from their purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and XMLHTTP.
If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. IBM's eventual realization of this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
It was so simple internally, they could have ported those tools to a GUI. But GUI's and user interfaces are not something IBM has ever done well (other than command line ones).
The organisation is also in the way. Both in Ibm and for those teams using ibm. Very bureaucratic and like token ring over management kill. Good and have its niche. But murder by the liberal Ethernet.
> If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes.
No, they wouldn't. I could take one Linux box, get a domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn't be able to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No, I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
Sidenote: In VM, you could spawn a new machines with "physical" storage or drives (Nothing was physical on the mainframe; everything is faked just for you! Awesome.) by typing a single command at the command prompt! If you needed to fix a bug in some combination of operating system and IBM products, you could spawn that exact customer-replicating environment in about 2 lines of text.
It's sad to read about the dev headaches caused by today's poor virtualization environments. I distinctly remember that stuff was no work at all at IBM. It didn't interfere one bit with the actual work of coding on the products. In fact, we really never thought about setups or creating environments for testing or development.
In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring output from both the failing case and the working case as printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin up two machines and fix one while you leave the other broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today. Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
Also on simpler BSD's like OpenBSD, bioctl is dumb simple. Setting up a encrypted disk is a no effort task.
On firewalls, PF has a syntax simpler than most text adventure games.
Every time I get into the GNU world, well, I get better HW support sometimes, among a slight bit of performance, but, FFS, configuring a Linux firewall gives me nightmares everyday. Just compare NAT on Linux vs OpenBSD. Or TUN/TAP devices, where in OpenBSD it's just a matter of a SINGLE line at pf.conf and two hostname.if files to define the bridge and the tap device with a subnet. Done. Oh, and sysctl to set IP forwarding, but that was the easiest task on any OS.
In a sense, a parallel sysplex with remote hosts and storage is a very sophisticated private cloud environment that'll run your CICS transactions a lot like you do with AWS Lambda.
The most logical place for a cloud service to develop inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated physical systems as cattle that could be remote wiped, virtualization would have been a logical next step) but sold off the organization building that to AT&T as part of the Global Network sale.
I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS.
It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it.
Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.
It is so stressful and alienated that the decades spent on mainframe is good but not great. I worked on the partition Management called lpar. Os and db2 etc. It is sort of more interesting to do dos/vse. I guess instead of thousands of users you have hundreds.
I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.
I used it when I was doing some porting of smaller programs to run on z/Architecture for example setting up the de/compression co-processor correctly. It's true that Linux on x86 or arm is not unusual, but this is Linux on Z
Amusingly, I signed up for this a couple days ago (https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/), which worked fine at the time, but the following day when I went to follow up I discovered the HTTPS cert had expired :D
That was several hours ago. The site's still down.
You can! You need to install the Hercules mainframe emulator and the freely available MVS 3.8 on top of it. There are compilers for COBOL, Fortran, PL/1 and assembly available. The go to guy on YouTube for getting all this working is moshix:
Very close to the real deal only when emulating a 370 from the 80s. zOS is a different beast though even though it shares a lot of the asm underneath. But there is no way to run zOS for yourself without a license from IBM or access to a real z-series somehow.
Kinda what I figured. Th whole concept of a mainframe is pretty neat in that you can go through the 1000 page manual and have an idea about all that is possible, instead of an infinitely changing software tool ocean. The latter is probably better overall, but it would be neat to check out the mainframe paradigm.
Yeah, I'm only interested in using software legally, but it's a shame IBM doesn't make this available. It's not like someone is going to just port all their mainframe apps to run on this emulator right? Or is that a real concern of theirs? I figure the hardware itself is the secret sauce.
I get the impression (as a vaguely interested outsider looking in from a distance and making a LOT of presumptions) that it's "just" institutional drag and "tradition". Create a culture founded upon filling in forms and ticking boxes, and "hi I can haz?" is going to produce $every_windows_error_at_once.wav, a lot of hand-wringing, and an internal processing chain that'll naturally tumbleweed itself in the general direction of the legal department. Network effects / emergent behavior. Soo, you read between the lines ("ah, it's fine, the requirement was fulfilled"), and take it from there. 𝙻𝚘𝚐𝚘𝚗 ===> _
The only reason I haven't pursued this myself is that MVS is ultimately just not objectively compelling enough, because while it's similar to what's out there today, I get the impression I'd only have to unlearn an arbitrary bunch of things once I was on the "real" system.
As an aside, I happened to stumble on a copy of "IBM and The Holocaust" a few years ago. It's a startling insight into IBM's beginnings tabulating and wrangling data on the millions of Jews "processed" throughout Germany in WW2, which turned out to be the first commoditized consumption of what would today be regarded (without a second thought) as big data.
The world has certainly moved on since that point and IBM's DNA is completely different today, but IMO the "data processing" energy still remains as an incredibly strong centerpoint, and I honestly see mainframes as a digitized realization of the punched-card concepts IBM's beginnings were founded upon. (Combined with the institutionalization aspects I hinted at in the first paragraph, this is the main reason I'm very hesitant I'd survive in what sounds like an especially rigorous environment.)
While the UI of reading a printed book hasn't yet been beaten (I'll switch to e-readers once they can pageflip instantly -.-), it's very practical to be able to virtually pick up a book and thumb through any portion. To this end, PDFs of this title seem to readily be floating around, for example (open as URL) data:text;base64,aHR0cDovL3Bvc29oLnJ1L2Jvb2svaHRtL2libS5wZGY
I will note that after reading I kinda looked askance at my ThinkPads a bit and went "wow, what a history. uhhh....". Fair warning :)
Oh boy, that memory bus... I'll get to that in a second. First, yes, IBM creates IP blocks that they then license. Maybe I'm weird, but I view that as software - and I also heartily dislike IP block shops. What makes matters worse is how IBM has an awful track record when it comes to these licenses - they somehow always pick a partner that ensures the tech seeing little to no use. For example, you mentioned their memory bus... guess how they did that: they licensed (or sold?) Centaur to a single party, Microchip, who lists[0] a single memory controller with no price and no apparent interest in actually selling the thing. Also, Synopsys - one of those fabless companies that I love so much, is somehow involved[1]... resulting in memory controller binary blobs. It is pretty awesome really, I don't think IBM could have more surely murdered their tech if they'd tried.
Now I'm pulling for them, I actually own a POWER9 machine. I think it is great that they want to get memory controllers out of the CPU - but they've done it in such a way that leads me to believe that it is an intentional sabotage, which would only happen if they genuinely had no interest in an active hardware role.
The writing has been on the wall for a while when it comes the next major bottleneck. I'm surprised that Intel was able to keep their quad-core game running for as long as they did, but "chiplets" were obviously going to have to happen, which stresses IO. IBM solved that a long time ago - as demonstrated by the massive IO bandwidth on display for several hardware generations. POWER9 came in two flavors, one with on chip memory controllers and one with their traditional off die strategy. So definitely not new - but its always been very boutique and therefor very expensive. Their OMI proposal was supposed to change that - but it won't, given the awful way they've executed it. Anybody remember that time that IBM's PS/2 offering had a major positive impact on the industry and didn't lead to a mess of dead ends? Me neither... this will be like that.
With a bus like CXL you could have a card full of memory chips that is shared by multiple CPUs. The z machines have a system like this it is just proprietary for them.
Memory that is less coupled to the CPU won't be as fast as HBM but you can have a lot more of it.
They've got a hefty patent portfolio, but I can't think of a recent example of them using it to freeze everyone else out à la eInk. Of course, the barrier to entry into their market is so incredibly high that there would be only a small number of companies who'd actually be able to test that. The only instance of them really going after someone (over IP) that I can think of was in the 80s when Hitachi was pretty brazen in the way they were stealing source code. Very low effort, like: Step 1 - acquire from a subcontractor the entire source tree for IBM's current mainframe OS; Step 2 - sed s/IBM/Hitachi/g; Step 3 - package the OS with Hitachi mainframes sold in Japan. They got along famously though, after Hitachi lost the legal battle and started paying them a royalty for the rebadged OS.
IBM does have a reputation for buying competitors in very niche areas, like process planning software, and then not doing anything with them except maybe parting them out several years later. It looks suspicious, but I think that is more to do with the way they stick to hyper-specialized enterprise solutions... the pickings are naturally very slim.
> They've got a hefty patent portfolio, but I can't think of a recent example of them using it to freeze everyone else out à la eInk.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard that e-ink "freezes everyone else out" from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Surely, if this was true we would have heard about it. Could you elaborate on your claim and if you experienced this? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this.
lol, I'm already familiar with you. I'm not really interested in generating billable hours for someone who behaves exactly as I'd expect a reputation management rep to. But I am curious to know if your script addresses this logical contradiction:
Electrophoretic display technology has a barrier to entry that can be vaulted by anyone capable of standing up a moderately sophisticated light industrial facility.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useful that E Ink Holdings Inc rationally leverages the legal protection of the USPO through a large number of patents to maximize profits.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useless that consumer demand is only able to support a small number of manufacturers (who are able to demand very high prices).
Ok, if that's what you want to believe then I can't change your mind. It is pretty clear to me that this is equivalent to me as a display guy claiming Microsoft is blocking progress in operating system development just because they have a lot of patents and they maximize profits. I hope it is clear that I think this is not a valid argument. Also, I'd encourage you to live up to the spirit of HN and try to provide evidence instead of being rude to people who challenge your claims.
> It is pretty clear to me that this is equivalent to me as a display guy claiming Microsoft is blocking progress in operating system development...
I'd need to have a very low opinion of a "display guy" to believe he was genuinely arguing in good faith, and in keeping with the spirit of HN (hallowed be its name), that the market forces an OS is subject to (like user training with regard to network effect) have any overlap with display hardware (which is unaffected by prior user uptake). Because anyone arguing that would have to be ignorant of both subjects... but why would such an ignorant person be so invested in white knighting a hardware company? Oh well, doesn't matter - my opinion was already arbitrarily settled upon for completely irrational reasons.
You clearly have very high opinions of yourself and your belief system. It is clear you are unwilling to respond with facts when simple questions challenge your claims and react with hostility. I don't think there's any beneficial discussion possible going forward. Best of luck in your endeavours.
It starts out with the marketing buzzwords but then drills down into the technical nitty-gritty. In terms of what the "AI" stuff actually means, one answer is contained on slide 121 – support for running Tensorflow and ONNX inside a Linux Docker container using zCX (which lets you run z/Linux Docker containers under z/OS). The zCX SIMD support referenced on slide 102 is probably highly relevant to this.
Mainframes also have a lot of PCIe channels you can attach GPUs to. IO capacity and hardware offloading has always been the most notable difference between a mainframe and an x86 box.
I wouldn't be surprised if, with some clever programming, one could pipe data from disk directly to GPUs and back to disk without involving the CPUs that run user programs except for the thinnest slice of time.
But, considering what you paid for the mainframe, you probably have the budget to commission them to write drivers just for you (or to license their source and compile it yourself).
IBM has built supercomputers with POWER machines stuffed full of GPUs, in close partnership with Nvidia, for years. I think they might still be the only ones offering systems designed for sustained NVLink bus saturation. So yeah, you could do it - and it would be awesome... but it would be a silly misuse of a mainframe where a cluster would make so much more sense.
You have to go through 100 slides before getting to technical details for this narrow specific particular topic that is being discussed here
A new OS is a significant endevour and there is a lot of release notes on any and all topics - technical, usability, timelines, compatibility, hardware, architecture, support, upgrade methodology, etc.
> 71% of executives surveyed say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy; and in three years, the percentage of organizations leveraging mainframe assets in a hybrid cloud environment is expected to increase by more than 2x.
Reading between the lines, doesn't this say that the execs are concerned about being so heavily reliant on their mainframes and so are transitioning mainframe workloads to cloud environments at a rapid pace?
You're right that's probably what they intend it to mean, but I think there is a reading of it that they are moving workloads from mainframes to the cloud, and during that process will be "hybrid cloud with mainframes".
I'd parse that as customers which have mainframes are also doing hybrid cloud. They don't overtly state that the mainframe workloads are going to cloud, just that some number of customers who have mainframes also have cloud workloads, and that number will probably be bigger than it was before.
When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.
Also, you can virtualize a lot of Linux boxes inside a full LinuxONE machine. And almost a gigabyte of L4 cache for every four 5.2 GHz CPs makes it a seriously fast single-thread machine. Add to that all that hardware offloading for IO and you end up with a lot more capacity that you'd have on the same datacenter volume.
It's not as good as it's sounds, especially with new Ryzen cores.
IBM won't let you do benchmark comparisons, but I've found unofficial ones that show Ryzen is almost 3X performance per thread on general purpose workloads.
You can get a 32 core 64 thread Ryzen for $2000. And it should have around 2/3 the performance of a top of the line z15 mainframe that costs $200,000+ . And the Ryzen is a single chip, so the rest of the hardware is cheap and compact.
It seems IBMs business model is to make the customer pay more with time until they give up and leap from their (legacy) platform, at which point they migrate to something ground breaking like... DB2 on x86 (of course it would have been cheaper to migrate things 10 yr. ago but the oxygen restriction caused by neckties usually prevents some kinds of foresight)
A little off topic, but do new megacorps pony up for IBM? Or is it just the Verizons, Morgan Stanleys, etc who got locked in a while back and there’s no easy course forward. Or maybe said another way, I’ve got $CASHCOW unicorn that raised a mega series H—-why would I switch from the stack that got me there to z/OS?
(disclaimer: I still claim to be scarred from being a former IBMer)
My understanding is that the tech unicorns do not, but that there are some off-the-shelf applications (in e.g. banking) that run on mainframes that do lead less tech focused companies to get into the mainframe game.
This is true of most core loan servicing and deposit management platforms. It is very difficult to get mortgage servicing (in particular) right; the mainframe platforms have decades of honing.
In my experience a new unicorn will never architect anything the requires a mainframe. It is the older banks and insurance companies that have workloads designed specifically for mainframes that have 30-40 years of development and maintenance baked into them.
"Mainframe" usually meaning you have legacy code that requires something that only runs in that environment. Like the TPF OS that Visa, Sabre, and many airlines use. Or z/OS things like CICS, Adabas, IDMS, IMS, VSAM, JCL, heavily mainframe flavored COBOL, 360 Assembler, etc.
That is, the only driving requirement left for IBM mainframes is your own software that depends on system software that only exists on IBM mainframes.
Same reason some people still use other old environments like HP MPE, IBM AS/400, and Tandem Nonstop, and so on. They have found, thus far, that the cost of doing that is less than the cost of rewriting it. Or they have been unable to do that for reasons other than cost.
Edit: Separately, there are still some technical advantages. z/OS mainframes have a level of "within the rack" redundancy that you won't find in commodity servers. Or, with TPF, it's difficult to engineer a solution that scales as well and remains reliable...it's a very battle tested distributed K/V store that deals with heavy write contention.
The redundancy part of mainframes is hardware. You can live swap a CPU, for example.
That's an aside though. The reason people keep buying them is software lock in, yes. There's a reason Amazon likes to push their proprietary services...they are the new mainframe.
IBM has amazing support software for mainframes. Their fix tool, for example (SMTP/E) makes individual tapes for each customer to ensure that fixes go on correctly. All the dependencies are resolved for that individual customer by IBM before the tape ships. That's one-on-one service that makes sure your machine doesn't go down from a patch.
In a high availability environment (like banking or airline reservations, as mentioned), mainframes never go off, even during upgrades. When physical machines need replacement, the entire system is run in parallel on a second machine.
These boxes have both incredible I/O hardware (there's never been anything like IBM channel I/O) and the software to keep everything humming. On a typical day when I worked there, we'd have a 1,000 devs using the same box (and that was a small installation) with multiple operating systems, virtualizations, etc. with zero hiccups.
IBM also has amazing software for getting stuff done. Documentation, for example, is universal and available worldwide from any terminal. When you want a printed manual, the system figures out which big, fast printer is near you and offers to print it down the hall. Every IBM employee has access to all the company's resources from every terminal, and it all just works.
Yes, PCs have caught up to emulating many of these features, but they definitely don't have the robustness or ease of use that System/370 (z/OS) did.
Really hard to replicate Tandem Nonstop's feature set if that was what you actually needed.
Of course part of the reason it faded away (indeed, was gradually fading away even when I worked for Tandem) is that almost nobody does need that sort of reslience.
360 Assembler was the second (and last) assembly I learned (after 6502¹). Gotta love an architecture that requires you to maintain your own call stack for subroutines. Or that has CPU-level instructions to move integers to and from EBCDIC strings.
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1. Well, I guess second-and-a-half. I played a little with Z-80 on my Spectravideo computer, but mostly that was writing a disassembler in MSX basic to reverse-engineer how the system worked after it was abandoned by its manufacturer. The disassembler was never finished because I didn't properly manage the multibyte opcodes.
I read that all mainframe components, even CPUs, were redundant and hot-swappable and that instructions are executed on two separate CPUs to detect faults and correct them on the fly. That would make a lot of sense if your application requires high availability and assurance but isn't designed for it. I haven't heard of any standard server hardware that can give you HA or such assurance with a single machine, probably because you would not build any application dependent on that these days. It's probably cheaper to do in software.
Case in point, vSphere Fault Tolerance is a software approach that runs your workload in a VM where the CPU instructions are mirrored to another VM on another physical server to deliver redundancy against physical server loss.
I remember hearing a story (probably apocryphal) about a mainframe that was so redundant that it had to be physically dismantled and moved from one datacentre to another across town, and did so whilst remaining up the entire time.
mainframes have hardware designed for very high IO speeds, they have no real advantage in cpu speed, but they can keep it fed with data far better than x86 servers which is what you want if you are reading millions of records off disk doing some fairly trivial calculations like adding interest and writing them back.
These days if you can parallelise those calculations the price benefits of servers are worth the software complexity.
A Z15 core runs at 5.2 GHz (IIRC) and has shared access to 960 MB of L4 cache for every group of 4 sockets of 10 cores each (Linux workloads can do SMT2 on each core). They emphasize single-thread speed because they measured diminishing returns when adding more cores to an LPAR and figured out it was pointless to play a numbers game.
> These days if you can parallelise those calculations
Yes, but it's not all workloads that are amenable to that - some will want to keep a consistent in-memory representation of the working data with all cores working on the same data. If you can scale out, great. If you can't, this is the very top of the line. It you need to scale up from a z15, I suggest you wait for the z16 availability ;-)
I wonder how many CPU cycles we burn running the many layers of abstraction we have built in the distributed computing world.. does this performance penalty exist in the mainframe world
A lot of it is running on dedicated hardware - some used to be dedicated silicon, but, IIRC, a lot of functionality is being brought into the CP (the "normal" CPUs), that when tasked with support functions, get custom microcode for that. Not even booting up these beasts is a simple thing.
This architecture; CPs, ZAAPs, IFLs, IOs etc are compelling to me along with the minimal OS, DB layers with a development setup that feels only just capable, albeit at a cost to the development effort. It feels efficient from a compute perspective? Today in distributed land we have libraries built on libraries built on OS services and API layers with other stuff we don’t need all to do some basic date math for example, how many cycles did we use to do that, maybe it was easier during the one off development process, was it worth it.
We bought a new iSeries to replace our > 10 year old iSeries. It does the accounting and we expect it to last another 10+ years. The backups are easy and the service is quick. The accountants did not want to consider another solution.
The iSeries is a fascinating machine. It was, when introduced, years ahead of anything else - virtual ISA, single-level storage and OS-level integrated DB/2 RDBMS - and, in many aspects, it still is (Apple's Newton is the only other platform I remember that has single-level storage).
Yes part of our accounting system is still running on Cobol from 1982, but don't worry it has been upgraded to the AI Cloud and it only costs 200M a year to keep running.
It actually seems to make sense, though it also seems very unimplmentable right now because it will require much higher qubit machines than currently exist... right?
:Person with Folded Hands: Please don't forget to follow me on instagram, fund my patreon, subscribe to my channel, tweet my comment and perform any other necessary hipster rituals!
We use some risk tracking web platform from IBM at my job.
I’m not it’s most proficient user but from the stuff I do in it, it’s basically half CMS half relational database with some search and export functions.
It’s called “IBM OpenPages with Watson” because of:
“Translate documents across 50+ languages, obtain 24/7 support with a GRC virtual assistant, promote accuracy and efficiency in incident reporting with AI relevant classifications.”
So apparently “Watson” now means “translating and auto filling stuff”?
What kind of applications of blockchains are there that a databased ledger wouldn't work for in a mainframe oriented system?
You already have access controls restricting to trusted parties. Slapping a blockchain on top would just be adding complexity and overhead at this stage.
IBM Z systems seem to have a good but conservative cryptography and security model.
I was surprised to find out that Z15 already supports CRYSTALS-Dilithium-6-5 digital signature algorithm. It's a lattice based post-quantum cryptography algorithm. I assumed that those algorithms are still under development.
For z/OS, I don't think much anymore. The high level of single-machine redundancy and architecture of I/O offload USED to be better than commodity machines. That's been eclipsed by raw power and improved distributed functionality in the commodity world.
There are still companies (Visa, Airlines, GDS) having issues getting off the more unique TPF operating system. It's basically a distributed K/V data store that scales very well and deals well with write contention. So far, only Amadeus has been able to migrate off of it. Some smaller airlines were able to migrate away, but not the larger ones.
The company that Google bought (ITA), was on their way to writing a full reservations system. They had finished the shopping engine but not the whole system. That was a company chock full of money of talent, and they didn't finish. Though their shopping engine is the best one that exists.
Edit: Somewhat related point. The "developer efficiency" was quite good in these environments. Since the OS came with everything a developer needed, there was mostly only one right way to do everything. The languages, libraries, database, batch management, "UI", authentication/authorization, security, and so on, was already decided for you.
Think: opposite of general-purpose operating systems use-cases. Very IO/compute/latency-intensive things. Where the whole programming paradigms are designed around efficient (even real-time) compute. Where the software+hardware pair are written once and rarely if ever changed, restarted, or taken down for maintenance. Credit card transaction processing and airline reservation systems for example.
Of course you could use Linux or similar for such jobs, but highly specialized hardware+software pairings can eke out surprising performance at the cost of massive hardware and software-engineering bills.
My first professional dev job was COBOL and it's associated tech, a majority of the stuff we did was banking stuff and at the time it seemed like that's what a majority of the COBOL market took up but I could be wrong
Some software was written for Mainframes that effectively NEVER reboots. So you have to modify it to support reboots easily, but it was written in COBOL or and old version of C and compiled with an old compiler. So it isn't that easy to fix.
It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to never go down. Some years ago I was working with Tandem/Compaq and they had a web server on the NonStop Himalaya platform. Long story short, said server had its first experience with real world web traffic at scale when we were delivering coverage of an international sporting event, and Things Went Poorly.
The onsite Tandem engineers had never been faced with a NonStop setup that just...stopped (actually it was worse than that). Bear in mind this was the company that used to do demos by randomly unplugging hardware and the transactions kept chugging along. We ended up punting coverage to a smaller flat version of the site served off Compaqs running IIS while we cleaned up the mess.
Now, Tandem shouldn't feel bad. After all, Cisco had guys in the hosting facility trying to keep the then-new PIX series up and running.
> It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to never go down
The thing with systems designed to never go down is that you still need to be sure the recovery process works well. Never going down is just half if your nines.
> Some software was written for Mainframes that effectively NEVER reboots. So you have to modify it to support reboots easily
Run it in a VM instance that can be snapshotted/checkpointed, so that any reboot turns into "suspend and resume from checkpoint"? Or are there any pitfalls to just doing that?
Yes that can help, but VMs are still either Linux or OSX or Windows, and they all require security or other updates that will eventually need to reboot the system. Also the processors are different.
As clients accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud, having a secured, scalable environment is critical for the underlying transformation process. IBM z/OS V2.5 introduces new capabilities that support application modernization and provide a cloud native experience on z/OS:
Can anyone comment on the state of "re-hosting" solutions out there now? Seems like anyone who could, would be using one of those to get rid of the mainframe and run their code on commodity hardware.
One of my biggest complaints about the Master The Mainframe thing is that they give you an up and running machine. There are very few ways to onboard from the very basics. You don't learn (at least I didn't got that far) to install software and services.
I know you buy it fully configured according to what you ordered (every unit is custom-built, the ultimate luxury computer - take that, Apple) but, still, most people will have no idea what to even ask for or what the possibilities are.
Having a hobby license for z/PDT or z/OS would be awesome, but I don't think it's coming. IBM got mad when the Hercules crowd started selling Hercules as sort of an off-ramp for mainframe users.
I don't understand why IBM doesn't just pare all of their assets back to mainframe and just own who they are. They are or already have ruined Red Hat and have a worst in class professional services business. They're good at the mainframe and should just keep updating it and following it up w/their weird marketing.
I'm mainly talking about the hardware. The mouse had actual bearings in it instead of just a plastic wheel. The quality of the build was insane. Imagine a world where you have that build quality coupled to the right to repair and highly modular design.
Back in the late 80's / early 90's, my dad's business had a few PS/2 machines, in addition to several Dells and Compaqs. The PS/2s were low end models, like the 30 and 25, mainly used for printing up packing lists, but the build quality was very high. Even the keyboards were solid.
I imagine answer is revenue - how much of it is from Mainframe as opposed to everything else?
I suppose divestiture of GTS is attempt to do that kind of slimming.
Disclosure - I'm an IBM employee, but always on external gigs so have zero knowledge of direction or internal matters other than what I read here and on The Register... all opinions my own etc :)
I know you are joking, but, since z/OS is the direct descendant of MVS (which stands for Multiple Virtual Storage) and predates DOS, the PC, the 8086 and most other things, it'd have been wiser to rename the PC and it's OS as SPS, or Single Precarious Storage.
At various points IBM tried to consolidate their product lines around a single architecture and software platform. Some of the noteworthy examples of this are the Future Systems project in the 70s, the Fort Knox project in the 80s, and the Workplace OS project in the 90s.
All of these proved to be complete disasters. Ultimately, the value add they provide to the people that use them is that the backwards compatibility. Trying to consolidate them all created compromises and complexity which sank the projects in question.
Fair point. The AS/400 itself was also a successful consolidation of the S/36 and S/38 product lines.
Consolidation has worked on a relatively small scale where two platforms were combined, attempts to produce one platform to rule them all have generally failed.
"IBM hasn’t dominated the tech industry since the early 1980s. Most founders today weren’t even born when the last antitrust case was opened into it. The share price is up 9x since then, and IBM shipped its highest-ever volume of mainframe computing capacity in…. 2020!"[1]
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
DoD and related govt orgs keep it afloat as well. Maybe not the most powerful anymore, but rock solid support and longevity-- their uptime is legendary-- keeps it going in little tech tidepools around the country.
Z/OS was always a tough nut to crack. I tried a few times to get a mainframe job but the job postings always want extensive experience and if you get an interview it’s usually because they didn’t bother to read your resume ahead of time to see if you had any experience with Z/OS specificity. But I always thought it would be an awesome experience to have - pretty much everything new and trendy you deal with in IT was invented and perfected long ago on the mainframe, the only thing that has changed is that it doesn’t cost a million dollars to do it anymore. The Kubernetes people could probably save themselves a lot of effort if they go back and see how mainframe did X back in the 1960s.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread> With z/OS V2.5, IBM is introducing new high performance AI capabilities that are tightly integrated with z/OS workloads, designed to give clients business insights for more informed decision making.
But trying to tie an extremely compute intensive requirement (AI) to an environment with probably the highest $$/MIPS is just...dumb.
but in many other similar circumstances they give the option of buying Application Assist Processors. That takes the work away from the main processor.
It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized for running the AI workloads.
IBM also open up running AI in their cloud.
zAAPs, zIIPs and IFLs are exactly the same hardware as main processors. The difference between them is purely at the licensing level. The firmware sets a flag saying "don't run classic z/OS workloads". z/OS sees that flag set and then will only schedule "new" workloads (such as Java and XML) to that processor. Actually there is an undocumented API you can use to schedule any (enclave SRB mode) workload to the zAAP – IBM keeps it under NDA, and ISVs have to agree to obey IBM's rules about what workloads are allowed to run as part of that NDA. (One ISV, Neon, started selling a tool to run an arbitrary workload on the zAAP, called zPrime, IBM immediately sued them, and Neon settled the lawsuit in 2011 and agreed to drop the tool). Other operating systems, such as z/Linux, ignore that flag completely and to them a zAAP is just the same as a normal main processor (CP).
> It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized for running the AI workloads.
Yes but that wouldn't be a zAAP. They do have hardware accelerators for various functions (crypto, compression, sorting) but those aren't zAAPs (or zIIPs or IFLs). Crypto acceleration is CPACF (extra CPU instructions on main CPUs) and Crypto Express (external accelerator card). Compression hardware acceleration is zEDC. Sorting hardware acceleration is the Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...
https://www.computeexpresslink.org/
Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes could be used for this new funky thing called the internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web product was an abomination they inherited from their purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and XMLHTTP.
If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. IBM's eventual realization of this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
No, they wouldn't. I could take one Linux box, get a domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn't be able to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No, I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
Try that with Kubernetes!
In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring output from both the failing case and the working case as printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin up two machines and fix one while you leave the other broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today. Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
On firewalls, PF has a syntax simpler than most text adventure games.
Every time I get into the GNU world, well, I get better HW support sometimes, among a slight bit of performance, but, FFS, configuring a Linux firewall gives me nightmares everyday. Just compare NAT on Linux vs OpenBSD. Or TUN/TAP devices, where in OpenBSD it's just a matter of a SINGLE line at pf.conf and two hostname.if files to define the bridge and the tap device with a subnet. Done. Oh, and sysctl to set IP forwarding, but that was the easiest task on any OS.
I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS.
It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it.
Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.
I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.
You can also get free access to small vps running Linux on a mainfram on the IBM cloud
What's the point? VM with linux is hardly interesting to anyone.
That was several hours ago. The site's still down.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.maste...
Everything's back to exactly how it was before, even down to using "" (ie, empty string) where my name should be. Excellent.
I must say that site responsiveness is much, much slower than it was when it was serving spam. :D
https://www.youtube.com/c/moshix
The only reason I haven't pursued this myself is that MVS is ultimately just not objectively compelling enough, because while it's similar to what's out there today, I get the impression I'd only have to unlearn an arbitrary bunch of things once I was on the "real" system.
As an aside, I happened to stumble on a copy of "IBM and The Holocaust" a few years ago. It's a startling insight into IBM's beginnings tabulating and wrangling data on the millions of Jews "processed" throughout Germany in WW2, which turned out to be the first commoditized consumption of what would today be regarded (without a second thought) as big data.
The world has certainly moved on since that point and IBM's DNA is completely different today, but IMO the "data processing" energy still remains as an incredibly strong centerpoint, and I honestly see mainframes as a digitized realization of the punched-card concepts IBM's beginnings were founded upon. (Combined with the institutionalization aspects I hinted at in the first paragraph, this is the main reason I'm very hesitant I'd survive in what sounds like an especially rigorous environment.)
While the UI of reading a printed book hasn't yet been beaten (I'll switch to e-readers once they can pageflip instantly -.-), it's very practical to be able to virtually pick up a book and thumb through any portion. To this end, PDFs of this title seem to readily be floating around, for example (open as URL) data:text;base64,aHR0cDovL3Bvc29oLnJ1L2Jvb2svaHRtL2libS5wZGY
I will note that after reading I kinda looked askance at my ThinkPads a bit and went "wow, what a history. uhhh....". Fair warning :)
Interesting at times but really really not fun
Now I'm pulling for them, I actually own a POWER9 machine. I think it is great that they want to get memory controllers out of the CPU - but they've done it in such a way that leads me to believe that it is an intentional sabotage, which would only happen if they genuinely had no interest in an active hardware role.
[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM8596
[1] https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a...
The trend is out of the CPU now? I was hoping they would instead start layering DRAM stacks on the CPU die.
HBM on the die is crazy high performance.
With a bus like CXL you could have a card full of memory chips that is shared by multiple CPUs. The z machines have a system like this it is just proprietary for them.
Memory that is less coupled to the CPU won't be as fast as HBM but you can have a lot more of it.
IBM had merged it into Watson, kept the acronym, but changed the words. Then they stopped making it available in any meaningful way.
I was so pissed. I’m sure my company would have paid out the nose for it.
I got the feeling it was a capture-and-kill situation.
IBM does have a reputation for buying competitors in very niche areas, like process planning software, and then not doing anything with them except maybe parting them out several years later. It looks suspicious, but I think that is more to do with the way they stick to hyper-specialized enterprise solutions... the pickings are naturally very slim.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard that e-ink "freezes everyone else out" from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Surely, if this was true we would have heard about it. Could you elaborate on your claim and if you experienced this? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this.
Electrophoretic display technology has a barrier to entry that can be vaulted by anyone capable of standing up a moderately sophisticated light industrial facility.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useful that E Ink Holdings Inc rationally leverages the legal protection of the USPO through a large number of patents to maximize profits.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useless that consumer demand is only able to support a small number of manufacturers (who are able to demand very high prices).
I'd need to have a very low opinion of a "display guy" to believe he was genuinely arguing in good faith, and in keeping with the spirit of HN (hallowed be its name), that the market forces an OS is subject to (like user training with regard to network effect) have any overlap with display hardware (which is unaffected by prior user uptake). Because anyone arguing that would have to be ignorant of both subjects... but why would such an ignorant person be so invested in white knighting a hardware company? Oh well, doesn't matter - my opinion was already arbitrarily settled upon for completely irrational reasons.
> HN (hallowed be its name
> white knighting
You clearly have very high opinions of yourself and your belief system. It is clear you are unwilling to respond with facts when simple questions challenge your claims and react with hostility. I don't think there's any beneficial discussion possible going forward. Best of luck in your endeavours.
It starts out with the marketing buzzwords but then drills down into the technical nitty-gritty. In terms of what the "AI" stuff actually means, one answer is contained on slide 121 – support for running Tensorflow and ONNX inside a Linux Docker container using zCX (which lets you run z/Linux Docker containers under z/OS). The zCX SIMD support referenced on slide 102 is probably highly relevant to this.
I wouldn't be surprised if, with some clever programming, one could pipe data from disk directly to GPUs and back to disk without involving the CPUs that run user programs except for the thinnest slice of time.
But, considering what you paid for the mainframe, you probably have the budget to commission them to write drivers just for you (or to license their source and compile it yourself).
Btw given they do linux can they twist so that channel is partition into for that linux container. In the new world just driver through.
A new OS is a significant endevour and there is a lot of release notes on any and all topics - technical, usability, timelines, compatibility, hardware, architecture, support, upgrade methodology, etc.
Reading between the lines, doesn't this say that the execs are concerned about being so heavily reliant on their mainframes and so are transitioning mainframe workloads to cloud environments at a rapid pace?
When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.
IBM won't let you do benchmark comparisons, but I've found unofficial ones that show Ryzen is almost 3X performance per thread on general purpose workloads.
You can get a 32 core 64 thread Ryzen for $2000. And it should have around 2/3 the performance of a top of the line z15 mainframe that costs $200,000+ . And the Ryzen is a single chip, so the rest of the hardware is cheap and compact.
Like "uh, we moved payroll to cloud and this mainframe job needs that data".
(disclaimer: I still claim to be scarred from being a former IBMer)
That is, the only driving requirement left for IBM mainframes is your own software that depends on system software that only exists on IBM mainframes.
Same reason some people still use other old environments like HP MPE, IBM AS/400, and Tandem Nonstop, and so on. They have found, thus far, that the cost of doing that is less than the cost of rewriting it. Or they have been unable to do that for reasons other than cost.
Edit: Separately, there are still some technical advantages. z/OS mainframes have a level of "within the rack" redundancy that you won't find in commodity servers. Or, with TPF, it's difficult to engineer a solution that scales as well and remains reliable...it's a very battle tested distributed K/V store that deals with heavy write contention.
That's an aside though. The reason people keep buying them is software lock in, yes. There's a reason Amazon likes to push their proprietary services...they are the new mainframe.
In a high availability environment (like banking or airline reservations, as mentioned), mainframes never go off, even during upgrades. When physical machines need replacement, the entire system is run in parallel on a second machine.
These boxes have both incredible I/O hardware (there's never been anything like IBM channel I/O) and the software to keep everything humming. On a typical day when I worked there, we'd have a 1,000 devs using the same box (and that was a small installation) with multiple operating systems, virtualizations, etc. with zero hiccups.
IBM also has amazing software for getting stuff done. Documentation, for example, is universal and available worldwide from any terminal. When you want a printed manual, the system figures out which big, fast printer is near you and offers to print it down the hall. Every IBM employee has access to all the company's resources from every terminal, and it all just works.
Yes, PCs have caught up to emulating many of these features, but they definitely don't have the robustness or ease of use that System/370 (z/OS) did.
Of course part of the reason it faded away (indeed, was gradually fading away even when I worked for Tandem) is that almost nobody does need that sort of reslience.
Bank calls the Tandem support line: "Our computer is down. It crashed! How do we get it back up?"
It wasn't offline. It had fallen over, punching through some of the sections of the raised floor.
--- 1. Well, I guess second-and-a-half. I played a little with Z-80 on my Spectravideo computer, but mostly that was writing a disassembler in MSX basic to reverse-engineer how the system worked after it was abandoned by its manufacturer. The disassembler was never finished because I didn't properly manage the multibyte opcodes.
These days if you can parallelise those calculations the price benefits of servers are worth the software complexity.
A Z15 core runs at 5.2 GHz (IIRC) and has shared access to 960 MB of L4 cache for every group of 4 sockets of 10 cores each (Linux workloads can do SMT2 on each core). They emphasize single-thread speed because they measured diminishing returns when adding more cores to an LPAR and figured out it was pointless to play a numbers game.
> These days if you can parallelise those calculations
Yes, but it's not all workloads that are amenable to that - some will want to keep a consistent in-memory representation of the working data with all cores working on the same data. If you can scale out, great. If you can't, this is the very top of the line. It you need to scale up from a z15, I suggest you wait for the z16 availability ;-)
Also: telcos, hospitals, airlines, and state/federal government agencies.
who needs performance, current hardware is too fast for non-server meanwhile cruds can be optimized anyway
Or provide profiles for different power situations.
Security, folks. A fast car without seatbelts is a death trap, not a means of transportation.
With LPAR the ransomware would have really lucky if it were aware of where it's being running from.
https://research.ibm.com/blog/qiskit-summer-school-machine-l...
I’m not it’s most proficient user but from the stuff I do in it, it’s basically half CMS half relational database with some search and export functions.
It’s called “IBM OpenPages with Watson” because of:
“Translate documents across 50+ languages, obtain 24/7 support with a GRC virtual assistant, promote accuracy and efficiency in incident reporting with AI relevant classifications.”
So apparently “Watson” now means “translating and auto filling stuff”?
You already have access controls restricting to trusted parties. Slapping a blockchain on top would just be adding complexity and overhead at this stage.
I was surprised to find out that Z15 already supports CRYSTALS-Dilithium-6-5 digital signature algorithm. It's a lattice based post-quantum cryptography algorithm. I assumed that those algorithms are still under development.
https://pq-crystals.org/dilithium/
There are still companies (Visa, Airlines, GDS) having issues getting off the more unique TPF operating system. It's basically a distributed K/V data store that scales very well and deals well with write contention. So far, only Amadeus has been able to migrate off of it. Some smaller airlines were able to migrate away, but not the larger ones.
The company that Google bought (ITA), was on their way to writing a full reservations system. They had finished the shopping engine but not the whole system. That was a company chock full of money of talent, and they didn't finish. Though their shopping engine is the best one that exists.
Edit: Somewhat related point. The "developer efficiency" was quite good in these environments. Since the OS came with everything a developer needed, there was mostly only one right way to do everything. The languages, libraries, database, batch management, "UI", authentication/authorization, security, and so on, was already decided for you.
Of course you could use Linux or similar for such jobs, but highly specialized hardware+software pairings can eke out surprising performance at the cost of massive hardware and software-engineering bills.
The onsite Tandem engineers had never been faced with a NonStop setup that just...stopped (actually it was worse than that). Bear in mind this was the company that used to do demos by randomly unplugging hardware and the transactions kept chugging along. We ended up punting coverage to a smaller flat version of the site served off Compaqs running IIS while we cleaned up the mess.
Now, Tandem shouldn't feel bad. After all, Cisco had guys in the hosting facility trying to keep the then-new PIX series up and running.
The thing with systems designed to never go down is that you still need to be sure the recovery process works well. Never going down is just half if your nines.
> served off Compaqs running IIS
Yikes!
Run it in a VM instance that can be snapshotted/checkpointed, so that any reboot turns into "suspend and resume from checkpoint"? Or are there any pitfalls to just doing that?
I know you buy it fully configured according to what you ordered (every unit is custom-built, the ultimate luxury computer - take that, Apple) but, still, most people will have no idea what to even ask for or what the possibilities are.
Having a hobby license for z/PDT or z/OS would be awesome, but I don't think it's coming. IBM got mad when the Hercules crowd started selling Hercules as sort of an off-ramp for mainframe users.
There are better examples of great IBM PC products, like the ThinkPad.
I suppose divestiture of GTS is attempt to do that kind of slimming.
Disclosure - I'm an IBM employee, but always on external gigs so have zero knowledge of direction or internal matters other than what I read here and on The Register... all opinions my own etc :)
It seems like they sell some products that might compete with themselves.
All of these proved to be complete disasters. Ultimately, the value add they provide to the people that use them is that the backwards compatibility. Trying to consolidate them all created compromises and complexity which sank the projects in question.
Consolidation has worked on a relatively small scale where two platforms were combined, attempts to produce one platform to rule them all have generally failed.
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
[1] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1408469812318195716