[Info-vax] CentOS has been effectively killed for production use

Arne Vajhøj arne at vajhoej.dk
Wed Dec 16 09:20:01 EST 2020


On 12/16/2020 6:34 AM, IanD wrote:
> On Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 11:41:39 AM UTC+11, David Wade
> wrote:
>> IBM mainframes are big. If you need one to run zOS (formerly MVS)
>> or zVM (formerly VM/ESA, VM/XA etc) then they sell you a box that
>> is over sized, but even so you only get to use part of it. You pay
>> with the soul of your first born, or some other outrageous fee, but
>> IBM know that you have a pile of CICS code written in Assembler or
>> Cobol and no one who understands the business logic so you are
>> pretty much stuck with a mainframe.
>> 
>> You are probably using it to run a big bank, airline reservation
>> system or Air Traffic control. Moving from these hits into those
>> risk analysis holes you mentioned before.
>> 
>> However now you have the big animal IBM will let you use the spare 
>> capacity to run Linux. They charge much less for this capacity.
>> Its called "Integrated Facility for Linux"
> 
> Where I work they recently performed a mainframe upgrade because they
> have a number of projects now targeting the mainframe, one of the
> drivers being reducing the security venerability footprint and others
> from i/o requirements as data volumes explode
> 
> There is currently an industry shortage as federal institutions snap
> up personal with their deep pockets and Boomers retire
> 
> They are even embarking upon mainframe training programs, such is the
> renewed focus on the mainframe for the areas where it excels. It's
> certainly not being treated as a dinosaur

IBM mainframe is a niche today.

But it is certainly a much bigger niche than the VMS niche.

And the niche is big enough and the attrition small enough
that it is practically a given that the mainframe will still
be around in 25 years.

Arne




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