an ominous comment

Troy Benjegerdes hozer at hozed.org
Sun Jul 19 19:13:19 PDT 2015


On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 06:58:18PM -0700, Stephen Williams wrote:
> On 7/19/15 5:25 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> >On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 11:52:03AM -0400, dan at geer.org wrote:
> >>Discussing security policy post-OPM debacle in a setting to which
> >>I have access (sorry to be oblique), it was said by a CxO "We have
> >>to prepare for the day when no software we depend on is run on
> >>premises."
> >>
> >>I did not handle this well (think sputtering as an alternative to
> >>white rage).  At the same time, I am probably in a bubble in that
> >>I suspect that nearly everyone I see with a computer (of any form
> >>factor) is already in that situation or, save for Javascript piped
> >>in from the cloud to run locally, soon will be -- denizens of this
> >>list and a few others excepted.
> >>
> >>Echoing Lenin echoing Chernyshevsky, "What is to be done?" or,
> >>perhaps, "Is anything to be done?"
> >>
> >>--dan
> >The same thing we did in the old days.
> >
> >Install an IBM mainframe.
> >
> >https://www.techwire.net/the-mainframe-lives-on-an-industry-perspective/
> >
> >The only place the 'cloud' makes sense is if you are Amazon or Google
> >and you want to sell your excess computing capacity to suckers who can't
> >afford to buy their own computers.
> >
> >If you actually do capacity planning and maybe do something like apply
> >modern devops to mainframe platforms, you can actually get some economies
> >of scale running your mainframe on-site.
> >
> >It will probably cost less than what that CxO's got paid under-the-table
> >in a rigged altcoin pump-and-dump orchestrated by the cloud service
> >provider.
> 
> Traditional corporate onsite compute, storage, network, security,
> software (Oracle etc.) is almost always extremely expensive.  While
> a raw hard drive may be inexpensive, if you buy it in an EMC or
> mainframe storage array, you are going to pay many multiples more
> per GB, compute minute, etc.  And, if you bought anything more than
> you actually use, you're being very wasteful.  Parts of the cloud
> revolution are rapid just in time purchase, deployment, change, new
> scalable methods, etc., but economically, it is often tremendously
> less expensive than a commercial solution plus the support staff to
> make it work.  In the most efficient traditional local deployment
> possible, this may not be true initially, but for the vast majority
> of mediocre corporate IT departments, it is very true.
> 
> If you are large and/or savvy enough, the thing to do is to borrow
> cloud system methods and run a cloud for yourself.  Currently,
> that's not completely easy or turnkey.  At some point, we should get
> to a clean utility computing model, but it will take a few more
> generations of evolution.
> 
> sdw
> 

IBM would tell you the z13 is the best platform to run a cloud on.
Claims are you get 8000 or so cloud servers per machine [1]. I'm
sure fujitsu or some other vendor will sell you something equally
expensive in the same 'mainframe' class that can virtualize like 
that.

A lot of what I hear about 'cloud' and virtualization are things that
were first deployed in 1970's-ish on mainframes.

Now, you're absolutely right that a 1TB hard drive that has been 
qualified to work with that machine will cost about 10x what you can 
get at staples.

But the point about mainframes is they are built to have lots of 
*memory bandwidth*, and a 'compute minute' on a Z13 is going to process
a lot more transactions and write them reliably to that overpriced 
disk than any cloud solution is ever going to do.

You just have to be ready to write a check for a couple of million 
if you want one of these things on-site, and that's why the cloud 
exists, for the folks that either don't have that kind of money, or
don't understand why they should spend it up-front, instead of getting
nickel and dimed to death by cloud vendors and their hackers.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2872096/ibm-s-z13-and-the-case-for-the-mainframe-cloud.html



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