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Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by nabla9 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @10:28AM (#20977348)
Do you know any big bank not using mainframes for their core operations? 90% of big banks use mainframes, so there must be some big banks that don't use them. Interested to know who they are. Chinese?

It's OK to do most things with chunk of normal servers, but when you need to handle very large number of transactions with fast commits, and stuff like eventual consistency is not allowed, it becomes expensive to handle them no matter what.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by solresol on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:23AM (#20977608)
Commonwealth Bank of Australia -- they were on mainframes, but spent a few hundred million dollars to get off.

One of the other big Australian banks (Westpac) has an "exit IBM" project as well, but it isn't complete yet.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by nabla9 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @11:58AM (#20977795)
I googled it. Apparently they moved their home loan systems etc. from "windows-based mainframe" to UNIX. What is windows-based mainframe? (HP Superdome??) They also moved into SAP analytics.

There is no information anywhere saying that they moved their critical banking systems and transaction processing.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by hapless on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:19PM (#20978641)
Unisys.

Unisys always had a smaller mainframe share than IBM, and they stopped making new chips sometime in the 2000s.

For at least ten years the fastest Unisys mainframes have been very big (proprietary) x86 machines running Windows with a Unisys mainframe emulator.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by rbanffy on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:32PM (#20979328)
I worked for Unisys in 2002 or so and I always thought it was funny to see a mainframe able to run Pinball...

For some time I defined a "serious computer" as something that didn't have ports for keyboard and monitor.

Having said that, the pre-x86 A series were pretty cool. And ran the most user hostile OS ever created, to the point its very name was used for Tron's villain.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by rightbyte on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:53PM (#20979695)
Going from IBM to SAP seems like no less lock in?
Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by dagw on Monday September 16, 2019 @03:28AM (#20981802)
But only on the software side. Dozens of companies will compete to sell you hardware solutions to run your SAP stuff on.
Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by blaser-waffle on Monday September 16, 2019 @11:01AM (#20984745)
SuSE Linux on Lenovo, Dell, HP, whatever
Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by lol768 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @01:53PM (#20978477)
> Do you know any big bank not using mainframes for their core operations? 90% of big banks use mainframes, so there must be some big banks that don't use them. Interested to know who they are. Chinese?

Monzo? They're getting bigger now, circa 3M customers. More than First Direct, Starling, Metro Bank.

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by breatheoften on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:02PM (#20979478)
Seems to me like the global scale consistent database systems could really change this calculus (google cloud spanner, faunadb). To me these products represent a significant capability that never existed before — not entirely sure it would ever make sense for a bank to become dependent on hosted transactional storage but maybe a “bring your own cloud” model for one of these systems (I think faunadb offers this — cloud spanner can’t because of the custom network requirements for clock synchronization) ...
Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by drevil-v2 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:22PM (#20979559)
National Australia Bank moved their core banking to Oracle software running on commodity x86 servers.
Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by nineteen999 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:38PM (#20979635)
Having worked there only a few years back, I can guarantee there was still a very large amount of mainframe activity - all the change management at the time was still done on an IBM mainframe.

I personally worked on a project there that involved building new virtualization platforms for not only x86/x86_64 Intel, but also AIX (Power) and Solaris (SPARC).

Re:IBM introduces z15 mainframe by dejv on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:49PM (#20978811)
I do, but they still use enterprise grade servers that each cost almost as much as my house.