Mainframes stage recession-driven comeback
May 29, 2009 —
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Big is the new small.
During these challenging economic times, mainframe systems have been the beneficiary of an increasing trend toward IT consolidation, and they are being positioned as modern application development platforms by development software makers.
"When I started at this job two years ago, there was talk about a mainframe renaissance," said Chris O'Malley, executive vice president and general manager for CA's Mainframe Business Unit. The market for servers costing over US$100,000 has quadrupled since 2000, he noted.
"Today, IBM has gained market share back to what it was back in 1992, which was the pinnacle of its success."
The global economic downturn has led organizations to pause and look at their mainframe systems, he said, pointing out that the mainframe has half the transaction-per-user cost of distributed systems, with greater price performance than systems sold in the past.
"It is not your grandfather's mainframe," O'Malley said, noting that some workloads that caused bottlenecks have been offloaded from the mainframe, and that today's systems are built with cheaper, harder and better software utilization.
In comparison, there is a high cost in infrastructure to support blade-type servers. That should give CFOs pause before they build another data center, said O'Malley.
Mainframes provide lower costs than distributed hardware due to lower labor costs, less real estate and environment costs, and their ability to run significant work in a single container, explained Jim Porell, director of business development for System z software at IBM and an IBM distinguished engineer.
IBM's Integrated Facility for Linux, which ships with System z, has enabled even greater consolidation on the system, said Micro Focus' CTO Mark Haynie. Micro Focus sells Linux consolidation and migration tools for mainframes.
"We support all of the familiar mainframe APIs and old COBOL interfaces on Linux. Linux has a lower cost of ownership," he added.
There is a new direction in the industry with people consolidating more to get cost savings, said Bill Carico, president of ACTS Corp., an IT consultancy established in 1981. "The mainframe has great appeal for people to leverage all its attributes to consolidate servers and cut costs."
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