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Mainframes stage recession-driven comeback


By David Worthington
May 29, 2009 — 
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."

Mainframes have never gone away because they leverage centralization better than any platform, offering availability, scalability, and security, on a cost per user basis that is unparalleled, Carico explained. "Large companies have a need for disaster recover and business continuity, and they don't have alternatives."

There are five qualities that place mainframes above other computing paradigms, said Porell: resilience, security, business process integration, capacity management and storage management.

Mainframes protect data by being less susceptible to malware, and they provide high hardware utilization for many different kinds of work, he added. However, he acknowledged that the mainframe is not the best solution for every job. It is best suited for applications that are stateful and need to be redundant, he said.

He also said that companies should begin to rethink traditional enterprise workloads. For instance, real-time analysis of operational data on the mainframe is more effective at detecting fraud in a timely manner than are batch queries offloaded to commodity hardware for analysis, he said. "It also reduces overall cost and complexity of managing private information."

Mainframes are well-positioned to play in the Web 2.0 world, because they solved problems around them 20 years ago, said Haynie. "People tell me [Ruby on Rails] is incredible for stateless application [development] between an AJAX client and a server. I say, 'That was invented by IBM in 1975.' "

Green-screen applications just require middleware for AJAX applications to call on them from browsers, he said.

"We have enabled the mainframe to run Java EE, C++ and .NET applications through Linux with Mono," said Porell. "There is a tremendous amount of code to execute on the mainframe operations model."

Passing the baton
An aging workforce supports the platform, and that is a negative for mainframe adoption and use, said O'Malley. "Showing twenty-somethings a green-screen UI is like showing garlic to a vampire."

To address the generational gap, CA is producing new products that will be introduced over the next several years that raise the level of abstraction of the mainframe platform, O'Malley said.

The first product that it has introduced is a browser-based application management program, CA Mainframe Manager, that reduces the time it takes a mainframe guru to deploy an application; it also places expert and novice users on the same level, he said.

"The software ensures best practices, and we are harvesting time back for people to create more aggressive mainframe agendas. In two years, you will be able to look over someone's shoulder and not know that they were working on a mainframe," O'Malley said.

IBM agrees that there is a need for mainframe simplification, and it has undertaken several initiatives to make mainframes more affordable and accessible to developers, said Porell. Big Blue is raising the level of abstraction so that developers' skill sets can be consistent on and off mainframes, and it is working to wrestle the mainframe out of IT operation staff's hands.

The System z's z/VM hypervisor places the mainframe into developers' hands, and they can reboot whenever, without having to call IT people for assistance, he said. "We want it to be accessible to application architects. Playtime is often the second and fourth shift on the weekends. We want them to be using mainframes during the workday."

Micro Focus, which produces application modernization tools, is also attempting to simplify mainframe development.

Its tools offload development and testing to PCs running Eclipse and Visual Studio development environments that are more familiar to today's programmer than typing a COBOL application into a mainframe, said Haynie.

"They can build a COBOL application in Eclipse, jump to Java, and jump back. The debugging environment works together. In Visual Studio, they can run applications that switch between C# and COBOL, and call each other," he explained.

"There are a lot of alleged mainframe alternatives," said Carico. "Even the strongest competitors haven't been able to kill the mainframe. Companies don't have to do everything on it, but it looks good in an honest evaluation."


Related Search Term(s): mainframes


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