Mainframes making a comeback? 17 September, 2007 By Paul Weinberg

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He listed the following areas where mainframes are demonstrating superior performance: multiple work loads, service oriented architecture, the tracking of utilization, an end to end perspective, network expenses and complications, centralized control, security standards and the dynamic reallocation of resources.

People's memories of mainframe are frozen in time of terms of what they were like in the 1980s, despite the advances in the technology in areas such as the user interface since then, Ptak explained.

"The concept that you have to do this complicated programming before you can run a mainframe app -- none of that is true anymore."

Ptak noted that users have the option of either running run dumb terminals off the current mainframe models or maintain smarter clients, with the data and applications pulled down from the central machine.

Furthermore mainframes start at the low end at about $50,000 (U.S.) and are a little bigger than a refrigerator, he continued.

"In that [mainframe] processor you can do thousands and thousands of workloads, many more than an equivalent sized rack of blade servers."

Ptak compared the low utilization level of distributed servers at about 10 to 20 per cent to the mainframe where it is as high as 80 to 90 per cent.

At the top of the analyst's list of positive attributes for the mainframes are the improved power efficiency and cooling features which market leader IBM is using to market its System z series.

"They have redesigned the cabinets; they have redesigned the physical layout of the processors to maximize air flow."

System administrators are better able to detect the hot spots in data centers and determine when is a good time to move around the servers, Ptak stated.

"All this talk about virtualization and the success that VMware has had with the partitioning and isolation of multiple resources on a server is old hat. That from day one has been on mainframes."

Ptak pointed out that up to recently, the big market for mainframes has been outside North America and Western Europe in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Eastern Europe.

He noted that during the Cold War, eastern European nations in the Soviet Bloc were prevented by U.S. restrictions in trade from taking advantage of the advances in distributed computing that had taken the west by storm.

"When markets opened [in Eastern Europe], they had all of this code, all of this aging infrastructure, and they immediately went to a mainframe. They didn't have all of this prejudice against the mainframe."

Ptak was bullish to also note that the mainframe IT industry, where IBM, BMC and CA predominate, are experiencing a renaissance in sales.

However, a BMC spokesperson countered that sales for mainframe hardware and software upgrades largely involve existing enterprise users that already have major investments in their largely data and transaction focused legacy systems.

Mike Moser, product management director and program executive in BMC Software, was basing his comments on a company survey of about 1,000 companies in its installed based.

"The big shops, the medium shops and anyone with significant scale are still growing for the most part. They are growing their capacity; they are also growing to a lesser degree, through new applications."

On the other hand, customers with a small MIPS capacity footprint are reporting either a declining mainframe environment or they are switching to distributed computing, Moser noted.

"We don't see a lot of net new mainframe shops."

Among BMC's findings is that 74 per cent of respondents indicated they could not afford to convert their mission critical applications and workloads on their mainframes to distributed computing.

Meanwhile, 93 per cent of respondents have a positive outlook on the long-term health of the mainframe as a viable platform for new and existing workloads.

Also, BMC heard that respondents consider mainframes as critical to Service Oriented Architecture and Web services initiatives for data hub and transaction functions.

However, there are not a lot of younger computer sciences graduates coming onto the job market with mainframe IT technical skills, Moser reported.

"You are not learning it in college. It is a big problem: it is one that we worry about."

Moser did not want to hazard a guess as to the average age of the current mainframe technical support person in the enterprise.

Both Ptak and Moser agreed that most enterprises have IT environments that combine mainframes and distributed computing.

"There is a very small per cent that claims to have a mainframe only environment," stated Moser.