|
A quick look at headlines in the trade press is enough to let you know that the mainframe computing market, while not exactly in revival, remains a significant factor in IT computing. In the 70s, the mainframe market was hot. By the 90s, it began to resemble a sleeping giant, but the tide has turned in the last several years. The popularity of distributed systems as a way to bring local computing power to everyone remains, but distributed computing has been around long enough for the honeymoon to be over. The difficulty and cost of managing large numbers of distributed systems has fueled the trend towards consolidation, and the increasing computer power and memory needed to support large numbers of people on common applications has energized the virtualization market. Growing awareness of environmentally-sound computing has also encouraged the consolidation and virtualization markets. These markets, in turn, have breathed new life into the mainframe market.
Many businesses that currently run mainframes or generate enough application volume to justify a mainframe have started to look at mainframe resources with a fresh eye. IBM reports new mainframe customers, in addition to repeat business. Server consolidation onto a mainframe platform is sometimes a preferred path for customers wishing to better manage their extensive server environment. Today’s mainframes are not the mainframes of yesterday. For example:
- It takes fewer people to manage a mainframe than it does to manage equivalent distributed servers.
- Mainframes take less energy and space to operate.
- Mainframes are more secure than equivalent distributed systems.
- Entry-level mainframes are not overwhelming, in price or size.
- Price trends, in cost per MIPS and Megabytes, continue to benefit the buyer.
- Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) is a trademark of the mainframe.
- Mainframes are old-hands at virtualization and include logical partitioning (PR/SM), a virtualization technique, just now starting to appear in today’s high-end servers.
- Mainframes can run many virtual machines or guests — thousands with z/VM.
- You don’t need a COBOL programmer. While new COBOL code continues to be produced, Java, C and C++ accounts for much of new mainframe software.
- Utilization rates of over 99% are typical, with no performance degradation.
- Mainframes run Linux, enabling the use of open software on lower cost MIPs.
This paper will look at the new mainframe market with an eye towards TCO and how trends in the mainframe market impact TCO:
- SNA to TCP/IP conversions and the migration to IPv6
- Specialty engines, such as zIIP and zAAP processors
- Autonomic computing — automation, self-management and self-healing
- The status of automation with respect to:
– business continuity or disaster recovery
– automation code deployment
– dynamic provisioning for workload management
– global status management
It will also consider how mainframes can help businesses improve service, increase IT responsiveness, optimize business processing and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Big Iron — A Little History
Starting to appear in businesses in the late 1950s, the mainframe footprint has grown along with the technical developments of the last 50 years. True workhorses, mainframes are used for high volume data processing such as credit card processing and telephone billing services. Well engineered, mainframes are known for their RAS, making them excellent platforms for critical applications. Mainframes can host multiple operating systems and provide virtualization via logical partitions and virtual machines, traits that are strikingly similar to the capabilities provided by today’s new host servers, but mainframes did them first and set the bar very high. The key players have changed through the years, but IBM dominated early on and remains the dominant vendor. While the hardware has changed over the years, they can still run the software from the early days, garnering user appreciation and loyalty.
The 1990s saw a real slump in the mainframe market but late in the decade, with the growth of transactions over the web, appreciation for the usefulness of mainframes grew again. As another plus, Linux support was added to most mainframes, allowing businesses to use open source software. The result is renewed interest and new customers — IBM claims many new mainframe customers in addition to new business from existing customers.
Mainframes vs. Distributed Systems
There is little to debate on this topic. Mainframes and distributed systems co-exist nicely — IT shops that include mainframes also probably include distributed systems. It’s also true that many IT shops only have distributed systems and there are some good reasons why this is so. These IT shops may have been established after the mainframe-only era or they just don’t have the processing requirements to justify such large systems. On the other hand, many IT shops that once shunned mainframes and grew a large inventory of distributed systems are now among those moving to consolidate and simplify their platform management, seeking to achieve the benefits associated with mainframes. Today’s large data centers are likely to have a combination of mainframe systems, distributed systems, WebSphere servers, security servers and network distributors.
|
