Introduction
The global business arena is a diverse and dynamic one, constantly buffeted by changes in customer trends, government regulations and larger social-political issues. Every year, IBM conducts an annual survey of more than 1,400 executives worldwide to find out what are the critical issues of the day.
In 2005, top-line revenue was highlighted as top-of-mind, followed by profitability and then cost containment. These global leaders further identified improving processes for greater efficiency, finding new ways to meet customer expectations and enhancing employee productivity some of the key things they had to do to get there. Security and privacy issues also continue to dominate boardroom agendas.
For CIOs who are expected to be as attuned to the organization’s business objectives as any other member of the management team, it has become their jobs to deliver an IT infrastructure that reflects these concerns and are aligned to business requirements. Add to this a growing disillusion with distributed computing caused by rising costs, unwieldy management, security lapses and lack of five-nine availability.
As a result, CIOs are focusing on building unified infrastructures based on open standards and service-oriented architecture (SOA) to optimize every dollar spent. In this climate, mainframes are experiencing a revival as enterprises discover that consolidating server workloads, data and applications onto a single mainframe can deliver better utilization rates and improved security, while reducing complexity and costs.
New Converts to the Cause
The ability of the mainframe to address the concerns of the day is winning new customers far and wide. Forty years ago, mainframes may have been the province of only the largest financial and public organizations. In recent years, its focus on innovation has attracted new clients in diverse industries, from education, retail (over 90 percent of retailers use mainframes) to golf, from gaming to the life sciences, running innovative workloads.
A great example comes from Brazil where a developer of online games and game architectures, Hoplon Infotainment, has opted to host its latest game, TaikoDom, on an IBM mainframe running Linux and IBM DB2. By moving the game from an Oracle database to IBM DB2, Hoplon saw a 30 percent improvement in overall database performance.
Another surprising mainframe user is the PGA TOUR. Its TOURCast application, which enables golf fans to follow tournament action for every player, every hole and every shot online, depends on data processed and transmitted in XML format by Linux virtual services running on an IBM mainframe.
Long Live the Mainframe
Detractors will have users believe that the mainframe is dead, that it is based on “old” technology, that it is the most expensive and inflexible platform in the world, and finally, that application support is poor. That’s a whole lot of talk, but does the evidence bear them out?
While the mainframe may have been around for more than 40 years, “old technology” it is not. It has an undeniable track record in secure, reliable computing, the ability to handle multiple workloads effortlessly and a total cost of ownership (TCO) that improves every year. Emerging priorities in enterprise computing play to the mainframes’ strengths, increasing the interest in this “father” of platforms.
For example, virtualization, which allows a single server or platform to support hundreds of concurrent applications and share data and hardware resources across heterogeneous environments, was invented by mainframes more than 35 years ago. Today, it is a godsend for enterprises looking for ways to simplify their IT infrastructures, and reduce complexity and costs.
The SOA movement is also gaining momentum as it can help companies increase the flexibility of their business processes by making the most of their underlying technology infrastructure through the reuse of existing IT assets. This reduces development and maintenance costs while improving the speed-to-market of new products and services.
For both these technologies, mainframes have a headstart that is hard to beat. As enterprises continue to look to create a flexible infrastructure to improve information flow while maintaining high levels of availability and security, there is no other platform better to support this than the mainframe.
Getting the Applications You Need
CIOs don’t like to be held hostage by vendors touting proprietary solutions, nor have they found any one vendor able to fulfill their every need. Yet application management in a heterogeneous environment is one of biggest sources of the IT management complexity today.
Consolidating applications on a single mainframe, a platform which now supports UNIX® APIs, J2EE, grid standards and Linux, will help reduce costs and complexity. There are more than 800 Linux® applications and 275 Linux ISVs working on the mainframe today. In its traditional stronghold, leading core banking ISVs continue to invest millions to develop new applications that run on the mainframe.
Innovative mainframe technologies like an Integrated Information Processor, which helps free up computing capacity for business intelligence and transaction processing, makes the decision even easier. The mainframe’s sophisticated workload management capabilities are unmatched more sophisticated than any other in the market, and allows work to be prioritized based on business needs, with dynamic resource sharing across mix application workloads.
Keeping a Tight Rein on Costs
As the survey found, executives are under pressure to drive growth while managing costs. A simple but relatively complete calculation of the TCO on any infrastructure would comprise the cost of hardware, software licenses, environmentals (including real estate and utilities) and labor.
Based on this, server farms are one of the most expensive environments to maintain. According to the Wall Street Journal, distributed server farms today generate as much as 3,800 watts per square foot, compared to 250 watts per square foot in 1992, with thousands of dollars of cooling capacity needed for each server. Assuming 1,000 distributed servers producing 400 watts each, the electricity bill could hit more than USD 35,000 per month alone. By comparison, a single mainframe z9 generates 312 watts per square foot – one tenth the amount.
Because of this and more flexible hardware and software pricing strategies, total mainframe costs have fallen consistently since the mid-1990s and halved between 2000 and 2004. Can any other platform claim that?
Pundits Beware
Long time journalist and technology pundit Stewart Alsop said in March 1991, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996.” He was later featured in the IBM 2001 Annual Report eating his words and saying, “It’s clear that corporate customers still like to have centrally controlled, very predictable, reliable computing systems – exactly the kind of systems that IBM specializes in.
As more and more enterprises in new industries look for new and innovative ways to stay ahead of their competition, the mainframe be relevant and indeed, sought out, for both its decades-old capabilities and new technologies.
 Ho Lai Mun is the Singapore Country Manager for IBM System z, and leads the System z technical, Sales and marketing team. Prior, to his recent position, Lai Mun was the Country Manager for the IBM System i (eServer iSeries). He has spent most of his career in IBM with the now called Systems & Technology Group. He started his career with IBM as an Account Administrator and shortly has been with the group as a salesman, business partner representative and channels manager, and was also the first eSM in Singapore.
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