Posted on 06/21/2011 10:36:40 AM PDT by ShadowAce
What does two and two make? The answer: a myth.
It’s a joke, but not a very funny one, for IBM’s System z team: when they talk to customers who refuse to consider a move to a mainframe environment, two and two is their objection: "it will take me two years to do it, and I’m going to spend two million dollars in the struggle," they say.
If this were true, you’d have to be crazy, a masochist or have a really bad data centre to embark on a plan like this. Your staff would despise you, your CEO would disown you, and your users would pretend to be busy when you came to tell them that you’re rewriting their applications for them.
But the assumption is false. Today’s mainframe deployments can be measured in weeks, not years. You don’t have to rewrite or migrate many of your apps (though you might discover that hundreds aren’t being used any more), and the bill won't swallow your hardware budget for years.
If you subscribe to the two and two myth, you are not considering all your options: that’s the conclusion of our Register white paper “Reconsider the Mainframe”.
Let’s give you some other numbers with twos in them: $200,000, the effective entry level for a mainframe deployment. Twenty per cent: the power used for the same workload for a mainframe compared to running it on virtualised x86 servers. Two decades: the time during which IDC reports that mainframe workloads have been growing by 19 per cent year-on-year.
Add to this that staff productivity in the mainframe environment has increased by a factor of 18 in the last 10 years, and the economics of the mainframe are radically different to the last time you entered the numbers in an ROI spreadsheet. As, come to think of it, is the spreadsheet.
For those with long memories, it’s remarkable that there’s even a mainframe left to reconsider that’s not a rusting hulk. If the mainframe was a horse in the late 1980s, they’d have shot it.
As x86 servers piled on the power in the 1990s while prices tumbled, most analysts and many users consigned the mainframe to history – and with good reason. The momentum towards moving workloads to a server environment was a drip-drip effect, and packaged software innovation made the case unanswerable for many applications.
Startups and growing businesses never seemed to hit the point at which it was appropriate to make the case for the mainframe, because to switch back from their client-server applications to big iron ran counter to all the conventional wisdom of the data centre – especially after 2000, when we assumed that virtualisation and the cloud would solve the problems of management and utilisation.
Also, departments became accustomed to having their own servers, and jealously protected them. Lovingly patched, with their own apps, sometimes their own management, and – crucially - their own budgets, consolidation into a standardised mainframe environment seemed like yesterday’s news.
As you know, it hasn’t quite worked out. For many types of application, the mainframe has never been bettered. Resilience, availability and manageability have become more important. And just when you thought budgets were under control, the price of virtualisation software has rocketed.
As x86 sprawl threatens manageability, the System z security and management environment is now available for Linux and Java applications, run on their own blades. And here’s a number with a zero in it: no one has ever hacked the mainframe.
None of this means that all, or even most, big IT departments will be using the mainframe in the near future. But as Reconsider the Mainframe points out that, you’d be foolish to dismiss the technology because you still believed a bunch of out-of-date myths.
You can download our paper, 'Reconsider the Mainframe' here. ®
“no one has ever hacked the mainframe”
I suppose that’s true for some very narrow definitions of “hacked”.
Making all the terminals attached to a mainframe suddenly start scrolling “The Call of Cthulhu” from start to finish is not a hack, apparently.
Who is running mainframes anymore? A few select places perhaps but all the best have been buried.
Who is left? IBM and HP. Anyone else?
And HP killed the best version of UNIX, OSF/1, choosing their own HP-SUX.
Not really. Basic deployments, for smaller shops just looking for server consolidation, they pretty much give it away. Now, if you're looking for Enterprise level reliability/redundancy(and multiple physical processors per box), then it starts to cost serious $$$,$$$.
Fujitsu and Hitachi I believe.
Almost all large banks are running mainframes.
Sorry but the users will always go for for a “Shrink Wrap Solution” if at all possible over a big iron commitment
hand winding core memory bump.
The Government~! Of Course....
Go to any local city or county central officess and you will find a nice old multi-million dollar mainframe that does 1/10th of the work they need to do at 10 times the cost~!
I worked in one such place- The mainframe did nothing useful, there were AT LEAST 4 full-time people to keep it running day and night. One guys full-time job was to print this months reports, then shred and burn last months. No one ever look at these reports.
Their usuall topic of conversation each day? How to manipulate the rules and overtimes to maximize their retirement -last calculated at 78K per year- before they 'retired' and were re-hired as contractors, to do the same 'work' at $75K per year.
Banks, insurance companies, payroll providers, airlines reservations, financial management concerns, telecommunications services, subscription billing vendors, governments, the military ...
Yep. Mainframes are dinosaurs. /s
and Unisys as well
Hospitals! I’m a DC engineer for a hospital system, and the new mainframes are very slick, sleek and quick to deploy. They’re still working out the bugs, but we recently integrated a newly-purchase Z10 with our SAN. Going on just short of a few weeks from unpack to power-up was pretty impressive.
I’ll go back to the mainframe when they bring back punch cards. /s
BFL. The folks who keep calling for the death of the mainframe really just don’t understand their place in the computing ecosystem.
What do you call a JCL specialist that takes care of procs?
A Proc-tologist!How do you keep a DB2 DBA in suspense?
I'll tell you tomorrowMainframe Acronyms:
- IBM - I've Been Misled
- MVS - Man VS System
- TSO - Terrible System Overhead
- SMS - System Mangled Storage
Many big corporations with global operations run multiple “mainframes”.
I did some work at the 3rd largest electronics distributor in the world. Overnight their mainframes - in USA, Asia and Europe - are keeping all their global databases number-crunched, up-to-date and backed up; and during the day the same equipment - world wide - looks like a bunch of “networks” comprising their entire global Intranet, simultaneously running some old “green-screen” and up-to-date “X86” file-server and client-server apps.
IBM has reinvented what a “mainframe” can do, so that it can do just about anything through virtualization of the supposed non-mainframe world, on the mainframe.
I know one outfit that runs a small “server farm” on a mainframe.
Lately I think “flash” memory is getting the bragging rights - for now.
Someday, maybe “nano” technology will be used to create a “massive capacity” “disk drive”, at the molecular level, requiring infinitesimally little power to change a "0" to a "1".
As a former Cobol Cowboy I regret the day I left the Mainframe world.
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