Do mainframes have a future?

I was reviewing Unisys continues to modernize its mainframes with mobile, open systems additions, a report authored by John Abbott, Founder and Distinguished Analyst of the 451 Group and was thinking about the future of the mainframe and whether that configuration really has a future. I think it does, albeit built upon a transformed view of what a mainframe really is. Before launching into that subject, I had to think about what does the word mainframe really mean. After all, at first they were single physical systems that addressed all of the requirements of a computing environment including processing, memory, storage, networking and support of local and remote user access. All of that computing power was managed by a single operating system, often developed solely and only for the purpose of managing a single supplier's systems.

Over time, each of those functions became the focus of intense development and enhancement. Each became faster, offered increased capacity and yet, the entire system was still managed by a single operating system.

Distributed computing approaches were developed to bring computing power closer to the user and allow many systems to be harnessed together to address the workloads organizations needed. This, of course, created many different parallel lines of development and reformed what the concept "mainframe" meant.

Although some would reserve the word "mainframe" to refer to a system running something like IBM's z/OS or Unisys' OS 2200, increasingly any large computer configuration, regardless of the operating system(s) managing it, is called a mainframe.

Today's mainframe is only vaguely related to the first machines in this category. Although it may be supporting the work of tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, it may really be a large number of separate systems harnessed together and only presenting the appearance of a single computing resource.

So, on the one hand, single vendor systems appear to be suffering under the onslaught of Windows and Linux-based systems, the concept of the mainframe goes on.