Mainframes: Still going strong after all these years

In May this year Sun Microsystems announced it had successfully transferred its 1,000th customer from the "complex, closed, mainframe environment" to Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise servers running its Solaris Unix variant. Hailing the move as "driving computing dinosaurs towards extinction," Sun claimed to be helping customers cut expenses in IT staffing and software licences.

Around the same time, the supposedly buttoned-down and overly bureaucratic IBM reacted to the latest in a long line of jibes against its 30-year-old platform -- which some analysts estimate continues to contribute up to 40 percent of the company's revenue. It did the one thing no one expected, and showed it has a sense of humour. Deciding to roll with the punches, IBM announced that its new mainframe line, the eServer zSeries 990, would be known as the T-Rex. "It was a bit of a post-modern joke from IBM and I'm not sure everyone got the joke," says IBM's senior eServer consultant Doug Nielson.

Undoubtedly a bold marketing move but maybe more people would have got the joke had IBM pushed it a little further and nicknamed the eServer after a bird instead of a dinosaur? The theory that dinosaur's weren't in fact wiped out by a fiery asteroid but slowly evolved into birds has been rolling around academia for years. Whether the theory is true or not, the analogy works well for IBM and Unisys, the other remaining major mainframe vendor, as they try to reposition big iron as still being alive and well. Mainframes have not become extinct, the argument goes -- they have simply evolved into a slightly more nimble and flexible form.

Ironically, the very trends that were supposed to wipe out stodgy mainframes have contributed to their renaissance. We're talking, of course, about e-business and the Internet. IBM's Nielson says e-business has been the major evolutionary force shaping the development of the IBM mainframe. Some dot-coms have even opted to use the zSeries as their first and only platform, he contends. "We didn't see this until a few years ago but what the mainframe has always been good at is just what you seem to need from a high-end e-business server," he says.

Any discussion around mainframes invariably leads to the issues of cost -- some Unisys machines retail up to $22m -- but a recent research note from analyst firm Forrester says that while big iron is expensive, it can be a flexible option. "Companies should aim their mainframes at e-business," the analyst group wrote. "The S/390 and the new zSeries servers are expensive, but many large companies already own one. Building an e-business infrastructure on the same monster system means lower marginal costs for increasing capacity than investing in new servers. Being able to pop in a new processor or two without even having to reboot gives firms flexibility to expand to accommodate e-business demands."

IBM has shipped about 4,000 of its zSeries mainframes, which first launched back in October 2000 with the eServer zSeries 900. Nielson says this may not sound a lot compared to the number of Intel servers shipped in the same period, but it is a lot for machines that mostly retail for well over a million pounds: "Is that a lot of mainframes? You bet -- it's the most successful mainframe IBM has ever had."

.Net and Java

Unisys has not shipped the same kind of numbers -- hardly surprising since the company is several orders of magnitude smaller than IBM. And rather than attributing the continuation of its mainframe business to the dynamic but non-specific term e-business, Unisys ClearPath Plus product manager Colin Gash says existing legacy customers continue to provide the bulk of the vendor's business.

"One of the prime things we have to do in this so-called mainframe arena is to carry on servicing the requirements of our high-end customers, and these continue to grow at 30 percent a year," says Gash. "You are talking 10,000 connected users in a secure, recoverable environment. A whole network of distributed systems would have a go at it but would struggle."

But although Unisys mainly supports existing customers it is still continuing to develop the platform to keep pace with developments such as Web services (http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/specials/webservices/). It recently expanded its range of mainframes with the launch of its ClearPath Plus Libra 185 machine early this year, which supports Microsoft's .Net infrastructure as well as Sun's Java. The move mirrors a similar strategy by IBM which ported its Websphere Java Web platform onto the zSeries.

But despite continued development, Unisys has admitted that mainframes aren't its mainstay and ClearPath Plus sales aren't increasing. In fact the company recently said revenues from mainframe line have been decreasing by a double-digit percentage.

Linux is fun

While Unisys has pushed the idea of running Windows alongside its OS2200 operating system on ClearPath Plus, IBM has been pushing Linux. This open-source operating system, in turn, seems to have reinvigorated the zSeries. IBM's Nielson claims that around 20 percent of his company's mainframe shipments are now Linux-based systems.

"One thing the mainframe certainly needed was new applications, speed, youth, and fun -- dare I even say. Linux brings all of that. What Linux needed was commercial respectability and industrial strength and Linux on the mainframe does that. It turns out to be a very good combination," he says.

The way the zSeries is designed allows multiple copies of Linux to be run on the same machine, a feature IBM uses to create virtual server farms. "We can run thousands of copies of Linux on the single machine. The resources of that machine can be turned second by second to the problem. Compare that to a server farm where one box is maxed out and the other one is idle and they can't help each other."

TThe ability to consolidate a large numbers of servers onto a smaller number of mainframes is a recent trend that that sees the whole move from centralised to distributed systems -- popularised in the late 80s and early 1990s -- come full circle.

"Y2K caused a lot of our customers to count their servers, and some of them got a real fright when they found out how many machines they had," says Nielson. "It's not so much a technical problem as a people issue. If you're supporting thousands of small machines you are going to need a lot of people to do it. What we are now seeing is customer's downsizing to the mainframe which is a complete reversal of where the industry went in the 90s. Now they can't get the machine room door closed because of all these little Intel boxes."

Germany's fourth largest commercial bank, Commerzbank, recently consolidated applications that were running on eight smaller IBM System/390 servers onto five new IBM eServer zSeries mainframes.

"Consolidating smaller servers into a reduced number of mainframes not only allows us to cut costs, it also ensures our IT infrastructure will be able to keep processing huge volumes of data smoothly," explains Niels Diemer, head of mainframe programming at Commerzbank IT Production.

Page Two: Mainframe or server?

The only issue with the evolution instead of extinction theory, is that it raises the question: have mainframes changed so much that the term 'mainframe' has become redundant? Is big iron that runs Linux, or even Windows, as well as being .Net and J2EE compliant, simply a high-end server?

Neither Unisys or IBM have could provide a firm definition of what the word mainframe actually means anymore. Nielson claims that IBM has had an on-off relationship with the term. "IBM has been somewhat schizophrenic about the use of the term mainframe. There was a time when we turned away from it because it seemed to represent a lot of the thing we were trying to leave behind. But now we are quite happy to use it again," he says.

Unisys' Gash admits the term is confusing and may not be around for too much longer. "It is all extremely blurred but I guess a mainframe today is defined as a system that primarily runs on a proprietary OS along with other newer features. We can run the next Windows or Linux on our mainframe systems. We all know intuitively if not specifically what we mean because there are so few real mainframes left," he says.

Semantic arguments aside, it is clear that mainframes -- under whatever name -- will continue to be an important platform in industries such as telecoms, government and financial services. Ironically, while IBM and to some extent Unisys have been able to reposition their mainframes thanks in part to the rise in popularity of Linux, analysts claim Sun could be the one facing an uncertain future. The combination of Linux on cheap Intel boxes has hit Sun's server revenues hard. Following the recent restatement of its fourth-quarter results from a $12m profit to $1.04bn loss -- Sun is unlikely to issue more press releases associating its competitors with the words dinosaur or extinction any time soon.