50 Years Young: A Look at How the Mainframe Has Evolved

In biological evolution, species evolve by adapting to environmental changes and an ever-shifting competitive landscape. This adaptation occurs across generations over a long period of time. The result is species that are extremely well adapted to a biological niche within an ecosystem. Yet a small change in the ecosystem can greatly challenge a species’ place within that ecosystem. The species either adapts or is outcompeted. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” is powered by adaptability.

It is not so different within the man-made world of IT.  I still feel that OS2 was the better PC operating system in its day, but Windows proved to have the upper hand in adapting to the fast-changing personal computing environment of the 80’s. You know which one is still around.
The Mainframe is turning 50 next year. With this in mind I recently had a conversation with an industry analyst who remembers his colleagues predicting the demise of the mainframe because they saw it being replaced by Unix—a powerful distributed platform.  Today, he believes, and even his colleagues biased toward distributed systems agree, that the Mainframe will continue to thrive as Unix heads for extinction—all because of the disruptive success of Linux.
The Mainframe Is a Survivor
Today’s mainframe is completely different from its predecessor at every level—hardware, software, and application.
In the 60s and 70s the mainframe was IT. All computing was “data center” computing. We remember the image of IT as the “glass house.” The data center was a hallowed temple with restricted access and end-users totally unaware of how anything got done. Then computing resources smashed through the glass wall to land as departmental servers and personal computers.
Through the 80s and 90s PCs and client server architectures delivered real business value. But even as the promise of distributed computing was realized, the reality of performance limits and high operational costs began to hit home. Although the pundits still predicted the mainframe’s demise, it was already obvious that the economics of moving everything out of the data center were just not there.  At the same time, IBM continued to invest in their platform and improve the core qualities that made the mainframe superior.
After we survived Y2K, the internet explosion really took hold. The internet set us on a course for the post-PC era that we are entering today. Mobile devices are the personal computing power of choice today. All of those distributed devices focus their traffic back onto the ever-busier mainframe, where transactions are processed and critical data resides. There is no doubt that the mainframe will be sitting in a data center humming when the last PC has its hard disk removed.
The Mainframe Today
The mainframe is the high-performance heart of any IT organization lucky enough to have one. It’s the back-bone of our global economy—all major financial institutions rely on mainframes for its extreme performance, reliability, and security. It is the only platform reliably capable of hosting the database and transaction processing requirements that the Global 2000 depend on for business-critical operations. Perhaps the notable exceptions are Google and Amazon with their incredible server farms. Yet, even they could probably achieve their goals more cheaply, more dependably, and with less environmental impact if they hadn’t evolved from a smaller distributed environment and a mindset biased by that evolutionary history. Time will tell, and economic realities will rule, even for them.
Leading software companies understand the importance of the Mainframe and have introduced modern software  that meets the needs and preferences of a new generation of IT professionals.
The mainframe has also become the most economic server consolidation platform for Linux workloads. About 33% of mainframe shops do this today and only departmental politics and religious affiliation to the incumbent prevent others from following suit.
IBM has fine-tuned the latest incarnations of the mainframe to run Java on z/OS very efficiently and to scales that outpace all other platforms. In talking with our customers I see the early evidence of a return of new application workloads to z/OS such as cutting-edge Java applications that interact in real-time with mainframe hosted data, with zero network latency.
With the release of the zBC12 IBM is offering an alternative to the current non-mainframe customer base who might like to adopt centralized computing for economic efficiencies, probably using Linux rather than the traditional z/OS. The new machine can run as many as 520 virtual severs in 10 square feet with about a 10^th of the power and floor space requirements. This is one mean, green machine and it seems inevitable that, as IBM pursues this course, the mainframe will continue to be a staple for businesses of any real size wanting the performance, reliability, and security that come with in-house, private IT.
In recent years we have seen the rise of distributed virtualization, the emergence of cloud and Big Data analytics.  Now, concerns about environmental issues (like power consumption) and the merging of analytics and transaction servers have many IT leaders taking a fresh look at the mainframe as a platform for new applications and services. The mainframe has never been better adapted to meet the current and future needs of IT.
Image used under Creative Commons License courtesy of  ka2rina.

 

David Hodgson

Senior VP of Product Management and Strategy at CA Technologies

David Hodgson is a senior VP of Product Management and Strategy at CA Technologies. He is focused on CA’s Mainframe portfolio and keeping it relevant in the evolving world of IT. With a focus on the flagship product, Chorus, he leads a team that is delivering innovations to enable the mainframe to be a critical part of a private and hybrid cloud infrastructure, big data analysis and accessible from mobile devices. David joined CA in 2000 and has 30 years of experience in the software industry spanning support, services, development, IT management, process and operations, and business development. Now a US citizen, David was born and educated in the UK. David can be followed on Twitter (@dmgh7).

http://blogs.ca.com/mainframe-voice/2013/09/20/50-years-young-a-look-at-how-the-mainframe-has-evolved/