One of the major IT stories today involves a technology that grew almost 70% year-on-year and practically doubled its market share.
The other involves something that a major research company thinks will only command about 5% of the market in 2015.
The first sounds like a clear-cut winner. The other sounds like something that is dying on the vine.
The first of these is the IBM mainframe; the other is Cloud Computing.
]]>Mention cloud computing to a mainframe professional, and he's likely to roll his eyes. Cloud is just a new name -- and a lot of hype -- for what mainframes have done for years, he'll say.
"A mainframe is a cloud," contends Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, a data management consultancy in Dunedin, Fla.
If you, like Toigo, define a cloud as a resource that can be dynamically provisioned -- that is, allocated and de-allocated on demand -- and made available within a company with security and good management controls, "then all of that exists already in a mainframe," he says.
]]>When they hear the word “mainframe,” today’s generation of IT pros may picture green-screen terminals and room-sized computers, but the traditional mainframe hasn’t stood still. With the announcement of its zEnterprise 196 last summer, IBM started to blend the mainframe and distributed systems worlds, at least for Unix and Linux operating systems, under the auspices of cloud computing.
According to Reed Mullen, leader of IBM System z Cloud Computing initiative, that cloud vision may come to include Windows and x86 server virtualization. “It is the stated intention of IBM to run Windows on System x blades within z/Enterprise -- you can run potentially everything there,” Mullen said. He declined to give a time frame for this feature, but “we know it is a missing piece from the mainframe story.”
]]>For months, IBM has been unhappy with French company TurboHercules SAS, because the latter has tried to develop an open source emulation of IBM mainframe systems. Moreover, TurboHercules is one company accusing IBM of anti-competitive activity in Europe.
Now Big Blue has greater cause of concern, as Microsoft has invested in TurboHercules. Not only might Microsoft be using the relationship as a way to attack its rival by proxy, but it could also see mainframe emulation as a tool in its quest to become a dominant force in cloud computing.
]]>Will cloud computing finally wear the mainframe market down like thousands of years of harsh weather?
Anyone selling a server or a cloud against a mainframe will surely say "yes" to that question. Cloud computing is another style of utility computing, but it clusters cheapo servers together instead of using a large monolithic machine. But the people who actually buy and use mainframes are not so down on the big iron. And that's because they have not just studied history, but lived it.
Successive generations of new computing architectures have ground down the mainframe market from its mighty heights in the 1970s and 1980s, but the venerable big bad boxes are still humming away out there, cranking through untold billions of transactions and making IBM many billions of dollars of revenue and a large chunk of its profits each year.
CA Technologies today announced the results of a new independent study revealing that 79 percent of IT organisations believe the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. Over 300 IT decision makers in ten countries responded to the CA Technologies commissioned survey, "Mainframe - The Ultimate Cloud Platform?"
The study also concluded that 44 percent of mainframe shops face workforce sustainability issues in keeping mission critical systems staffed.
In addition, 74 percent of respondents believe that the mainframe will have a role in any cloud computing initiative, and 70 percent agreed that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.
Additionally 82 percent of respondents reported that they intend to use the mainframe in the future either as much or more than today.
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With Microsoft now involved in cloud computing, via Office Web Apps and Facebook integration, and Google working with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, you may wonder where the mainframe fits into this exciting new world. You might also be curious about the role of IBM’s venerable Information Management System (IMS). Well, that’s what we’re going to explore.
]]>For proprietary companies clouds are a tough deal.
Clouds don’t care about operating systems. They don’t care about where data is. They don’t care about constraints like CPU speed, memory, or formats. They expand as needed, in the background.
Mainframes are not clouds. Neither IBM nor Oracle want you to know that. It would kill them for you to understand that.
]]>Asia Dent (right) must be the most famous face in Poughkeepsie today.
She was photographed by IBM PR recently putting a probe to a new 5.2 GHz chip that is at the heart of the company’s new zEnterprise mainframe, shipping next week.
Florian Mueller calls this the most dangerous product announcement of the century. That’s because zEnterprise could let IBM create a cloud monopoly among large enterprises, assimilating Linux under its mainframe patents.
]]>In “Cloud Computing Comes to a Desktop Near You”, I thought aloud about the direction that Microsoft, Google, and others are trying to take us. Do we really want or need to cloud-itize (cloudify? to make clowdsy?) every software process? Well, probably, yes. If we can securely and cost-effectively distribute IT to more efficient handlers of that IT (e.g., Microsoft or Google handling email and collaboration, Amazon handling storage), then there are some very powerful financial motivators at play.
But how do we get from here to there?
The move to the cloud is going to take a long time, and there will be many steps along the way. And, for some business processes and functions, we have to realize that we’ll keep some things in-house, even while we take advantage of what web services and cloud computing is bringing us. (A more full-featured, available-to-all middleware infrastructure.)
Let’s take GT Software’s Ivory Service Architect as an example. GT has developed software that is supposed to make it easier to take an existing business function that is available to your application and turn it into a web service. Your software can run on Windows, Linux, or even IBM’s System z mainframe family, all while being able to access existing business services on your mainframe system, which you’ve probably spent a lot of time and money on in terms of application development and tuning.
Mainframes? Web services? But why?
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