As large-scale mainframe integrations shift focus from the front to the back end, we look into the essential ingredients and stages for project success.
The IBM 360 was released in 1964, and began shipping 12 months later. Up until this point large-scale computers were purpose built, whereas the IBM 360 used the same combination of hardware and software, and came with a whole 8MB of memory, was rented rather than sold, for anywhere between AU$2700 and AU$115,000 a month.
Honeywell, RCA, NCR, Burroughs, and GE jumped on the mainframe bandwagon, and within five years the installed base of 17,000 business machines, grew to 90,000 worldwide.
For three decades the mainframe reigned supreme. Then during the nineties, personal computers grew into servers and then server farms, and mainframes were increasingly depicted as dinosaurs and decommissioned in favour of their lightweight, fast-moving counterparts.
The last decade has seen a mainframe technology battle, rumours of its imminent demise, Sun's cheeky Mainframe Migration Program, and a rapidly changing business environment. Still, mainframe vendors are reporting growth.
This year Big Blue celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first mainframe with the release of the e-Server zSeries z890 and z990 mainframes. It claims the market is going from strength to strength.
Andy Cooper, information management and brand manager for Computer Associates (CA) in Australia and New Zealand, says the business mood regarding mainframes is subject to trends. "Through the nineties some people saw mainframes as expensive legacy systems, something difficult to get value from," Cooper says. "Now we are seeing organisations opting to keep their mainframe systems rather than replace them, and looking for ways to get better value out of them."
This shift in attitude according to Cooper is due in part to new technologies which better enable businesses to use the data and processing power on their mainframes.
"The bottom line is that a little while ago people thought they would get stuck with expensive, inflexible systems while the rest of the market moved forward," Cooper says. "That is no longer the case."
However, while the tool sets available for mainframe integration projects are advancing rapidly, and providing end users with greater flexibility, the projects themselves are still large and daunting. Not in the least because they invariably deal with the very applications on which businesses are built.
Stability is perhaps the most fundamental reason as to why the mainframe still sits at the core of most business computing, according to Boris Ivancic, area sales director for Attachmate in the Asia-Pacific.
"We still find for high-transaction, highly-scalable environments. There's no better way to run than on a mainframe," Ivancic says. "A lot of the mid-tier vendors argue they can do things more effectively on smaller boxes, but if that were the case more major organisations would have made the shift."
Given that many data-dependent corporates have their core operations hardwired into the mainframe environment, Ivancic believes we are unlikely a move away from this.
Nonetheless, in the mid-business sector, there is still a gradual migration to server-based, or thin client computing. While CA's Cooper says big business is increasingly opting to leverage the full value from their mainframe systems, some are simply looking for a way out.
"It will always come down to the specifics of the organisation. There are some organisations where it absolutely makes sense to decommission the mainframe," Cooper says. "Where commercially it is a better option to migrate off onto another architecture."
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