Mainframes Win on TCO

Mainframes can cut total cost of ownership significantly, says Jim Porell, distinguished engineer for System z at IBM. These platforms, which don't have to be overwhelmingly large, reduce manpower requirements and cut space, the time it takes to find problems, and other key metrics. The new generation of mainframes is capable of working fluidly with other computing approaches.

Question: How has the mainframe evolved?

Porell: Our heritage is in high-end transactional processing and database servers and doing it in a secure and resilient fashion. Our heritage is in COBOL, pl/I. Our initial input methods were punch card or dumb green screen. In the 1980s, people got PCs and, needless to say, liked the new graphic capabilities. A lot of work went into screen scraping the front end and moving more of the presentation side to the front-end processor. Meanwhile, the mainframes were getting bigger and faster and more resilient. There was instant failover even in different geographic regions. The front end of the mainframe has totally changed in the last 20 years. With that shift, obviously, we can move applications there. We started to build work flows that see gains in efficiencies. You can start working with Java and other programming approaches. It has completely modernized the programming environment. The PC and UNIX server software can run inside the mainframe. What's changed is that mainframes are hosting UNIX or Windows. It has totally changed the operations model.

Question: What basic models exist today?

Porell: I am holding up my hands with a space between them. One hand is the application server and one hand is a database server. That's the UNIX model. If I put my hands right next to each other, that's the virtualization model, which is available from VMware, Zen and others. If I put my hands on top of each other, that is the mainframe environment. If you look at the three environments, if one hand fails, you might slip to a backup site. But how do you coordinate backup mechanisms, security and other things? It might be the exact same code but the operations model is completely different in the three different styles of computing.

Question: From IBM's perspective, what characterizes the mainframe?

Porell: There are some characteristics with mainframe: You can program it. Now it's got that PAL 1 and open capabilities. It can use Linux, Java, J2E, Web services. It's a consistent programming model with the rest of the industry. Now what distinguishes it is redundancy in hardware, powering, processors and memory. If a hardware component fails, there is a backup. You don't get the blue screen or red screen of death. Then there are things like security. It does things with memory and hardware and software that inhibit buffer overflows and inhibit viruses and Trojans. A big part of this is running multiple workloads simultaneously in the same hardware box and in the same OS image. Because with virtualization I can run multiple workloads in the same hardware box, but typically dedicate one OS system to a given function because I am afraid of one workload compromising the service level of another workload. In many cases, I must buy additional software and other products to coordinate and operate the recovery mechanism. The real world is about collaboration. One computer does not solve all business problems, not the mainframe or UNIX or PC. It's all about collaboration.

Question: What distinguishes the mainframe from the TCO point of view?

Porell: What distinguishes mainframes is that they put in a lot of parts to dramatically reduce the cost. The elements include security and intrusions, the mean-time-between-failure and the number of people needed to manage the environment. That is probably the most significant. There is also electricity, floor space and cooling. There is the reduction in the elapsed time for work flow to occur. There is a reduction in the number of audit control points to meet governance and regulatory compliance and system diagnostics for problem determination.

Question: How can a mainframe be more deeply integrated into application development?

Porell: Let's quantify against what it takes to build an application. Typically, the application developer has everything on their desktop. They think they have everything to accomplish the task. The best tools for creating code on a PC today are using open source, Java and C++. Typically, the first inclination is to develop it on a PC - and to use it for the production server, the backup server and the development server. Generally, people do multiples of three for scale clustering. The other choice is take some of the code, not all of it, and port it to the mainframe. The PC environment is a physical appliance model. You have dedicated servers for specific functions. The mainframe is more of a virtual model. You take software and add it to the existing container and add capacity management and resilience.

Question: How much can this add to efficiency?

Porell: We've seen customers with 600 PCs with UNIX-type servers. VMware or Zen virtualization may knock it down to 60 servers. With a mainframe, you get it down to one server with maybe 25 engines, or processors, on a machine. Let's say you have 600 Oracle license verses 60 Oracle licenses versus 26 on a mainframe in each of the respective models. That is a tremendous savings. I'll give you another area, The total cost of upgrade. It's the difference between 600, 60 and 1. If I want to do an upgrade to Windows Vista from XP, how long would it take to do 600 servers, perhaps working on weekends? Almost a full year. If I have 60 servers, it would take maybe five weeks. In a mainframe environment, it would be less than four hours.

Still another area is capacity management. If I want to add capacity for the holiday season or some other spike, how long would it take to provision new processors and get them online? With 600, you probably need a purchase order and the labor and time to install new boxes. On a mainframe, you could have 26 engines with a couple of them idle. You could turn it on or off on demand without having to reboot.

Question: The model, however, isn't either/or - all three approaches can be used in unison.

Porell: It's not about the mainframe. All three of those models can coexist. You have the opportunity to use the best of each model. Part of the problem is that the industry grew up and the developers grew up in a PC world. We need to introduce the developers to mainframes.

In summary, Jim explains that what distinguishes mainframes is their inclusion of many parts which dramatically reduce the cost. It's time to educate new developers on the benefits of mainframes and how all infrastructure models can coexist.

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