Mainframes: What's Old Is New

Buell Duncan, IBM's general manager of ISV & Developer Relations and a longtime channel veteran, wants people to take a new look at an old platform - the mainframe:

(I)n 2005 (mainframe) zlinux continued to grow and by over 30 percent! in 2004 websphere application server moved to a common code base running on z. last year websphere portal server did as well and in 2006 websphere process server and websphere enterprise service bus will be available. the market has responded... in just 18 months, almost one third of all z customers now run on websphere!! by contrast, that number before was in the very low single digits. as ibm continues to invest in function and performance of websphere, db2 and linux on z there is more opportunity for application providers.

Meanwhile, over at the Mainframe Blog, Timothy Sipples makes his case:

I'll let you in on a dirty little industry secret: most server hardware makes mistakes...

There are few systems you can buy that don't make mistakes. The IBM mainframe is by far the most popular of these precision systems. (The others tend not to be general purpose computers.) In effect every instruction runs twice for comparison, providing execution integrity. There's no way you can shut off this feature. z/OS, Linux, and all the other mainframe operating systems enjoy this benefit transparently, continuously. 2+2 always equals 4, even if the cleaning crew commits the grave sin of carrying a mobile telephone within six feet of your mainframe.

Industry old timers still tell stories of the IBM mainframe salesmen who could sell three systems by February and spend the next ten months playing golf.

In an era with hardware margins that are practically in negative territory, Duncan and Sipple may wind up with a growing audience for their message.