Despite the general received wisdom that
mainframe computers have long been consigned to the computing
dustbin,
business intelligence (BI) companies seem to be resurrecting
their use.
According to Madan Sheina, senior analyst at Ovum, the re
emergence of the mainframe was signified by the decision by Cognos
to make its BI software available on the IBM System z mainframe
running Linux.
“Mainframes are alive and kicking and remain critical components
of a company’s IT infrastructure, especially for mission-critical
high-volume transactional environments, like financial services,
where the mainframe has proven itself to be a trusted platform for
housing large amounts of data in a secure and centrally managed
environment,” suggested Madan for whom there were several benefits
to be had by putting BI on the mainframe.
“First, it enables enterprises to confidently (and smoothly)
scale up the performance of sophisticated
data analysis and other BI functions against larger volumes of
data. Second, since more customers view BI as a mission-critical
application, why not run it on a resilient and scalable
mission-critical platform, which plays directly to the strengths of
the mainframe, namely industrial-strength processing power,
high-availability, reliability, security and centralised IT
manageability. Finally, BI is still a growing market. Pushing the
software onto the mainframe helps companies to both protect and
leverage their mainframe investments (i.e. using BI to drive legacy
modernisation without replacement of the mainframe).”
Research by Ovum has shown that that mainframe revenues are
rising and MIPS capacity is at an all-time high, the growth almost
certainly due to existing mainframe users either upgrading or
growing their mainframe usage. Mainframe technology vendors are
also introducing new pricing strategies to make it more
cost-effective for both the hardware and software fronts that
extend its reach to companies that once felt priced out.
Despite its optimism Sheina conceded that some challenges still
existed. “Mainframes have to co-exist in a heterogeneous
client-server, web SOA, software as a service and increasingly
cloud computing world. Customers need to ask themselves how easily
they blend into these modern architectures. “[And] even though data
volumes and workload processes are spiking, mainframe datacentre
staffing levels have not changed significantly, despite these
increases. That perhaps remains the greatest challenge for the
mainframe. There are simply not enough young, bright people wanting
to learn mainframe skills over PHP, Java, Flash, and other ‘hip’
Web 2.0 technologies.”