Mammoth mainframe computers far from extinct - Sydney Morning Herald

Production technician Mike White inspects the main chassis of IBM's new zEnterprise EC12 mainframe computer at the company's Poughkeepsie, NY, manufacturing site.

If you thought mainframes â€" that bastion of super technical, big and complex IT - were on the way out in this era of smartphones, apps and cloud computing, think again. Mainframe computer manufacturers continue to pump out the machines in the knowledge that their clients cannot offer the end-user buzz if not for the mammoths chugging away in the back room.

“They just keep going strong, don't they,” said John Crooks, senior consulting IT executive, systems & technology group, IBM A/NZ, on the eve of the launch of the company's latest mainframe product.

“People talk to computers and mainframes but through a different medium - a tablet, a cell phone or a PC, they really aren't aware it's the mainframe doing the work.”  

“At the moment, government is obviously an area where we've seen an increase across the world of the growth of their influence. And when you catch a plane, all the reservations are done on the mainframes,” Crooks added.

IBM's new zEnterprise EC12 mainframe server. Photo: Supplied

“People talk to computers and mainframes but through a different medium - a tablet, a cell phone or a PC, they really aren't aware it's the mainframe doing the work.”

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Even though NASA decommissioned its last mainframe, an IBM Z9, in February, and companies such as Fujitsu, Hitachi and IBM - the vendor responsible for the majority of the world's mainframes -, say most large corporations, financial institutions and government agencies still buy them.

However, customers want them to be simpler â€" blame it on Apple and the "appification" of the tech world â€" or the sheer complexity of enterprise systems that have become so multilayered, a whole new industry has sprung up on the promise of making them more intuitive, and data simpler to interpret. Now even IBM has been asked to simplify its mainframes.

The company invests $US1 billion in each new version, according to Crooks, and this time has poured another $US2 billion to make the new zEC12 simpler.

“This is one of the things our customers have said, 'our systems as getting far more complex - what can you do to help us make it simpler?',” he said.

Crooks said the company has added built-in firmware that could automatically learn patterns from systems running on the machine and alert operators when events diverged from the norm.

“There are third-party applications that do that, but they are not optimised for this environment. You have to say, 'look for these things'. This one actually learns from the system and based on that learning it says, 'this is different'.”

Last year IDC reported mainframe vendors in Australia exceeded their highest yearly revenues in just six months to March 2011 to more than $115 million. At the time, it said the results "defied doomsayers predictions".

The jury is still out, however, on whether mainframes will continue to run most of the planet. Although some say it is just an old name for servers, there are those who believe mainframes are too slow for the current pace of innovation, as reported by IT Pro.

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