Technologies: You've Been Mainframed

The rebirth of the mainframe market is not a horrible trick played by Jeremy Beadle ? it?s a serious business, writes Sean Hallahan

Depending on who you believe, the mainframe is a dinosaur that has outlived its time or a beast that has been hibernating and is now being revived.

What is certain is that the image of the mainframe has changed both technologically and in marketing terms. Companies that in the past have declared the mainframe market moribund are now claiming to have mainframe class machines of their own. More importantly, they are selling these machines through the channel. Even IBM, the doyen of the mainframe business, is to sell some of its System/390 machines through resellers.

The old mainframes had a number of defining features, many of which have been overtaken by the march of time. Performance was measured in terms of Mips (millions of instructions per second), a method of expressing processing power.

A second characteristic was the nature of the operating system which, up until recently, was proprietary in nature. Storage capacity was a third feature ? because of the nature of mainframe technology the systems had to be installed in a special temperature-controlled computer room.

Finally, price could be taken as an indicator.

Many of these indicators, however, are no longer valid. Most of the mainframe suppliers ? even IBM, which had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table ? now offer a measure of open systems even within their proprietary operating environments.

If price alone was the criterion for identifying a mainframe then open systems supplier Sun Microsystems would certainly qualify. Its Ultra Enterprise 1000 server has an entry-level price of #785,000 and rises to #5 million for the high-end system. The system can support 20 terabytes of online storage, making it a mainframe class machine, 64Gb of memory and 64 I/O channels. Sun is fully committed to the channel and will market the machine through resellers.

But Sun has set a realistic limit to its ambitions. It acknowledges it will not be able to displace the System/390 and the MVS operating system and intends to adopt a strategy that has become familiar over the years of surrounding the IBM mainframes by the Enterprise 1000 systems. It is not a new policy, but it has been successful in the past. Digital had the same strategy in the 1980s, which contributed to it becoming the number two player in the market until it fell on hard times. Sun has also moved into the storage market where again it is shying away from direct competition with IBM and targeting the independent storage supplier EMC.

The lines between powerful open systems boxes and so-called proprietary mainframes have blurred, but there are still distinctions in terms of marketing. Bull, which has its own range of mainframes based around its proprietary General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS) environment, has no plans to sell them through the channel.

Peter Reed, Bull marketing manager for Enterprise, contends that the company?s corporate users insist on dealing direct with the manufacturer. ?They like to be close to the supplier, it is the kind of environment they value,? Reed says.

But the company has plans to sell its high-end Unix clustered offering, Sagister, through the channel. According to Reed, the differentiation between the high-end open systems products and the proprietary mainframe systems has been gradually eroded. Last year, the company unbundled its systems management software for Sagister from the hardware and marketed it as Open Enterprise Software Suite (OESS). The aim is to bring mainframe-style systems management discipline to the open systems market.

Reed believes that the battle between the suppliers of proprietary operating systems and open systems vendors is now largely over. ?I am in the happy position of being in charge of both the mainframe and the open systems technology. The industry did itself a disservice over the battle between proprietary and Unix operating systems,? he says.

A new and almost nauseous atmosphere of harmony now permeates the industry. Companies that a few years ago were denouncing IBM and the other mainframe manufacturers for locking their customers into their products by means of the proprietary nature of their operating systems are now embracing them with open arms. Some are even prepared to admit that they were wrong in their original attitudes.

For example, Sun ? one of the original critics of the mainframe environment ? now acknowledges that mainframes still have a role to play. Originally, mainframes used bipolar technology as a method of chip fabrication. Bipolar technology is fast but extremely expensive and generates a great deal of heat, with the result that systems require water cooling. This involved constructing special computer rooms with miles of plumbing.

The move over to the slower, but cheaper, complimentary metal oxide silicon (CMOS) chips reduced the overall costs of ownership. IBM is thought to be ahead of many of its rivals in CMOS technology, but other bipolar manufacturers are striving to catch up.

?Sun was one of those companies that said sack the plumber and move to distributed systems. But there are still an awful lot of System/390 machines out there,? says John Pattenden, Sun server product manager. He admits ?there were a whole bunch of areas where Unix was inferior? to proprietary operating systems, citing systems management, transaction throughput and I/O bandwidth as examples.

But Pattenden believes that Sun is fast catching up with its mainframe rivals in many of these areas. ?Parallel Sysplex [IBM?s term for clustering] may be a bit better at clustering than Sun at the moment but we are getting closer,? he says.

This mutual self aggrandisement extends to IBM. ?We would never claim that the 390 is absolutely everything to everybody,? said Tim Jobson, IBM regional manager for System/390. IBM has now positioned the System/390 as a server product rather than a piece of hardware. The company already sells some of its low-end System/390 systems through resellers and has plans to extend the programme, according to Jobson.

It has appointed two resellers, Anix and Cotec, to sell the R/390, P/390 and the Multiprise 2000, its low-end mainframe. The R/390 is a mainframe with a Risc System 6000 card which allows it to Run Unix and the P/390 is a PC-based system. The Multiprise 2000 is an entry-level mainframe system with an internal hard disk and open systems adaptor cards that allow it to emulate the look and feel of Unix or NT.

?The Multiprise is a server or an application machine depending on the customer?s requirements. For some customers it will be their only machine and with the integrated disk it gives the customer an integrated system. For other customers it will sit alongside other machines as an application server,? Jobson says.

Jobson believes that what the industry is experiencing is a return to centralisation rather than a return to the mainframe as such. But for all that there are telling signs that independent software vendors (ISVs) are recognising that the mainframe has a part to play in the future of business. Oracle, SAP and Baan have all ported their products to the S/390.

?This isn?t charity. Their customers at the high end with experience of running distributed systems have asked them to do so,? says Jobson.

?Obviously, as an IBM employee, I would like to see customers using DB2, but we accept that we live in a multi-hardware world and that if a customer wants to run Oracle then it will be able to do so on the System/390.?

According to Jobson, the distributed processing machines are gradually being incorporated into the data centre. ?A lot of users had set up mini data centres, but discovered that the data centre was better able to handle security and backup, which they did not want to be bothered with. It made sense to put them back into the data centre.?

Analyst IDC estimates that 1996 was a boom year for the shipment of mainframe Mips, which grew by 77 per cent to 575,000 Mips. This view is confirmed by IBM, which shipped more mainframe Mips last year than at any time in its history. But the mainframe companies are not making the sort of money they were from the machines and most are hoping that the internet will boost sales. They are also confident that the network computer or thin client machine will bring forth a mainframe revival. But in that respect they will face considerable competition from the likes of Sun, Digital and Hewlett Packard (HP).

Analyst Bloor Research predicts that there will be a return to centralised computing driven by the high, long-term cost of ownership of PC networks. If Bloor Research is right then the mainframe companies are in a better position to take advantage of the trend than at any time in recent years.

IBM is trying to increase its share of the small to medium enterprise market where it has always been weak. The bold decision to sell the Multiprise 2000 through the channel means that it considers the machine a viable rival to the offerings of HP, Digital and others.

Dennis Keeling, author of the Ovum report Ovum Evaluates Corporate Finance Systems, does not believe that the mainframe is dead, but he does not believe that it is attracting any new customers. But he recognises that there was an over-simplified view of the ease with which customers could move to an open systems and client/server environment. ?What we are seeing is the move to open systems and client/server is fine in theory but is fraught with problems in practice,? he says.

Keeling believes that corporations that were in theory intending to move toward open systems and client/server machines have in fact moved back to the mainframe. ?We were going through a phase in 1993 where mainframes were dying. In 1995 to 1996 they began to revive because companies realised they could not do without the mainframe ? 1995 and 1996 saw a resurgence of the mainframe. The fact that companies like SAP, Peoplesoft and Oracle are porting their applications to the mainframe shows that it is not dead.?

Keeling believes that only IBM has truly understood the shift that has taken place in the past two years. ICL, Bull, Siemens Nixdorf and Unisys have missed the point. ?They have virtually walked away from the mainframe and are talking about open systems,? he says. Keeling does not totally accept that the network computer will make the PC obsolete, but he does see it as having a big impact on the market.

?I deal with a lot of corporate IT directors who say to me that they cannot take a PC away from someone who has been using it for years. But there are plenty of people out there who are using dumb terminals who would love a network computer,? he says. Keeling also points out that mainframe skills in programming and operation have been long established and that to change to a Unix-based system would mean considerable costs in staff retraining.

With the launch of machines such as Sun?s Ultra Enterprise 1000, the dividing line between a mainframe and a high-end mid-range system has become narrower. But if Keeling?s view proves correct, there is still a considerable gap between the mainframe-based client/server system and the open systems model. In the past few years the major manufacturers of systems have moved more and more to the channel as a means of selling their systems.

With machines like the Ultra Enterprise 1000 being sold through the channel there is no reason why the mainframe players should not do the same. Where IBM has led, others will surely follow. The channel has become more sophisticated as machines have grown more powerful, networks larger and applications more critical.

IBM has put its toe in the water by offering the Multiprise 2000 through the channel. With the move from bipolar to CMOS becoming standard, it is likely that other manufacturers will follow suit.