Aceshardware

"Since 1994," he said, "I have written many times about the mainframe, and in each I have explained, and repeated, why it seems to be misunderstood by many, mostly younger folks, who have presumed that it must be over the hill, out of touch, or dead as a dinosaur."

Said Kahn, "The bottom line is always the same -- don't criticize what you haven't taken the time to understand."

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Server ... Die/3.html

Server sales, Q2, revenue, YoY

overall: -30.1%

x86: -28.1%
non-x86: -32.2%
Unix: -30.9%
Sun/SPARC: -39%
IBM/mainframe: -39%

Oooops! Being tied with SPARC for biggest sales decrease in Q2 doesn't
seem like something to brag about.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21989209

http://www.ibm.com/investor/sharedv3/au ... webcastini

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/ea ... 09_SLD.pdf

Paul,

Go post your numbers elsewhere, they have nothing to do with my post. Maybe you need to read this quote again, and let it sink in:

You post a link to an article about "the mainframe is coming back" and you don't think the most recent
actual sales data for mainframes vs alternatives is relevent? How do you breath with your head so far
up your fundament?

BTW, those are not *my* numbers, they come from IDC, IBM, and Sun so get a grip on reality already.

I've got a far better grip on reality than you, Paul. I work in the real world, where companies actually put computers to use. I do not put much weight in sales numbers for a single quarter, particularly when the quarter in question both reflects one of the largest economic downturns in US history and corresponds with a normal cyclical downturn in mainframe sales due to the z10 being over a year old. BTW, I happen to have a brand spanking new z10 in my computer room - it came in last week.

The article I linked to was about the 45 year history of the mainframe, and why it is still viable today. The article is NOT about how many mainframes were sold in the last quarter.

Of course, you are well aware of all this, but you are more interested in trying to score "points" than in partaking in an intelligent discussion on the realities of the corporate computer market. Maybe if you could get down from your high horse for once, you would notice you are in a ditch.

If you are not interested in participating in an intelligent discussion about the merits of the article, the only other decent choice you have is to keep your thoughts to yourself.

In 1996 mainframes took about a third of all server spending. Within five years shifts toward x86 and
RISC servers left mainframes with about 1 dollar out of 8 spent on servers. Today mainframes struggle
to retain just 1 dollar out of every 10 spent on servers.

The extent that mainframes are "viable" today shows how tighly locked in legacy mainframe users are
into the software base and decades of in-house developed apps. IBM can soak those poor bastards to
almost any extent. The degree to which they are being milked can be seen in the huge price difference
IBM charges for mainframe CPUs licensed to run legacy OS apps and CPUs for Linux etc. Yet some of
those long suffering mainframe users *are* willing to pay the cost to break free of indentured servitude
to IBM. For example, Union Pacific Railroad is spending more than $150m over the next five years to
ditch their IBM mainframes and 11 million lines of assembler running on them. Ouch! How great is a
platform that a major user is willing to crawl five miles through broken glass to get away from? :-O

Stay tuned for another person making the opposite statement with a company leaving Itanium for something else:)

Where did I ever claim that the mainframe did not lose market share in past decades? Mainframes had to go through quite a transformation in the last 20 years to remain viable, I'm not arguing any of that.

The fact is, many of those companies running "legacy" apps have evaluated their costs and have found mainframes to have a lower TCO. Also, a large number of the companies who have migrated off their mainframes have found that their ongoing costs are higher after the conversion, quite a few have actually moved back to the mainframe.

The mainframe I run has no "legacy" code running on it at all, it is only a database server for SAP, but it is running what you call a "legacy" OS (z/OS). A complete TCO study was recently done which showed that a comparable AIX configuration would be substantially more expensive to own. Looking at acquisition cost alone is myopic.

Here's another interesting article for you:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRel ... BW20090914

Eh? Are you sure that study was on the level Ford? I mean, would IBM have an incentive to move your company from z/OS to AIX? On the surface, that seems doubtful. Now if the alternative was say Oracle on Solaris (which is what we run SAP on), then I'd have a little more faith in the result.

The article you linked is an interesting read, but let me say first that I am glad Mainframes are no longer ruling the world. The mainframe world is the typical closed environment where only a very small elite got access to insanely expensive technology. I still remember getting only access to a few programs on our IBM mainframe (14 years ago) and wondering what was going on on the rest of the machine. And I can't say that I was impressed by the fact that I had to wait sometimes for an hour (JOBs waiting) or so before my database exports were done. The statistics I had to report to my managers took me weeks to program in some weird language I have long forgotten (no Cobol) and the ouput where some horribly looking listings no matter what I tried.

And then finally I got S3270 emulation on my pc together with a network link to the mainframe. Downloading was still horribly slow, but it took only a few days to turn the CSV imports automatically into superb looking Excel graphs. My managers were pretty happy the day I gave them the new statistics. I hope you can understand that "long live the PC, death to the mainframe" was one of the things on my mind that day.

The PC revolution allowed almost everyone to get full access to computer technology: you learn linux on a $500 pc and it is a good start to become a competent system administrator of a 50 million $ datacenter. Instead of the slow progression of the mainframe IT, the pc caused an explosion of innovation.

I can imagine that for some mission critical applications, a software stack that has matured and stayed the same for years is excellent for reliability. But it is hard to imagine that some unix machines have not obtained the same level of reliability. And those unix machines probably run circles around mainframes. Haven't seen any mainframe in TPC-C scores for example.

[teasemode=on]
Yes the roadmap for the MXXXX series looks stunning. 500Mhz in the next 3 years.
Sure it isn't you who should start to think about migrating *8^)
[teasemode=off]

// Jesper

My fear is that "cloud" computing is a return to those days. "Don't develop anything on/for your PC or departmental server, use the corporate cloud (or google's, or microsoft's) instead."

Justice Department opens IBM antitrust probe-trade group

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Justice-D ... l?x=0&.v=1

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into allegations that International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM - News) abused its dominance of the mainframe business, said Computer and Communications Industry Association chairman Ed Black.

The CCIA had urged the Justice Department to open the probe, accusing IBM of anti-competitive conduct for doing things like refusing to license its mainframe operating systems to users of "Hercules" for installation on machines other than IBM mainframes.
Hercules is an open-source project that would allow IBM's mainframe operating systems to run on Intel-based (NasdaqGS:INTC - News) and Advanced Micro Devices-based (NYSE:AMD - News) computers.

"We are aware that Justice has begun the CID investigatory process," said Black. A CID is the equivalent of a subpoena and indicates that an investigation is under way. "The scope is quite broad," said Black.

Neither IBM nor the Justice Department could immediately be reached for comment.

The CCIA also accused IBM of withdrawing licenses for its operating systems from customers who use non-IBM hardware, retaliating against business partners that also support migration as an option for customers, tying its mainframe operating systems and hardware and acquiring mainframe startup PSI to stifle competition.

About two years too late but what the heck.

When you jump at the first opportunity to be an international corporation rather than an American company that does global business, there are repercussions.

IBM reports Q3 results:

http://www.ibm.com/investor/sharedv3/au ... webcastini

Overall systems revenue down 13% YoY

System z - down 26%
System p - down 10%
System x - up 1%