Many of the 2,000 or so conference attendees were from large companies that continue to rely on mixed installations of IT systems, despite being pushed by some vendors toward commodity servers. In fact, when the audience members at the kickoff keynote session were asked as part of the electronic poll whether they run their data centers on either Windows or Unix exclusively, only 4 percent said yes.
Abdul Khan, who manages servers and storage at Blue Shield of California, said the San Francisco-based insurer's mainframe setup supports custom applications that would be too difficult to move to other systems. "It would take a long time to change our software," Khan said.
Although users such as Khan may stick with mainframes to run legacy applications and to take advantage of the reliability of the systems, Bill Homa, CIO at Hannaford Brothers Co. in Scarborough, Maine, sees the mainframe as an ideal platform for ongoing software development.
Saving money with Cobol
In a phone interview, Homa said Hannaford, a grocery chain with annual revenue of about US$5 billion, continues to develop custom Cobol mainframe applications through Bangalore, India-based IT services provider Infosys Technologies Ltd. The company's software costs, including maintenance and development, are as much as 30 percent less than what it would pay for packaged applications, Homa said.
IBM last week announced that Hannaford was one of the first companies to install its System z9 mainframe, which became available in September. The z9 is one of two mainframes in the grocer's data center, which also includes about 200 servers running IBM's AIX version of Unix, as well as 250 Windows servers.
The z9 can process 1 billion transactions per day, more than double the capacity of IBM's older z990 system, which Hannaford also uses. In addition, IBM made architectural changes to the z9 that improve its ability to pull information from a database by about 30 percent, Homa said. That's particularly important because Hannaford employees use wireless devices to access the mainframe and place product orders on the spot in warehouses and stores.
But what Homa really likes about the z9 is its scalability. He's currently using only two processors on a system that can support up to 64 CPUs. "This machine is doing more work than [the] other 500 servers in the data center put together," he said.
IBM and other enterprise IT vendors are moving toward utility computing, in which companies can buy processing power as needed, thereby making the underlying hardware less important. But that trend is "a long way from reality for most of us today," said Gartner analyst Steve Prentice.
In the meantime, users will have to continue to push vendors to support standards that can improve the interoperability of heterogeneous environments, said Donna Scott, another Gartner analyst.
IT managers also have to contend with the ongoing introduction of consumer- oriented technologies into business operations. That includes instant messaging applications, Google Inc. 's desktop search tool and peer-to-peer voice technology from vendors such as Skype Technologies SA.
In another poll at the conference, 20 percent of the respondents said they have banned such technologies from end-user systems; 43 percent said they discourage the use of them, and 26 percent said they allow the technologies to be used but don't support them. The remainder either encourage or actively support the use of such technologies. Prentice said that ultimately, "you cannot stop consumer-grade technology from entering the enterprise," especially if IT managers want to keep their environments attractive to knowledge workers.