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.