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Readers respond: Redmond vs. Big Iron Please don't insult my intelligence. I work for a large (30000 Mips) multi-CEC, multi-shop business with 8 z990s running z/OS 1.6. I can barely get my laptop running Microsoft Windows 2000 booted in the same time it takes to get one of our CPCs IPL'ed and ready for production. For a real business, nothing comes close to IBM z990 running either z/OS or Linux. (Jul. 2005 search390) A Worldwide Three-fold Strategy Under an expanded global alliance, Fujitsu and Microsoft will combine Fujitsu’s mainframe expertise and systems with Microsoft’s latest Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft .NET software. This is in addition to what Fujitsu and Sun intend to do by 2006: bring together their Solaris and SPARC-based server product lines by mid-2006 to create a data centre systems family, codenamed the Advanced Product Line. (Sep. 2004 Network Computing) Itanium-Armed Start-up To Menace IBM's Precious Mainframe Monopoly Platform Solutions, a company started by Amdahl's old core engineers, is making an industry-standard Itanium 2 system capable of running MVS, z/OS, S/390, Unix, Windows and Linux simultaneously. PSI is playing for the half of the $5 billion-a-year mainframe hardware business that IBM barely cares about, all those mid-sized and middling large companies that aren't the Fortune 100. (Aug. 2004 LinuxWorld) Death of the Mainframe? New survey finds PC servers growing in popularity among banks The dominance of mainframe computers in the banking industry is over. The move towards PC servers during about the last three years in investment banking was driven partly by cost but also by PC servers offering scalability, familiarity and ease of use. (Jun. 2004 Banking and Technology News) Sun and Fujitsu to target IBM mainframes Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu are to merge their development efforts for SPARC processors for servers with an eye to winning custom from rival IBM's mainframe market. This will replace Sun's current Sun Fire and Fujitsu's Primepower product lines. (Jun. 2004 Computing) Hardware Today — IBM Server Snapshot Big Blue's four server lines span more than 10 processor types and a dozen operating systems. The iSeries are POWER-run, OS/400-based servers; the pSeries is fueled by AIX and Linux on POWER; the xSeries covers Intel; and zSeries system are mainframes that thrive in scale-up environments. (May 2004 Enterprise IT) Unisys: The Other Mainframe Unisys wants you to know that IBM isn't the only mainframe company in town. The company has announced major updates to its ClearPath Libra mainframe line, introducing new systems, improved modularity, a new pay-for-use business model, and J2EE application server support. (Mar. 2004 Enterprise Systems Journal) Unisys Modular Mainframe Brings New Agility to the Data Center Unisys has launched its newest modular mainframe series, the ClearPath Plus Libra 500. Among other innovations, the series offers a pay-for-use business model based on new metering technology and access to open source J2EE. The combination of J2EE and EAE allows developers to choose J2EE, .NET or COBOL as their developing environments. (Mar. 2004 TMC Net) Grid ready to square mainframe circle Few companies flourished more as a result of the demise of the mainframe than Oracle. But Oracle is now willing to acknowledge the values of the mainframe. "With grid we return to a recognition of the core values of the mainframe of the 1960s and 1970s," says Oracle's vice president of product strategy in the server technologies division. (Mar. 2004 VNUNet) Consolidation sparks mainframe revival The existing Fujitsu-Siemens mainframe system was replaced with IBM zSeries and pSeries servers. Four IBM z900 mainframes will be used as SAP database servers and for additional back-office applications. DB2/zOS provides the database platform for SAP/AM in data sharing mode. (Feb. 2004 search390) Seeking a Windows mainframe in the ES7000 The ES7000 Orion 540 enterprise server from Unisys merges attributes from three worlds: the application support of a typical Windows server, the scalability of a Unix server, and the hardware resiliency of a mainframe. This 32-processor behemoth delivers a Windows machine that can be relied upon for high-end transaction processing and server consolidation. (Feb. 2004 InfoWorld) Hardware Today: Unisys Server Snapshot Unisys Clearpath systems are divided up in a few ways, targeting each segment of the mainframe market. The strongest focus is at the mid-range and high-end, where MCP systems have a strong presence in the financial, public sector, communications and commercial segments. (Jan. 2004 ServerWatch) Windows feeling open source draft The discussion was once about mainframes downsizing to NT, but now lots of these mainframe customers are deciding on Linux. Microsoft's worst nightmare is the customer that dumps its server farm and runs everything on a single IBM eServer z900 running Linux. The company's IT professionals decided that this strategy would be cheaper than having 44 servers running Windows. (Jan. 2004 Search2000) Microsoft Betas Crossover to Legacy Software With a full release of its Host Integration Server (HIS) 2004 scheduled for mid-2004, Microsoft is banking on selling the new version to customers that are comfortable with its Windows Server 2003 platform and who want to now begin linking new servers with legacy IBM mainframe and midrange systems. (Dec. 2004 Internet.com) IT Refresh for Retail Banks While tier 1 banks might be hesitant for now to abandon their mainframe environments, there's a considerable niche of tier 2 banks that are interested in looking at Unix. IBM and an India-based company called i-flex have announced a global alliance, uniting i-flex's banking solution with IBM's WebSphere and DB2 platforms. (Nov. 2003 Line56) Mainframes: Still going strong after all these years In May Sun transferred its 1,000th customer from the "complex, closed, mainframe environment" to Sun servers running Solaris. Hailing the move as "driving computing dinosaurs towards extinction," Sun claimed to be helping customers cut expenses. Ironically, some dot-coms have opted to use the zSeries as their first and only platform. (Oct. 2003 ZDNet) Focus pays off for Unisys The ES7000 business has gained great momentum over the last year as server consolidation becomes widely understood among corporate clients. The Intel/Windows-based ES7000 allows corporations to reduce the number of servers they have and to consolidate many applications onto one platform. (Sep. 2003 ITWeb) Ellison: Big iron bad, grid computing good Big iron presents problems of expense, the need for additional capacity, and single points of failure. Oracle's alternative is enterprise grid computing. Using farms of hundreds of low-cost two-processors servers, Oracle's 10g technology will improve performance and reliability at a much lower cost. (Sep. 2003 VNUnet) Microsoft benchmarks step up Linux assault According to Microsoft, one Linux image on one zSeries CPU performed at about the same as Windows NT 4 on one 900MHz Intel processor. IBM has no plans to begin running Linux performance benchmarks for the mainframe. The reason Linux mainframe benchmarks are so scarce is that they simply may not matter to customers. (Sep. 2003 InfoWorld) ClearPath Plus Dorado Modern Mainframes: A More Agile Solution This Profile compares two strong examples of systems designed to use the new technologies to support agile solutions — Unisys’ ClearPath Plus OS 2200 mainframes and IBM’s z990 mainframes. New technologies — such as capacity on demand, self-healing, and open/interoperable Web-service-supporting middleware — can deliver added cost-effective scalability, flexibility, robustness, programmer productivity, and manageability. (Aug. 2003 Aberdeen) Comparing Server OSes: Why SCO UNIX Is A Bad Idea Obviously if you're looking to buy high-end mission-critical mainframe hardware and software, your best option is something from IBM, Sun, or HP/Compaq. AIX is the only choice you have for IBM's high-end systems (some of which, according to IBM, do not support GNU/Linux), but it's a good choice nonetheless. (Jul. 2003 Jem Report) Office to work with proprietary back-ends The old "rip and replace" strategy of pushing customers into buying whole new systems when they only need one application is kaput. A lot of companies have stuff written in Cobol running on a mainframe that, after 20 years of tweaking, is pretty much perfect. Microsoft has recognised that to a large extent their success will depend on helping customers who want to add something to an existing system. (Jul. 2003 ZDNet)
IBM Power blades to arrive in March IBM is ambitious and aggressive with its blade plans. In Germany, Big Blue's engineers have been tinkering with zSeries blades using a mainframe's processor and the z/OS operating system. (Nov. 2003 CNET News)
New Unisys mainframe gets .Net, Java The Unisys Libra 185 has 32 processors and as much as 64GB of memory. The system can run Java and .Net programs directly on the mainframe. It costs between $1.1 million and $22 million, depending on configuration. (Jul. 2003 CNET news)
Supercomputing goes mainstream Is it wishful thinking on the part of IT vendors, or is there a real business demand for high-performance computing (HPC) systems? Applications involving money are obvious candidates. Then there are business intelligence systems. Dashboards are all useless if there is nothing to provide the analytics that underpin what appears. (Jul. 2003 IT Week)
Celebrate A New Performance Standard In May 2003, Hewlett-Packard posted a TPC-C benchmark of more than 700,000 transactions per minute, the second highest ever performance in transaction processing -- and at only $9/tpmC. Of the total of 120 published benchmarks as of June 2003, there were 41 from HP, 19 from Dell, and one from Sun and one each from Network Appliance and Rack server, and none of them are mainframe guys! (Jun. 2003 Financial Express of India)
Time to stop using the 'm' word Far from only selling into a closed mainframe community to run old bespoke legacy systems, IBM reports that 70 percent of mainframe sales are to run new packaged applications, such as Siebel, SAP and PeopleSoft. We need to accept the reality that the new zSeries are modern servers that ought to be evaluated alongside other Unix servers. (May 2003 Computing)
Ballmer Touts Windows Server 2003's ROI For Big Iron, Small Business Ballmer said companies are looking to migrate off legacy mainframes and, in particular, off legacy Unix. Intel's President described the cost-of-ownership benefits of Intel's Itanium-based servers over Unix and IBM zSeries machines. (Apr. 2003 TechWeb)