Where Cost Containment, Reliability and ‘Green IT’ Meet

Chris O’Malley, Executive Vice President and General Manager for the Mainframe Business Unit at CA, Inc., explains why mainframes are playing a key role in improving business performance.

“The mainframe is exactly the kind of powerful, scalable, secure, reliable, cost-efficient, energy-efficient and compliance-friendly platform companies need to survive and thrive in today's global electronic marketplace”
-Chris O'Malley, CA

Corporate decision-makers are facing escalating business pressures and new mandates to reduce costs, improve reliability and encompass green technologies. These seemingly contradictory objectives are driving enterprise IT organizations back to the mainframe. Mainframe worldwide capacity has grown from four million to 14 million MIPS over the past decade – in part because progressive companies are addressing their business requirements by centralizing key systems such as SAP business applications on IBM System z mainframes running Linux, or hosting new workloads under z/OS.

The move back to the mainframe makes sense in light of budget pressures, staffing realities and accelerating global market dynamics. IT organizations with constrained staff resources and flat budgets simply can’t afford to add more servers to their data centers or add any more floor space – no matter how much vendors promise to ease server ownership.

Mainframes, on the other hand, already do an enormous amount of processing with minimal staff and fewer ‘moving parts’ to manage. An estimated 70 percent of mission-critical applications still run on mainframes, so the platform is perfectly capable of supporting most workloads. Plus, with its substantially lower power, cooling and floor space requirements, the mainframe can deliver highly-scalable computing power with a minimized carbon footprint. 

By aggressively leveraging the unique value proposition of today’s highly efficient and adaptable mainframe, IT executives can play a leading role in enabling their companies to achieve competitive advantage in a global marketplace that is increasingly information-based, resource-constrained and closely regulated.

Many organizations are capitalizing on this opportunity. Since IBM’s introduction of the z10 Enterprise Class platform last year, traditional z/OS workload capacity growth accelerated despite current economic conditions. In addition, a new study by TheInfoPro shows 93 percent of large ($2 B+) companies are projecting their use of Linux on mainframe to increase or remain steady over the next two years – with 10 percent projecting growth of more than 76 percent. Respondents cited the ability to leverage available mainframe computing capacity, the superior cost-effectiveness of the mainframe, support for green computing initiatives and infrastructure consolidation as their reasons for doing so. The mainframe is also the industry’s most reliable platform, offering 99.999 percent uptime – which is unheard of with distributed servers – and unmatched security.

One challenge companies may face in exploiting the mainframe’s potential business value is that many IT organizations have not hired and trained for mainframe management over the past few years, since distributed platforms have been in vogue. At the same time, many of their oldest and most experienced mainframe managers are nearing retirement, leaving many IT organizations facing the possibility of a significant skills gap on the mainframe side.
 
CA has addressed this issue with its Mainframe 2.0 initiative, which both enhances the productivity of under-staffed mainframe teams and empowers the next generation of IT professionals to effectively manage mainframes using their existing skill sets. Mainframe 2.0 therefore enables companies to get the full potential business value out of their investments in mainframe infrastructure for many years to come.

The mainframe’s value transcends simply keeping ‘legacy’ applications running smoothly. The mainframe is exactly the kind of powerful, scalable, secure, reliable, cost-efficient, energy-efficient and compliance-friendly platform companies need to survive and thrive in today’s global electronic marketplace. IBM and CA have also put a lot of work into ensuring that the mainframe can fully support the open source, internet-centric, service-oriented computing environments that represent the future of information technology.
 
That’s why everyone who is thinking strategically about their company’s technology roadmap should make sure that the mainframe plays a central role in that roadmap. IT service levels – and the efficiency with which they are maintained – will become even more critical to business performance in the future. Effective exploitation of the mainframe’s full potential value will therefore remain a key competitive advantage for many years to come.

Chris O’Malley is executive vice president and general manager for the Mainframe Business Unit at CA, Inc. He is responsible for developing and executing CA’s strategy for this key global market – including oversight of all business planning, R&D, and marketing activities. He also serves on company’s Executive Leadership Team.