Thoughts on Mainframes

A few days ago the NYTimes ran an interesting article on IBM's new mainframes, and apparently increasing sales. The article and the discussion of mainframes is cast pretty strictly in terms of virtualization. The real problem, is power.

Anyone who has worked in a modern datacenter can tell you that typically half of your electrical consumption (possibly a little less) ends up being consumed by the AC units required to cool the other half of your electrical consumption. Rackspace is very expensive nowadays (depending on where you look) simply because everything else has suddenly become so cheap. I can get a brand new 2U server installed in a rack for only a few k, at the most. At that point, it's usually only a few months before the combined forces of depreciation and the high costs of power, bandwidth, and rackspace, cause the process of provisioning and maintaining a home for that server far exceed the costs necessary to procure it. This is all obvious, and would not be at all surprising to anyone who has ever colocated anything. But that's really my point here. Virtualization isn't a neat technology, it's a method to save money.

The simple costs of shoving a bunch of computers into racks that will have anything less than a high level of utilization (i really like to think of this as throughput, but that's just due to my background) is a huge and unjustifiable waste when solutions like VMWare are available. Balmer I think misses the point when he tries to shrug off VMWare as premature and hard to use. He makes the same essential mistake with linux. What's worse, is that he yells at no end about minimizing the total cost of ownership with regard to both of these products, which is again, exactly the point. IT people are not ignorant of costs. If anything, IT departments are yelled at more than others to pull their weight in terms of expenditures. Innumerable metrics exist to judge a companies performance based on the size of its IT overhead coupled with its customer satisfaction. The use of technologies like VMWare (and it's actually impressive that 5% of the servers out there are virtualized on this platform) represents the most efficient cost savings measure made available to small and medium sized businesses in at least the last four years.

The fact that some technicians and managers might have to put in a few late nights to get everything working exactly right is by no means a deal breaker. It's an opportunity for people to feel like their pulling their weight and really adding to the bottom line.

And so, in some kind of crazy and roundabout way, we have come all the way back to mainframes. If you can afford at least a few of these things, and you're already looking to spend oodles of money on new VMWare deployments, then it certainly appears to make sense on the surface, even just going on the limited information provided by our articles here. When you factor in that some of these machines are some of the most reliable that you can buy nowadays, that's even better. Finally, to know that when you buy a piece of hardware like this, you have a lot more than a 'certified partner' at your disposal. IBM doesn't like to lose customers. Microsoft, doesn't seem to mind sometimes.

-AJB.