A perspective on mainframes
As a new contributor to the Itanium Solutions blog, let me give you a quick intro. Having graduated with a computer science(CS)/math degree 25+ years ago, I’ve seen my share of changes along the way, but what surprises me most are the changes that have not yet occurred. While I was taking CS classes in the early 80’s I shied away from taking more COBOL programming classes because the ‘common wisdom’ was that COBOL applications, and the mainframe they ran on, were on a downward trend and not an area where you wanted to focus your career. The mainframe is still around, and there are more lines of COBOL code running than any other programming language. Who would have believed it?
I put my time on the mainframe as a programmer for a petroleum engineering firm, and still remember a late night onsite at one of our customers, a large bank in west Texas. After recompiling, linking and loading my latest update, I suddenly discovered that everyone was gone, the doors were locked … and could only be opened with a key that I did not possess. It was about that time, my hands-on computer programming interest waned. Today, I am a program manager in HP’s Enterprise Storage, Server and Networking group, and privileged to interact with a variety of customers and partners looking to drive innovation in the data center.
Now on to the point of this blog post – unlike 25 years ago when the mainframe was essentially the only option if you needed a highly available server, the HP Superdome has similar availability and reliability of the mainframe. The Superdome server was designed to run mission critical enterprise applications and has 128 Intel Itanium cores that can be utilized for scale-up applications using a large number of cores for single OS instance, or be partitioned to run scale-out applications running different OS’s…or both. The reliability & availability was built-in to the Superdome, not tacked on as an afterthought.
How does the HP Integrity Superdome stack up? Compared to a z10 mainframe, the Superdome has similar availability and reliability… BUT at a 3 year TCO that is 1/8th that of the mainframe. Check out the comparison in our new white paper. Having cut my teeth on the mainframe in my formative years I respect the longevity it has been able to achieve, but it sure is difficult to justify such a hefty premium when other alternatives deliver the goods.
John Pickett
Mainframe Alternative Program Manager
HP Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking
Blog: Legacy Transformation