John Lamb on ... the new breed of mainframes

The mainframe, once written off as a dinosaur, has been undergoing a Jurassic Park-style rebirth recently. With the aid of minute traces of the MVS operating system, computer engineers have reconstituted the lumbering beasts that once ruled the world. But, as in Michael Crichton's novel, all is not as it seems at the data centres in which these creatures are kept.

Since the dark days of the recession and IBM's near eclipse, the mainframe has made an extraordinary comeback. Last year, manufacturers of IBM 390 machines shipped systems with 50% more processing power than those shipped in 1994.

For all the talk of the client-server revolution, the mainframe is very much alive. This is particularly the case among the world's largest companies, which have invested billions in application software for the IBM architecture, and are unwilling to splash out u5m or so to transfer to a client-server architecture.

The machines they now buy are very different beasts from those on the market four or five years ago. The introduction of Cmos chips using the same technology as the chips which power desktop computers has significantly changed the costs of running mainframes, largely by reducing their power consumption. Although processors built from Cmos chips are less powerful than those constructed using bipolar or emitter-coupled logic technology, they can be linked together to create very powerful arrays.

Clustering - or parallel sysplex, as IBM calls it - has made the mainframe much more flexible by enabling groups of machines to work together. The greatest change, however, has been the way in which mainframe manufacturers have enrolled independent software vendors to develop products for mainframes.

Instead of selling boxes, they now sell solutions.

Oracle has started selling an IBM 390 architecture version of its database.

SAP is also considering porting R/3, designed for client-server systems, to the IBM 390. Prices are coming down, too. Candle, BMC, Computer Associates and Boole & Babbage have all cut the cost of their packages recently.

Unix is seen as a brontosaurus among mainframes. It's too much of a vegetarian compared with the MVS (tyrannosaurus rex) or the agile Windows NT (pterodactyl).

Most believe that Unix's pastures will be progressively limited by its meat-eating rivals.

More than half of the increase in mainframe power is being driven by the improving business climate. Banks, insurance companies and manufacturers are adding mips to existing applications, while new applications only account for about one-third of that investment, according to the Meta Group. A surprising number of mainframes are being deployed in client-server systems and Internet applications.

Users are benefiting from slicker technology and a wider choice of software.

That leaves them with just one final problem - how to manage all the extra mips, storage and software they have bought.

Readers will recall that it was the computer boffin who created all the mayhem in Jurassic Park. Let us hope that, in this case, art does not reflect life.

John Lamb is a former editor of Computer Weekly and Computer Age. His exclusive column will appear weekly in Computing from 9 January.