Debunking the urban myths
"In considering a business case for moving BI data and applications (back) onto the mainframe, customers need to carefully consider the following issues."

"Classic mainframe myths still exist today. Mainframes have traditionally been associated with high total cost of ownership; lack of advanced applications; inability to support realtime/low-latency processing; poor back-end data integration support; shortage of mainframe skills; and steep and inflexible development and maintenance curves."

"While some of that might still be true, most of these sticking points have been, or are in the process of being, addressed. For example, mainframes have certainly evolved dramatically from their early days, when they ran on single proprietary operating systems and single arithmetic processing. Today's modern mainframes have been fitted with new partitioning, virtualization and workload management techniques that host multiple operating systems, can emulate other hardware platforms and have the capacity to support mixed BI workloads without stringing queries in parallel across server nodes that are complex to fine-tune and administer."

"Cost has always been a barrier for mainframe computing, particularly the long-term economic implications of moving escalating and increasingly complex BI requirements. However, vendors like SAS and IBM are now introducing new pricing strategies and open source deployment options that make it more affordable."

"That said, some challenges continue. For starters, mainframes no longer enjoy a wall-to-wall environment like they did back in the 1970s or early 80s. Today, they have to co-exist in a heterogeneous client-server, web SOA, software as a service and increasingly cloud computing world. Can they ever become a good citizen of the corporate IT infrastructure? Customers need to ask themselves how easily they blend into these modern architectures. Our experience shows that there's much work to be done here."

"Even though data volumes and workload processes are spiking, mainframe data center staffing levels have not changed significantly, despite these increases. That perhaps remains the greatest challenge for the mainframe. There are simply not enough young, bright people wanting to learn mainframe skills over PHP, Java, Flash, and other 'hip' Web 2.0 technologies."

The author is senior analyst at Ovum.