Elephants can dance, if you sing well

As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold. But God only can help, if the question is — Are mainframes surviving?

There’s so much happening around these big boxes that it’s hard to hold the microscope in one place. They are elephants, they are monolithic, they are on a death-bed, they are fighting for survival, they are history and so on and on, as one keeps hearing.

And while these X-ray readings keep volunteering to shout obituaries, there are other industry symptoms that catch your attention. Some enterprises have decided to amputate, while at the same time, other contemporaries are giving mainframes a bear hug.

New workloads, MIPS growth, re-orientation of technology, IBM’s migration factory, zBX blades, and specialty engines are signaling the push for revival. And yet, challenges still keep nailing the proverbial coffin: anti-hegemony rhetoric, anti-trust cases, outdated and unwieldy wheel-chairs to carry them, modern architectures, application modernization and Cloud’s tab at the door bell. So are the so-called elephants surviving it all?

It’s always fun and helpful to talk to someone who can help with some answers before the coffee gets too cold. Someone who can retain the steam and have the outlier approach to analysis.

As it turns out, James Russell, Director MSM Sales & Software Consulting, South Asia, BMC can read the ECG in a not-so-boring way, punctuating it with the right interpretations and a simple cheerful tone. Let’s see what he decoded while I sipped my coffee.

Your main role is in expanding the BMC MSM (Mainframe Service Mgt & Workload Automation) solutions for BMC in the South Asia region. BMC’s recent annual mainframe survey results for the fifth year, of over 1,500 mainframe customers pointed a steady increase of investments in mainframe in the APAC region, even citing that APAC respondents are finding that mainframes are increasingly secure. Then why do we keep reading that ‘Mainframe is dying’. 

What motivates one market can be different for another market. Yes, 84 per cent of respondents expected to see growing or steady MIPS growth on the platform, a figure that has remained consistent over the past several years. About 57 per cent of respondents indicated that the mainframe will grow and attract new workloads over the next year. What I can say here is that the big guys will get better when it comes to core things and it will be characterized as highly-available, well-managed, well-compliant and secure. 

In the survey, a significant number of respondents (65 per cent) were also concerned about reducing IT costs in the next year. What do you make of the equation between mainframes and costs, specially after the attempts made with IBM joining hands with Linux, or contenders like Neon Z Prime? Is there geographical diversity here as well?

Small businesses are facing the option to retain or move to another platform. India etc have different dynamics. In its current state, India will be interesting in the next two to five years. As volumes of data become critical and challenging to manage, new changes may happen. The other dynamic aspect is that mainframes are highly adaptable and highly-transaction-processing-intensive. It would be a compelling factor for large scale servers. The deciding factors will be around how to get in a platform environment, the real estate challenges and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

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So the equation is changing its correlation?

Yes, it’s changing, more from a perspective of TCO vs. unit costs. This is because you don’t buy mainframes small, and then there are extra resources and skills that go into running mainframes. It’s about a large cluster-based approach vs. mainframes, which is a lot more effective. You look at all options for running a large-scale system.

And what about the impact being made by increasing application modernization or IT departments migrating to modern architectures?

We are migrating to a new world of applications. As organizations start to roll out new platforms and applications, we need server far more scalable than a transaction-processing perspective. It is not a flash in the pan but an evolutionary phase. In the IT world, the scalability question would be an important question. The future is interesting and it will be exciting to see how it shapes.

While all this is happening, is Cloud strong enough as a threat or an ally? Words like Mainframe-on-Cloud are doing the rounds, but doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron?

Cloud is a fascinating topic. It is very important for developers. The nature of Cloud is different. The standard architecture piece in cloud has to be looked into. Within Cloud, technology has to be delivered and Mainframe’s adaptation to it would be nice. Our survey points out that Cloud is an emerging area, specially private clouds. Organisations are likely to retain mainframe environments in Clouds.

IBM has been on the receiving end for a lot of issues, starting from the often-attacked hegemony to anti-competitive charges. Would you say IBM is re-orienting enough on mainframes?

What IBM has done is basically about how to provide a really good proportion in terms of architecture, ever since the traditional Z series mainframes. Mainframe is beginning to be more compliant, agile, and strong. It has consolidated management challenge to a more centralized environment. The questions have changed — How do we reduce IT costs? Can we manage infrastructures at a central level?

How would that translate for imperialism ruling so far? How do you interpret the noise being made for ‘fair competition’?

I will be circumspect while answering that. I don’t think I can comment adequately here except that any anti-competitive behavior is not good for the marketplace. Flexibility to choose is very important. Competition is good. To deny competition to a marketplace is to contract it. We do business that way. We do it support IBM or HP environment because that’s the way the IT world stands today. There is no such thing as one supplier.

There’s so much happening — zBX blades, specialty engines, UNIX, x64, IBM migration factory, Oracle’s handshake with Sun (that is known for its aggressive stance on mainframes), etc. How do all these changes in the mainframe scenario spell out for BMC?

BMC’s view is that the marketplace is consolidating. It’s about management and delivery across the structure regardless of the application. How can we provide an opportunity to optimize the platform, reduce IT costs, get alignment between IT and business apps, give production, performance management and risk optimization. We see the whole direction focused on consolidated management layer.

How proactive is this panoply going to get?

There is such an array of technologies. It’s a challenge to give control and manage platforms as per business users. But it’s a fantastic opportunity to provide value-based as per the expectations towards a zero-downtime box.

In short, being in the box and out-of-the-box at the same time?

BSM is about existing building blocks, but it is also about how to go around arranging these blocks as per management challenges. What BMC brings to the market is that ‘you concentrate on what is needed from the services, rather than worrying about the connections between the blocks’. In short, it’s about making sense out of the box.