IBM is expected later this month to announce its next-generation System z mainframe, its first update since the release of the z9 three years ago. It is promising improved energy efficiency, security and "50 per cent more capacity" in its new hardware.

But what this new mainframe won't change is the ongoing battle for IBM mainframe customers, who can easily spend millions of dollars on a new system and are continually wooed by alternative and much less costly platforms.

The venerable mainframe has a vital role in many large companies, and that's not going to change anytime soon. The mainframe "is the king of the house, it's where the crown jewels are stored," said Mike Walter, a Z/VM systems manager at Hewitt Associates, a human resource services company.

Mainframes earn their keep in many ways, but the one characteristic that's often at the top of any list is their reliability. Walter can only recall one mainframe crash in 10 years. "How many distributed servers can say that?" he said.

A big advantage for distributed servers, on the other hand, is cost. Palm Beach Community College just auctioned off its zSeries 890 on eBay for US$40,000, after paying $500,000 for the system three years ago.

Tony Parziale, the CIO of the 46,000-student college, said the four-socket Intel system that is replacing the z890 will cost about US$30,000. While his IT staff will miss some of the mainframe's tools, the new system "runs faster than the mainframe, and the software cost less," he said.

Decisions, decisions

This conflict between distributed systems and mainframes is evident in a recent survey by the IBM user group Share. More than 430 of its members, with job titles ranging from systems administrator to CIO, responded to the survey. In it, 23 per cent said they were planning to increase usage of their mainframes, compared to 19 per cent that will reduce their use or move off of the systems completely. Of the remainder, 14 per cent said no major changes or migrations were planned; 23 per centweren't running a mainframe, 18 per cent were unsure, and the balance was in the category of "other."

Since the release of the z9 in 2005, IBM has made a series of announcements concerning projects directed at improving the platform's administration. These include a US$100 million investment by IBM to simplify the mainframe environment and encourage use of the systems in service-oriented architectures (SOA). The company is also funding training programs at universities worldwide to ensure that there is enough mainframe-trained talent available.

The upcoming System z announcement will also emphasize "unprecedented levels of workload consolidation," said IBM CFO Mark Loughridge, who previewed the upcoming system during a conference call on the company's latest financial results last month.

Energy savings is a big reason for workload consolidation these days, and it is why IBM will likely give a lot of attention to the ability of its mainframes to host thousands of virtual servers in limited data center space.

Despite IBM's efforts, mainframe can be a chore to handle. According to the Share survey, approximately half of those responding said they rely on hand-coding by developers to get access to business information, a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process. A percentage that high indicates that "integration is a hard problem," said Pam Taylor, a vice president of Share and an IT architect at a large company that she asked not be identified.

Taylor sees SOA adoption as a means to address integration. The Share survey points to a movement by users in this direction, with 23 per cent reporting that SOA adoption was underway. Of the remainder, 6 per centsaid an SOA project was planned in the next six months, and 26 per cent said it was under consideration. One-third of the respondents said they had no SOA plans for their mainframes, while 11 per cent were unsure.

James Governor, an analyst at consulting firm RedMonk, believes that the SOA adoption rate is larger than the Share figures may indicate. He said that IBM's larger mainframe customers, such as in financial services, "understand the value of opening up their transactions to new applications" through an SOA. But in industries such as manufacturing, mainframe users "are not always looking at the coolest new thing," he added.