Mainframe As A Green Machine -- And More ROI -- 2008 to 2014: Industry Research

Mainframe As A Green Machine -- And More ROI -- 2008 to 2014

Published Date: September 2008

Published By: Wintergreen Research

Page Count: 455

Order Code: R49-440

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Mainframe as a Green Machine
The costs of electricity are certain to escalate, creating a dramatic difference between the mainframe and distributed server systems. Worldwide, access to power is an issue for data centers. Hybrid solutions are evolving. In some parts of the US, particularly in the Southwest, they have simply run out of electricity. In other parts of the US, for example Seattle, the cost of electricity goes to $.52 per kilowatt‐hour at peak hours of air conditioning use, considerably higher than the $.12 per kilowatthour used in this analysis. Thus market forces will surely force use of the mainframe as a green machine. Shipments of the mainframe have risen 30%.

Resurgence Of The Mainframe
The challenge facing the IT community is the resurgence of the mainframe. The analysis of mainframe traditionally compared the cost of the mainframe to the cost of a standalone Linux or Unix box. This is not a realistic analysis. Shared workload depends on many applications sharing the same computing environment.

Accurate analysis of shared workload depends on determining what portion of the mainframe an application will take up, depending on the mainframe being fully loaded with 200 or 2000 applications. IT capability that is being upgraded, depends on shared workload to provide efficient processing capability for real time processing. Services oriented architecture (SOA) provides the new flexibility for the mainframe providing for reusable components of code, increasing efficiency in shared workload environments.

SOA is used to create flexible response to changing market conditions. SOA collaborations create a way to reuse existing modules of code and organize business process. Automated process depends on having the ability to combine SOA modules from the desktop. SOA collaboration code comes from the existing engine vendors supporting modules.

IBM is the leader in creating the ability to consolidate its integration modules with foundation architecture. The foundation architecture is well evolved as the middleware product set configured as an engine that supports Web services implementation. IBM SOA is the defacto industry standard software used in creating business integration foundation systems.

Real Time Internet Processing
Real time Internet processing is needed in a range of applications to adapt to the new channel for business process. The Internet is central to the supply chain and it is used as a vehicle for direct sales. The Internet changes everything. Data centers cost $60 million to build, the mainframe can handle the same level of transactions and network traffic with a $6 million installation. This is an intuitive measure of why the mainframe provides a ten time cost advantage to the enterprises that adopt it for new workload. The study that follows shows how a fit to purpose tool can evolve that analysis on an application by application basis.

IT System Reliability
IT system reliability return on investment ROI is measured by SLA service level availability and the cost of downtime to an organization. As the Internet emerges as a significant channel, the industry measure of the cost of downtime is $1 million per minute. In this context, system reliability becomes a significant competitive market factor.

Efficient IT operations represent a primary cost of doing business. It is here that the mainframe achieves competitive advantage. The most efficacious measure of IT processing is measure of workload that can be preformed reliably and securely.

Mainframe vs. distributed server ROI analysis compares and contrasts the features and benefits of the two computing systems for a particular set of metrics for a particular application. Benefits of the mainframe recognized by the industry are scalability, availability, security, shared workload efficiency, network efficiency, throughput efficiency, integration efficiency, and electrical and space efficiency.

Overview Page
Following is the WinterGreen Research mainframe v. distributed return on investment summary page analysis. The page is available online using a promotional or other special code to create a user name and password. It shows that for a particular banking application the mainframe is far more than 10 times less expensive than distributed servers. The total cost advantage of the mainframe for one application is over $2 million per year, for every year.

The WinterGreen Research ROI tool lets people chose their own values for metrics and change the assumptions based on a particular situation in an IT data center.

Changes in the IT department economics warrant CFOs taking a new look at IT decision making process because the cost structures have become so dramatically differentiated. Now it is possible for the CFO to take a high level look at the cost of a distributed server data centers vs. the cost of System z implementations, because the costs are different by a factor of 10. The CFOs have been charged with achieving consolidation, implementing shared workload on the mainframe is but another example of consolidation of enterprise resource.

IBM has just eliminated its distributed data centers and moved to a mainframe centric architecture for IT. This represents a dramatic change in the industry driven by the IBM CFO predictions of the impact of rising energy costs on distributed data center operations.

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