Article written on: July 31, 1998
Should companies discard Mainframes & move on?
In this page, we try to give our opinions on this issue.
There has been and is an opinion, prevalent among the people working in the IT industry, that the mainframe would die in a few years. This has been going on for many years. In their opinion everywhere Windows / Unix based client-server systems will be installed and appropriate systems implemented.
Should companies move in that direction? Can companies afford to move in that direction? Which is the best solution in the Long term (if that is ever considered in this modern world)? These are some of the questions that we need to deal with time and again with advent of newer technology.
We hope that different people with varying expertise and experience share their thoughts with us all
Should companies move away from Mainframes? One of the arguments has been that maintaining mainframes is very expensive. The question we have for believers of this argument is "How expensive are the other option(s)?" Extensive networks, many servers for LANs and data storage, new releases of software for all the machines, upgrades to all these machines, so that the latest memory hogging software can run on them, people to maintain all these, etc., easily adds up to very large amounts in the long run. In fact, the vendors are twisting everyone's arms in ensuring that newer software is not backward compatible for too many versions. They ensure that at least few things are outdated and hence force users to buy newer versions.
Another traditional argument has been that with mainframes the company is dependent on one vendor. We understand their sentiment, but looking at the other options in the new world, there seems to be no better alternative, rather it is equally worse. Aren't we all facing a new monster with the same goals which thrusts its "copied" ideas on everyone. This includes new releases with very little change in functionality, but increased memory hogging, stifling the competitors and ensuring that whole industry keeps paying huge monies for them to keep turning these out on regular basis.
One of the critical concerns for any business is Stability & Security. There is no doubt that PC software & Networks are vulnerable in terms of bugs as well as security issues. This requires more personnel in extensive testing, backup processes, hardware and lot of extra time and manpower to get the same level of stability and security of a Mainframe which is nearly infallible! When the hackers are not able to get into Mainframes and do much, for them the grapes are sour! But for a business it provides the best security for all information.
Mainframe development and usage is as logical as any other computer system, but the latest generation of software engineers want everything to be placed in their brain on day one. They like to point and click without much usage of their logic section of the brain. They would like to let the machine do the design and development, in any half-baked manner. They would like to think that they are intelligent if they work with the latest software (even if bug-filled). Mainframe is not compared with anything, but everyone and every machine tries to measure up to a Mainframe!
The modern machines have very good individual processing power. That still does not help much if disk access, database access and networking capabilities are the bottleneck, now that there is lots more traffic to go around, compared to mainframes. Mainframes provide very good disk access speeds, especially for large volumes and good database services. In fact, there are many types of database services provided by Mainframes, like Networking databases, Hierarchical databases and RDBMS. Not many options are available on the other platforms. For certain applications, the relational databases can be a nightmare, where a hierarchical database provides excellent performance. But, to fully cover this argument on processing power, one has to also look at the need for large databases. This is linked to the way business is conducted and the business structures within the company.
All data processing in earlier days was centralized. Hence the need for huge databases on a central mainframe, especially large companies' data. For the client server solutions to work, there must be a big change in the way business is done in many companies. People in charge of these power centers must be ready to change and let go of this power a little bit.
The way the business structure is, within the company, must be redesigned and data must become distributed. Can this happen overnight? How much is the cost of such an operation and such a paradigm shift for the company? Some also look at an angle that probably they should not - "What is the short term expense?" This is being forced by people's expectations on the monetary performance of the company, especially, investors and stock markets.
Moving on to a different related issue - which was the first client-server? In our opinion, the mainframe was the first one. It had central processors serving a bank of "dumb" terminals (which were not that dumb in the first place), which could be distributed among locations. These terminals controlled the entry of all elements on a screen. Requests were transmitted in a chunk, for all the entries on the screen, to the central processors. The processors completed the processing for the request and the result comes back to the terminal in a chunk. The terminals were capable of performing quite a few things including, field attributes, auto tabbing, numeric checks, numeric formatting! None of these client processes required the server's intervention.
Now-a-days we pay thousands of dollars to get a more intelligent client in the form of a PC. This, of course, needs constant upgrades or sometimes total replacement, along with constant upgrades of software. Many times the software is not too backward compatible, forcing people to spend time on changes. Mainframes have provided many upgrades too, at some cost, but in most cases none of the code is affected by any upgrade, especially with COBOL or PL/I. Nearly all releases on the Mainframe need no change from an application stand point, including utility programs or third party software, some of which have been written decades ago.
The mainframe is still the backbone of several large companies. Several companies are scrapping their unwieldy and stalled client-server projects and looking at putting the Mainframe to better use. Some have even said "We can't go in a direction of more and more resources for a never-ending distributed environment." We would also like to add that the Common Business Oriented Language is still VERY COMMON!
In case you have any information to share directly or if you would like to start a discussion through the electronic medium, email us at vasudevanvrv@oocities.com.
Vidya & Vasu.
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