In the frame for another 50 years?
As IBM's mainframe celebrates half a century of life, we look back on how it transformed modern computing and ask what the future holds
To the casual observer, The Beatles and the IBM mainframe computer may have little in common, with the latter more about processing power than flower power.
But take a closer look and a number of parallels emerge.
Both had their birth in the early 1960s. Both were written off - the former by John Lennon himself (who pondered in 1963 that the band would be lucky to last three months) and the latter by industry commentators in the 1990s - only to remain central to their fields by finding their relevance among new audiences. Coincidentally, both are also a hit with astronauts: IBM's mainframe helped send man to the moon, while The Beatles' Across the Universe was recently beamed across space by NASA.
Just as the Fab Four remain bestsellers half a century after their formation, the mainframe is still big business for Big Blue as the technology turns 50.
In fact, there are signs the vendor is only broadening the channel for its big iron, with SCC added as a mainframe partner in 2013 and Celerity understood to have recently become accredited around its zLinux portfolio.
IBM unveiled the first System 360 mainframe on 7 April 1964, the room-filling predecessor to its present line-up of System z servers it claims marked the start of the age of modern computing. The first models ranged from $133,000 (£79,000) to $5.5m in price and could perform between 33,000 and 750,000 additions per second.
As personal computer networks swept to ubiquity in the early 1990s, the technology - known for its reliability and high availability - was written off as yesterday's man, with the then-editor in chief of InfoWorld famously predicting in 1991 that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996.
But the late 90s e-business boom ensured the mainframe - with its ability to perform large-scale batch processing such as billing - retained its relevance to modern computing. The arrival of Linux on the IBM mainframe in 1999 is also credited with bolstering the technology's popularity by enabling the boxes to run hundreds of virtual machines.
Andy Wright, UK commercial director at SCC - which is one of only three partners in the UK to be able to sell IBM mainframes with both z/OS and Linux - said he was told the technology was dead when he entered the IT business in 1989.
"It's interesting that 25 years later we are not only celebrating the 50th birthday of the mainframe, but in some ways they have become relevant again," Wright said.
"IBM is opening up the market by broadening the number of partners who can sell the Linux-based boxes, which suggests they see an interesting market place. The economics of these large systems can make a lot of sense in today's market and I would expect to see the mainframe being part of the portfolio for many years to come."
After having to share the market with a gaggle of rival manufacturers known colloquially as the "seven dwarfs" (normally Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA) in the early years, IBM is now said to boast a share of more than 90 per cent of the mainframe market, raking in $1.1bn from the technology in its most recent quarter.
But despite being a money-spinner for Big Blue, the mainframe hasn't always proved as lucrative for the channel, with partners complaining of wafer-thin margins and deals going direct.
"Mainframes are where IBM makes the bulk of its profits in STG [Systems and Technology Group] but in terms of profitability for the channel, it's very thin," grumbled one partner, who wished to remain anonymous.
"There are still a lot of mainframe customers out there and there are upgrades, but any chunky deals go direct. When we get a decent deal they restrict it to tiny margins. When you tot up how much it costs to run a mainframe business, versus what you get out of it, it's not great."
To what extent IBM's decision to broaden its mainframe channel is down to its need for partners to pick up the slack as it chops internal headcount within STG is also unclear.
However, Mark Starkey, UK managing director of Logicalis, one of IBM's two traditional UK mainframe partners alongside Computacenter, paid tribute to the technology's endurance.
"We are still a mainframe partner and continue to engage with IBM around what remains a great product," he said. "In many ways, what is happening now with cloud is going back to the mainframe environment."
Indeed, IBM has moved recently to reinvent the technology to ensure it remains relevant in the cloud and mobile computing era.
Its new System z-based integrated system, IBM Enterprise Cloud System, is able to support up to 6,000 virtual machines, making it "uniquely positioned to meet the enterprise cloud infrastructure needs of cloud service providers and dynamic private cloud deployments", Big Blue said.
IBM claims that the total cost of some Linux on System z cloud deployments can be up to 55 per cent less than comparable x86-based cloud infrastructure, due to its higher system efficiency and scalability.
Clive Longbottom, co-founder of analyst Quocirca, said this is one of the mainframe's great strengths.
"Mainframes run at 90 per cent utilisation day in, day out, whereas most Intel environments run at less than 50 per cent utilisation," he said. "Once you do the maths, the energy requirements are far lower than the equivalent scale-out environment so it has a lot going for it.
"The licensing for mainframes is still archaic, but IBM is addressing that."
Longbottom also paid tribute to IBM's role in the market and its ability to reinvent itself.
"IBM has kept the market alive nicely while the likes of ICL have come and gone," he said.
"When IBM came out with Linux mainframes, several large telcos and service providers bought them for hosting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of virtual Linux images as they found it far more cost-effective than using scale-out architecture."
SCC's Wright said the industry can learn a lesson from the mainframe's unforeseen durability.
"It's not a growing market but we need to be careful about how we look at technologies and send them to Room 101," he said.
MAINFRAME'S GOLDEN AGE
Launched on 7 April 1963, IBM's System/360 is credited with kicking off the modern computing era and set Big Blue on a path to dominating the industry for the next 20 years.
By 1989, products based on S/360 architecture and its extensions accounted for more than half of IBM's revenue but at the time of its launch its success was far from clear. According to IBM's 50th anniversary press blurb, Thomas Watson Junior's decision to plough $5bn (£3bn) into something that would cannibalise IBM's existing product lines was an epic "bet-the-business" move, and one driven by his desire to outdo his father.
For the first time, the S/360 allowed machines across a product line to work with each other.
"The most significant contribution of the S/360 to the world of computing was its commitment to compatibility," IBM said. "It was the first product family that allowed business data-processing operations to grow from the smallest machine to the largest without the enormous expense of rewriting vital programs."
By 1989 - before the personal computer took over the world - mainframes accounted for more than half the $260bn worldwide inventory of all computers made by all companies.