On the heels of the World Cup soccer tournament, I am reminded of an incident with another “z” – Zinedine Zidane. You may recall that in the match against Italy, Zidane headbutted an opposing player earning him a Red Card and the ejection - an unfortunate end to successful career.
The “new” z196 mainframe also has its better days in the past. Once a revered platform for mission critical computing, the mainframe innovations are just not keeping up with the rest of the server community. The last 7 quarters have seen mainframe revenue decline, and we are seeing increased doubts about the mainframe’s longevity.
But wait – wasn’t the new mainframe hailed as the “first systems of systems”. Sure if you ignore the fact that HP’s Converged Infrastructure has been available for over 2 years.
But wait - the new mainframe has a zBlade Center extension…that won’t have x86 blades for another year – unlike HP’s BladeSystem Matrix that uses x86 Proliant and Integrity Blades today.
But wait - the new mainframe is heterogeneous with the ability to run z/OS, AIX and Linux. Not much to brag about when in a single chassis HP can run HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS, Solaris and Windows using Proliant and Integrity servers.
But wait – the mainframe has a new water chilled option to better cooling…new for the mainframe perhaps. HP has a water cooled chassis available for years.
The System z mainframe, like Zinedine Zidane, was once a power presence that was worth a premium price. Now we see the innovative computing capabilities showing up in HP servers and solutions, with the once proud mainframe replicating to catch up with these advances.
So whether we call the new mainframe zEnterprise, z11 or zNext, I suspect it will be zLast.
