LITTLE ROCK — The mainframe business is to International Business Machines Corp. what manufacturing is to the American economy, a shrinking but strategically vital part of the franchise.
With the introduction of a new generation of mainframes last week, IBM is trying totighten its grip on corporate and government data centers. The new machines are faster, more powerful and more energy-efficient. But the most significant change, analysts say, is that other kinds of computers can now be plugged into the mainframe to manage a data center almost as if it were a single computer.
The new machines, some customers say, are the most significant change in mainframe design in a decade or more.
The mainframe move by IBM is part of the intensifying battle in the market for large computers, including ones running the Unix operating system.
In the market for Unix based machines, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are trying to grab business from Oracle, which completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems this year. Sun had been losing share in the past few years, and rivals are trying to exploit the uncertainty surrounding Oracle’s plans for Sun, said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst at IDC, a firm that researches technology.
As the economy gradually recovers, companies have renewed spending on smaller data-center computers, socalled industry standard machines, powered by personal computer-style microprocessors made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Intel Corp. on July 13 reported a sharp rebound in sales of chips for server computers, and IBM last week said its sales of industry standard servers rose 30 percent in the second quarter.
To date, corporate customers have not yet revived spending on bigger machines, mainframes and Unix-based servers. But analysts expect that to change in the second half of this year, helped bynew products, such as the IBM mainframe models.
IBM stands alone in the mainframe market, after competitors including Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi dropped out years ago. So to some degree, new models compete against the previous IBM models. The company says the new Z series mainframe runs more than 40 percent faster than its predecessor and is up to 90 percent more energy-efficient.
Conserving space and energy is important to many corporations, as they try to increase their computing capabilities without having to add to their real estate or their electricity bills.
Martin Kennedy, a managing director at Citigroup, is adopting the compact new mainframe and estimates that it will consume 60 percent less energy than its predecessor. Citigroup also plans to opt for a water-cooled model, which should trim power consumption by a further 12 percent.
“That was compelling to us,” Kennedy said.
The ability to plug other computers into the mainframe and manage hardware and software applications, customers say, is appealing. In theory, they say, that should make it possible to extend mainframe strengths in security and always-on availability to other systems.
In addition, customers say, the new design is intended to make it possible to blend tasks, parceling out parts of a complex application to different computer systems, more efficiently than in the past. For example, a bank might want to track automated teller machine transactions for fraud in real time. The ATM customer data are held on the mainframe, which also handles banking transactions. But the pattern analysis for fraud is best done on a Unix machine.
Being able to plug a Unix machine into the new mainframe should make doing such complex applications easier and less expensive, said Niels Simanis, a senior technology manager at Danske Bank, a large bank based in Denmark.
The new mainframe design, said Rodney Adkins, an IBM senior vice president, is mainly “about data center integration, being able to treat the data center as a single system.”
Having the mainframe act as the brainy control point for data centers, analysts note, would also tend to lock customers further into IBM’s technology. And a healthy mainframe business is important to the company’s strategy. The machines alone generate yearly sales estimated at $3 billion, about 3 percent of the company’s revenue.
But all mainframe-related business, including storage, software, financing and services, accounts for more than 20 percent of IBM’s revenue and more than 40 percent of its profits, according to A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research.
Business, Pages 21 on 07/26/2010