ITWire

According to O'Malley, it is not just superior cost of ownership but also a marked edge in quality of service that is driving the market back to mainframes.

"The quality of service, security – always virtues that have been substantially better than distributed solutions. With virtualisation, mainframe has been doing it for 30 years – it comes from the roots of a finite thing and optimising it to a whole," says O'Malley.

So what in O'Malley's view is causing large enterprises and some medium sized enterprises to pay the money for a big box from IBM, HP or Sun instead of a bank of commodity servers?

"You hear of disaster recovery tests. The mainfame came up no problem, the distributed solution never came back," says O'Malley.

"There is the quality of service issue, the security issue and also also the cost. In the mainframe space, as workloads quadruple there are less people caring for the mainframe and there is less people support needed, while in the distributed model, because of the complexity, the number of people go through the roof.

"The client/server model is too complex  because of the nature of the workloads. Also the capital component is very big. Some organisations have a $1 million monthly electric bill from servers running at 5-10% capacity - burning up money for no good reason.

"What VMware is trying to do with commodity servers was inspired by what virtualisation did the on mainframe when it was released 37 years ago."