Far from becoming obsolete, mainframes are becoming more relevant in the cloud and mobile era. That was the message from Marcel den Hartog, senior principal product marketing for CA Technologies' EMEA mainframe business, speaking at this week's CA Symposium 2012. However, he added that a chronic skills shortage is hindering companies from fully taking advantage of big iron.
As IT departments take advantage of cloud services, the role of the mainframe is becoming more critical than ever, Den Hartog says. “Cloud services have raised the issue of big data - where the data resides, how you crunch it to extract information to deliver to a cloud service, real-time manipulation of critical data.
“The mainframe guys' attitude is: if I go down, the company goes down. There's a powerful work ethic. When cloud services go down, people shrug and live with it.” The battle-hardened mainframe professionals tend to understand the inner workings of the business better, and are often best positioned to innovate, but are often overlooked, Den Hartog says.
And the skills shortage is the biggest problem, he adds. “For years, companies were cutting resources, and the mainframe guys stepped up and spread the workload around, but five years ago, we started to hear that the IT departments just couldn't cope any more. Now, some of them are in the position where they're just fire-fighting, and lack the capacity to do performance tuning. But the workload on the mainframe is still increasing, so the skills shortage gets even worse. It's a vicious cycle.” Many mainframe managers are nearing retirement, and junior staff lack the experience to make business-critical decisions with confidence, he says.
CA is actively encouraging mainframe skills development among IT professionals, with a mainframe academy offering boot-camp courses in fundamentals of mainframe management, and a number of free tools aimed at identifying performance and configuration issues. “We often see mainframes where performance tuning was done 20 years ago, but the hardware and software has evolved so much that you can get 30% better performance out of the mainframe without any risk.”
Performance is a huge concern for many organisations, Den Hartog says. “Mobile apps are making things worse. Simple interfaces need much more complex data. A single banking app can need dozens of data sources per page - one European bank rolled out an iPad app and the load on the mainframe ballooned immediately. They lost thousands of customers in just three or four days.”
The company is also working to provide management interfaces, which assist with skills development. CA's Mainframe Chorus tool integrates multiple tools into a familiar Web interface, and records the steps taken for common tasks so that IT staff can share expertise and increase the speed for management operations.
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