Dollars and Sense …

Cheaper by the Mainframe?

by Lou Washington

I work in a cube farm. You know, Dilbert land.

I have worked in both types of office architectures, cubes and walls. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.  I can’t really say that I am adamantly opposed to cubes. I’m more likely to be the obnoxious neighbor rather than the suffering victim in my cube neighborhood.

I remember when our company moved into our current world headquarters building. We had been strung out all over the greater Cincinnati area. The new building was going to bring us all together. It also was going to put many of us in cubes for the first time. 

So, the big day came. We all moved into our new cubes and began our lives working in a single, big, common office versus a lot of small individual offices. Since the atmosphere was positively redolent with a spirit of brotherhood and neighborly love, we also began to share printing facilities, refrigerators, coffee makers, conference rooms, microwaves and fax machines.

It was a true revolution for many of us; sort of like Marxism but with a profit angle.

Book of Acceptable Things

Oddly, as time went by, many people began to long for the good old days of private offices. After a few months, I noticed that the occasional cube would be equipped with a coat hanger or perhaps a white board or map or something other than one of the official approved office accessories as published by our Facilities people in the “Book of Acceptable Things.”

This little manual specifies what’s appropriate in terms of cubical accoutrements and decorations. Little by little, the deviationists began to undermine the authority of the manual by displaying a variety of calendars, pictures, plants, posters with pithy sayings and the like. Clearly, some were striving to be more equal than others!

But, that was just the beginning. Soon you could find personal printers, space heaters, mini-fridges, lava lamps, TVs, radios and small stereo CD players.  Some cubes were more flamboyant. You could find small oriental rugs in place of the universal corporate gray carpet. Occasionally someone would forsake the standard office chair for something different ... perhaps a leather, high-back “boss” chair, or some ergonomic weirdo “earth” chair that didn’t look like a chair at all. 

Instead of a wide-open pathway into a cubical, the resident might have stacked some bookshelves up to create a partition partially hiding the workspace.  I have seen beads (a la the ‘60s crash pad) serving as cube “doors” not quite obscuring the black-light Jimi Hendrix poster hanging within ... “Purple Haze” pulsating in the background.

We had one fellow who completely covered his entire cube in aluminum foil.  I believe he was forced to attend a re-education camp out in the country somewhere. Whatever, his dangerous behavior had to be stopped.

Centralized Decentralization

A smart person once said that “Centralized systems tend to de-centralize and de-centralized systems tend to centralize.”  I think that pretty much sums up the phenomenon I am describing above.

I think this is what we are witnessing in the IT world as well.  For years the mainframe dominated the world. Then, the networked PC with server nodes evolved in various forms, and it became quite chic to talk about the mainframe and its assorted subsystems and support personnel as some kind of genetic throwbacks stuck in Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.”

The mainframe became the symbol of a sort of information systems tyranny that could only be broken via the complete independence of the end user to maintain their own self-designed, self-engineered systems running on their own personal machines; a sort of siliconized version of the Me Generation.

Enter the anti-mainframe. The networked PC, the servers down the hall, the evolved network held together by miles of cables, fiber optics and coax.  The guy who supported your system worked for your department and likely never met your IT director, if you still had one. 

And throughout all of this, the mantra of saving money was being chanted. “Cheaper than that boat-anchor mainframe” was the phrase I remember hearing almost constantly. 

Cheaper Than the Mainframe?  Really?

Like the hundreds of space heaters, refrigerators and lava lamps running in the cubes, the cost of the hundreds of locally installed servers is hidden behind all the various departmental budgets paying for the hardware, software, support, climate control, training, wiring and maintenance supporting these distributed systems.

“Ah ha!” you say. That’s as it should be, the expense is closer to the expenditure and therefore it more accurately reflects the actual need in terms of the money spent.

Consider this, the average mainframe is running at something like 85% to 90% capacity.  The average server is running at about 20% capacity; almost the inverse of the amount utilized by the mainframe. What does this mean?  It means the company is paying for huge amounts of server capacity that will likely never be needed.

Our chairman, Tom Nies, once remarked that without software, the only thing hardware could produce was heat!  That is universally true across all platforms and operating system environments. So, what are you doing with the “heat” all those servers produce?

Your mainframe system may well be cooled by water coming off your HVAC chillers.  In the winter, the heat from the mainframe could be contributing to the maintenance of a tolerable ambient temperature in your building. 

Now, think about all of those closets, file rooms, hallways and odd corners now housing servers.  How are they being cooled?  Do you see fans running for hours on end standing in front of wide-open closet doors exposing the servers within?  Maybe you’re not cooling your servers, maybe you’re just losing the data maintained on the overheated box.

How much does that cost?  The lost data, the hundreds of fans purring away, the crashed system resulting from overheating because someone forgot to turn the fan on. Again, it’s not visible.  It’s hidden behind the individual department or group budget or it’s spread out in the general overhead for the building, division or campus.

Here’s another thought - how much space are you devoting to all of those servers? Once you devote a closet to accommodating a server, it kind of limits what else you might be able to do with that floor space. Look around your enterprise, count up the computing power you have spread all over the place, factor it down to what you might actually need for each of the systems now running on their own dedicated server and then add up the amount of space each of those boxes takes up.

I think you will likely find a lot of wasted square footage.

Many companies have started to pull all of the servers back into a central environment.  Here they are finding the answers to many of these questions. Row after row of rack-mounted servers are going to take up much less square footage than the decentralized, localized architecture but, this is not exactly going to create an environment conducive to hanging meat.

Suddenly the raised floor, the limited-access IT area, the climate-controlled, positive-air-pressure, halon- (or whatever they use today) protected room is back.  Even the water pipe, the subject of such ridicule over the years, is now returning to cool the rack-mounted servers filling these newly consolidated operating centers.

All of this “mainframe” stuff is now part of the equation when you are costing out alternatives as far as platforms in your data center. Be very careful that you are indeed comparing fruit with fruit when you start adding up the MIPS required, MIPS delivered and TCO for a mainframe-centered environment versus a server farm.

I read a blog posting from a gentleman who had started down one road and ended up changing directions. His Intel-based data center was approaching 850K; his finished mainframe facility cost him around 240K.

I’m not saying this is going to be the result for every implementation. But, as we move away from the decentralized “chaos” of servers anywhere and everywhere, and the concept of a centralized facility is embraced again, be prepared to honestly evaluate the two architectures on their true merits, liabilities and real costs.

Peace! 

About Lou Washington

I started my career in information management from the somewhat misunderstood field of Records Management. Following four years of working for the University of Missouri System's Office of Records Management, I joined Tab Products Co. in 1980. Shortly thereafter, I became interested in the software business, PCs and how those systems would shape the enterprise of the future. We were transferred to Tab's then corporate HQ in Palo Alto, CA. I was the first Product Manager for Tab's Tracker systems software products that utilized a PC-based bar-coding system to track the movements of everything from files to capital assets. I believe it was the earliest example of workflow automation available on the market. I was also peripherally involved in Tab's Laser Optics division, which brought to market one of the earliest business systems employing CD-ROM and WORM technology as an information storage media.

In 1990, I returned to Cincinnati and joined Cincom Systems where I began to learn about and work with mainframe-oriented products and systems. In those days, there was a real "split" between the mainframe forces and the desktop proponents. I always found this to be amusing since both had so many positive things to offer an enterprise. I could never understand why anyone would offer one at the exclusion of the other.

My present role at Cincom involves a number of things including product security, pricing, finance packaging and industry research.

My wife, Barbara, and I reside in Park Hills, KY. I am a member of Blessed Sacrament Church and I am active in a local car club, Cincinnati Cruisers. We are a group of PT Cruiser owners who enjoy tricking out our cruisers and driving around annoying people who have to drive boring cars. I am the Webmaster for the Cruisers and I invite everyone to visit www.cincyptcruisers.com and check out our awesome rides! Barbara and I both enjoy photography, travel and our two four-legged canine children, Chloe and Cookie.