Drama at the computing core

Little by little Standards-based approach By the numbers Consolidation: the first step

From the beginning, IT executives at Boscov's department store have had a mainframe bias. Today, as they think about evolving this family-owned retail chain's data center into a more flexible, business-driven computing resource, little has changed: They consider the mainframe more important than ever.

That might come as a surprise to those IT executives who consider the mainframe a dinosaur. But when considering which core computing platforms are best suited to support the new data center, twists on the old become newly viable options.

"The mainframe will stay, but its role will be substantially different from what it is today," says Joe Poole, technical director for Boscov's in Reading, Pa. Mainframe workloads will transition from the traditional batch jobs into a more fluid environment. For instance, Boscov's is merging Linux and the mainframe. The company deployed Linux on its IBM z900 mainframe in 2001 and began turning processes previously run on Windows NT servers into Linux instances. It has consolidated about 40 of about 70 NT servers onto the mainframe. By using middleware such as IBM's MQSeries, transactions can flow from machine to machine, he says.

Letting business processes flow, regardless of hardware and operating system, is behind lofty vendor strategies for pooling computer resources that grow and shrink in response to demand. System vendors are busy promoting their on-demand programs - HP with its Adaptive Enterprise, IBM with eBusiness on Demand and Sun with N1 - but analysts say the concept won't be reality for many years. As a result, users today should focus on establishing the core computing platforms that will lay the foundation for that eventuality.

For Boscov's part, it is considering buying mainframe capacity on demand from IBM and virtualizing Windows servers. These kinds of technologies would reduce management headaches while assuring that communication among all servers and the mainframe continues and that infrastructure is used efficiently. Poole needs to ensure this because Boscov's expects the number of transactions to jump significantly as it brings technologies such as radio frequency identification and wireless to its 39 stores.

Little by little

Beyond open source operating systems, IT executives have numerous other core computing options for moving from the status quo to a new data center that is easier to manage and that can support services-oriented and Web-enabled applications. These include industry-standard 64-bit server platforms, server clusters, blade servers, grid computing and server virtualization.

Analysts and other industry observers suggest that IT executives attack such decisions one at a time, rolling out pilot projects to see what works where and then figuring out how componentized portions of the data center can work together as an integrated whole.

"You have to make this process decision tree that says, for example, 'Am I going to move away from [symmetric multiprocessing] to scale out, and, if so, where does Linux or clustering fit in, and where do some of the database capabilities running on a clustered environment fit in?' " says Vernon Turner, group vice president for global enterprise server solutions at IDC. "So you're starting to break down your data center into the smallest manageable components. That's important because in the utility environment you have to be able to bill out in as small increments as possible."