It was 2006. The iPhone and iPad didn’t exist, and no one was really talking about the “consumerization” of information technology. Clouds were something that appeared in the sky. The first message was sent on Twitter. MySpace was the most popular social site on the Internet, the tiny Facebook site was just introducing a newsfeed feature, and people still wrote serious articles pondering whether the mainframe was finished. It was also the first year for BMC’s annual mainframe survey.

So, what were our customers thinking about in 2006, and how have the results changed as we move through 2011?

In 2006, the economy was in good shape, with the U.S economy growing 3.4 percent that year. The new z9-series mainframe had been released, providing more powerful mainframes to address the security and availability requirements of the world’s most demanding computer users. We saw the z10 release in 2008 and the launch of zEnterprise in 2010, offering a steady stream of innovation to the platform. The survey has noted that growth expectations and general optimism around the platform closely track these release dates.

Two key survey questions about the health of the market are, “What is the growth outlook for your mainframe environment?” and, “What is your expectation that the mainframe market will grow and attract new workloads?” We saw positive responses to both of these topics spike (reaching about 60 percent of respondents) in the year after the z10 and zEnterprise launches. Large shops grew MIPS usage aggressively. While we didn’t ask about MIPS usage in 2006, in 2007, 51 percent of the respondents were running more than 1,000 MIPS and 17 percent were running more than 10,000 MIPS. Today 56 percent of respondents report running more than 1,000 MIPS, with 23 percent running more than 10,000 MIPS.

The large users are exceptionally loyal and growing strongly in every category. We’ve seen specialty engines come into their own, with more than 50 percent of respondents reporting one or more types, with System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) and Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) specialty engines being extremely popular. As of 2011, almost 90 percent of large shops are running a zIIP to control software costs. We’ve seen a similar rise in terms of IFL and Linux on System z usage, from the low 20 percent range up to nearly 40 percent, reaching 51 percent in the larger shops.

The large enterprises are investing and extending their usage of the platform, based on acknowledged strengths in platform availability, security, and transactional processing capabilities and are just now investigating how to leverage the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) to run mixed platform configurations—including z/OS, AIX, Linux on System z, and Windows—along with specialty processors such as database query and middleware accelerators.

That Was Then, This Is Now

In 2006, respondents were asked to rate critical problems in the mainframe on a scale of one to 10. The top-three most critical problems, in order of importance, were root cause analysis, monitoring DB2 SQL, and change and configuration. Enterprise monitoring and change control remain the top areas today, where more than 50 percent of respondents are looking for cross-platform solutions, indicating a need to manage complexity in the hybrid data center. In 2006, Linux for System z was at the bottom of the list of 11 operating systems and components actively used in their server infrastructure. Today, Linux on System z is mainstream in large shops.

Addressing the skills gap was a challenge in 2006, and it continues to be an important issue today. The difference is that more attention is being focused now on leveraging automation and modern tools that can help make it easier for less-experienced staff to do their jobs.

So what is our research telling us? First, mainframes support the world’s largest and most complex data centers, and among those respondents, usage is accelerating. Users are focused on controlling costs as their environments grow at an ever-increasing rate, and they struggle to deal with growing environmental complexity brought on by distributed server sprawl and the cloud. We will watch the effects of initiatives such as business class machines and low-cost specialty engines on this important market segment. In the future, we will be looking with anticipation to see how mainframe sites deal with exploding size and complexity while facing increasing pressure to train a new generation of GUI-capable, social-media savvy administrators who consider the mainframe simply a layer within their complex web of enterprise systems.