The mainframe has been written off more times than an underperforming England national football team. But while many organisations are migrating process-intensive applications off expensive-to-maintain legacy systems onto increasingly powerful Windows servers or clusters, the mainframe can still retain a few customers by hook or by crook.

International Masters Publishing (IMP) for example, a publishing company specialising in mail order books and magazines, recently decided that its IBM zSeries mainframe operations were no longer cost effective. The firm is in the process of migrating its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application onto two Windows Server 2003 systems, a four dual-core application server and a database server based on dual-core processors. By its completion, the move will have ported 850 online programs and 4,700 batch jobs onto the new system.

IMP chief information officer David Ives said cost was certainly the primary driver for the move, particularly the system’s monthly maintenance bill, though the need to future proof IMP’s application development and perceived better reliability of Windows systems were also taken into account.

“We were seeing cost going up in the mainframe environment while simultaneously seeing other solutions in the marketplace. We have on average 350-400 million instructions per second (MIPS) outsourced to systems integrator Logica, and the IBM licensing cost was going up every time we came to negotiate it. We did not have sufficient volumes or negotiating powers to get those costs reduced,” said Ives.

Buying the necessary software cost IMP around €500, said Ives, though hardware expenditure on two servers was virtually negligible. The rump of the cash was spent on professional services, which came to a bill in excess of €1m.

“This should pay itself back in around two to two-and-a-half years,” said Ives, who expects cost savings in the region of €1m per year.

“The business case is fairly fluid and may turn out to include some unexpected things, but the payback might be earlier as well. A lot will depend on how quickly we can turn off the mainframe completely. The first year will be a learning curve for us as well but things might look different going forward and we’ll go down the virtualisation route with suppliers as an outsourced commodity,” he said.

Martin Boakes, the resident mainframe specialist at IT services provider Logicalis, admits to seeing a continuing trend towards migrating legacy systems off the mainframe and onto distributed servers, but said high maintenance costs are largely the result of operating system licence costs.

“The costs associated with maintaining mainframes are perceived to be high and the monthly license charge for IBM z/OS is very expensive,” he said.

“IBM justifies this by saying that it delivers better performance and uptime backed up by 40 years of development, but the end result is expensive regardless, and we are seeing a number of people move away from legacy mainframe systems as a result.”

But Boakes said mainframes do not have to be the expensive, bloated monstrosities which many people perceive them to be. He said that an entry-level mainframe system can cost as little as £60,000 if it runs an open-source operating system such as Linux. It can also use less electricity than the equivalent number of Windows servers required to handle the same application load.

“This shocks people because they think that mainframes are large, cumbersome and expensive, but it is possible to consolidate 350 or more servers onto one mainframe, which sends out a good virtualisation message and helps drive down the carbon footprint in terms of less heat generated and less power and space used in the datacentre,” he said.

Even so, it is hard for any organisation running 500 MIPS and below to justify the cost of using mainframes for such a relatively low volume of transactions, especially with so many companies pushing a single outsourced service based on a distributed server virtualisation model, said Ives.

“A lot will come down to the volume of transactions and size of applications concerned – I have lots of colleagues in the financial and travel industries who are buying MIPS in the thousands, for example,” he said.

The physical process of migrating applications off mainframes and onto Windows servers can be time consuming and fraught with difficulty, especially with legacy applications based on CICS, DB2, or COBOL for example, which were developed with the mainframe in mind.

“There are problems sometimes and many find it hard to come off the mainframe at all. Unfortunately it is not until they do it that they realise what those problems are,” said Boakes.

“It takes a long time to migrate the workload over, especially where they are running core applications and porting data can be a huge risk.”

IMP sought the help of enterprise application modernisation specialist Micro Focus for its migration, with Tata Consultancy Services providing integration.

But irrespective of any one organisation’s individual circumstances or how much they are willing to spend on third-party assistance, a lot will depend on the state of the firm's relationship with IBM.

Having acquired its last remaining mainframe rival, Platform Solutions Incorporated (PSI), earlier this year, the IT giant now dominates the market and is in a position to dictate terms to business partners and customers alike.

“There is only one mainframe market player [IBM] which is disappointing for me because I would like to see a competitive solution that would improve some of the mainframe cost figures,” said Boakes.

“It is fairly obvious why IBM will not reduce its software costs though, because they constitute the bulk of its revenues and all the shareholders would hit the roof.”

Statistics suggest that these high costs are not damaging IBM’s mainframe sales yet, however. According to researcher IDC, revenue from the sale of IBM System z servers running z/OS grew 31.7 per cent year on year in the second quarter of 2008, accounting for 11.8 per cent of all server revenue in that quarter.

But Windows-based systems still account for over a third of the total market (36.5 per cent), with Linux servers taking a 13.4 per cent share.