Will virtualisation create a mainframe renaissance?

When IBM first introduced the idea of a mainframe virtual machine back in the 1960s, few people would have predicted that the IT industry would have come full circle more than 40 years later. But increased interest in virtualisation and the demand for ‘greener’ computing could see a revival of interest in mainframe computing, according to some industry insiders.

“We are absolutely seeing interest in mainframes from clients who want to use more virtualisation,” says Roy Illsley, a senior research analyst with Butler Group. “It’s not an approach for everyone but, done well, it can reduce power consumption and footprint, improve reliability and provide a lot of value to the business.”

Although virtualisation is most often discussed in terms of Wintel and Unix servers, the idea of consolidating many workloads onto a single machine and creating ‘virtual partitions’ was invented on the mainframe in 1967, says Carl Greiner, an analyst with Ovum. “This isn’t a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, and virtualisation has always been done on mainframes.”

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IBM Reveals Jazz Product Launch Wave

Team Concert 1.0, the first commercial product derived from IBM’s Jazz platform for collaborative development, will be available on June 30, with nearly 20 related offerings from IBM and partners set to ship by the end of 2008, the company announced Monday.

The product is a collaboration portal aimed at keeping distributed-software development teams connected through technologies such as instant messaging. Programmers log into the system and see their own work items, what fellow team members are working on and assorted metrics related to the project’s status.

View Full Article: Yahoo News - PC World