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Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed
dipfan writes "Great piece in today's Financial Times on the surprising survival of mainframes - but the problem in the US is finding experienced techies to run them: "55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills." Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s. Help is on the way, though, thanks to IBM's use of Linux, which "freshens the labor pool" according to the article." (See also this earlier post on the mainframe-operator labor pool.)
The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems
You seem to be labouring under the idea that a mainframe is necessarily old. Let me clue you in: they're still being actively developed, and an IBM zSeries will handily spank the top-of-the-line Unix boxes from Sun without breaking a sweat.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations)
None of those things you mention can be done with a "network of workstations" in any comparable way to what can be done with a mainframe. Next you'll be saying a "beowulf cluster" can replace a mainframe. Nothing in the Unix world comes even close to IBM's Sysplex. Mainframes have 99.999% uptimes as standard. Mainframes can deliver quality-of-service (QoS) - you know in advance exactly how long your job will take to complete, because you know that the system can guarantee a minimum level of resource, no matter what else it is doing. You can hot swap drives, processors, nodes, anything you want.
will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door.
It's a fact that it is easier to write programs in COBOL than it is in C++. No memory leaks, no dangling pointers, etc and it's natively integrated with the database and operating system.
It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Quite simply, you are wrong. Plug in an IBM mainframe and it does what it says on the box, all fully integrated. It'll do what it was supposed to do, for decades if necessary, and when it's obsolete you can upgrade to a new one and your old software will run flawlessly first time, but faster. IBM proved this when they moved from 48-bit CPUs to 64-bit. As I have said before, this simply doesn't happen in the Unix world. A mainframe is a nuclear power station and a PC is the engine in your car. Sure you could use thousands and thousands of cars to generate the electricity for a city, but why would you?