Retired Mainframe Pros Lured Back Into Workforce

itwbennett writes "Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"

Comments

Re:Here is to....

[1c3mAn]

The Mainframe does it job and does it well. Nothing comes close in Data Throughput Processing with the amount of reliability that a mainframe brings.

Computer 'Experts' have been saying that the mainframe is dead since the early 90s, but here we are 20 years later and I still have a job programming for it, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Small to mid-level servers just don't have the capacity to deal with the growing about of data generated. Fedex does in the neighborhood of 2 billion transactions a day, you cant just wipe together a Beowulf Cluster and think it will do the job reliably.

Or the better question is. How much do you trust the Federal Reserve to run all its processing on Windows machines. Or Wall Street. Ever consider if a transaction there is 'lost' because a windows blue screen? Even linux machines arent as dependable as a Mainframe. The IBM Z boxes actually have their own redundant parts included in them already. Not to mention that it will phone in its own tech support request.

Mainframes are not for everyone, but they do fulfill their job well when you do need them.

There are also enough tools out there like SOA so that even Java "Kids" can write applications for them easily.

Mainframes run the world.

Re:Here is to....

[sexconker]

Uh, why?

Mainframes are fucking rock solid, reliable pieces of equipment.

They do the damned job like nobody's business.
The only issue with mainframes is that we haven't kept the people along with the software we chose to run on them decades ago.

Re:Here is to....

[AvitarX]

But I bet google loses lots of data. They certainly have had massive amounts of down time (by main frame standards).

search from 2 places, different results. They don't have highly critical data, so they can sloppily store and syncronize as needed. A liberty that Fedex does not.