NASA CIO Linda Cureton recently blogged about NASA decommissioning the last of their mainframe computers this month. Although not the massive, room-sized machine depicted in so many sci-fi movies, NASA’s seven-year-old IBM z9 was still about the size of a large refrigerator. While there are organizations out there that require the capabilities of a mainframe computer, the number shrinks every year as Intel-based servers built from standard PC components become increasingly capable.
In 2009, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives retired their last mainframe computer that kept their financial management data and inventory control records for over a decade. They cited operational costs as the reason for its shutdown — with maintenance and support costs of $700,000 annually and $30,000 spent annually on electricity alone.
In NASA’s situation, the Z9 was left online at the Marshall Space Flight Center simply to support existing applications scheduled for retirement. No new development was done on the system for years. Cureton says NASA’s larger applications currently run on SAP in a non-mainframe environment.
As a former programmer for one of NASA’s System 360 mainframes purchased in the late 1960s, Cureton reminds us that the machines weren’t so bad when she says, “Virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths.”
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