Hiawatha Bray (Boston Globe) put out an interesting story today on the survival / resurgence of the mainframe in IT. The story includes various perspectives from the mainframe audience gathered at the SHARE event this week in Boston.Reading this story reminded me about a discussion that we’re increasingly seeing in this new wave of Grid, virtualization, and commodity computing. Industry pundits are increasingly pointing out a “back to the future” trend in IT — where instead of mainframes, we’re building “scale-out” architectures that employ the same virtualization and symmetric multiprocessing techniques that mainframes use, albeit at a lower cost, and with finer-grained management capabilities. Andreas Antonopoulos from Nemertes Research describes the IT architecture progression in terms of a pendulum “swinging every few decades from centralized to-decentralized and back again.” In a recent column, he suggests that the mainframe isn’t coming back — next generation IT architectures are simply borrowing the most attractive qualities of mainframes. It’s a great read for additional clarity on the “centralized vs. decentralized” and “mainframe vs. scale-out” discussions. Regardless of where you think this is all headed, one can’t help but note the explosion of management vendors over the last few years, employing new virtualization techniques to tackle the new “scale-out” environment. BladeLogic, Cassatt, DataSynapse, Egenera, Levanta, Opsware, Platform, VMWare … the list goes on and on. Technology Industry