Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.

Lately concepts like SOA, consolidation, green computing and cloud computing has been the buzzwords in every CIO’s dream and every technicians nightmares, except mine. In my dreams I see datacenters filled with mainframes and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the CIO’s are dreaming about, then it would be called a nightmare. Before we continue on this subject I have to state that I’m a Linux/UNIX consultant, female and not 60+ years old, just to avoid future confusion…

In the dark, behind the headlines of death sentence after death sentence for the mainframe, companies like IBM, HP and Unisys has been working on bringing the mainframe back on the market. We all know that mainframes are huge, power hungry, complex and most of all OLD, but that’s not true. Mainframes are 1500 virtual servers in the same space where you can fit three racks with 126 1U servers, unless you get heat problems. Reduced heat means less cooling for the same amount of servers in the datacenter and together with a focus on power saving mainframes becomes the ultimate choice when it comes to green computing.

Some of the features IBM has been focusing on is new technologies for partitioning, virtualization and smart solutions for load balancing inside the mainframe. Most companies that are already using mainframe invest in more mainframes and are consolidating their Linux systems inside the mainframe. IBM mainframes seems to get their way back to the market with a growth of mainframes world wide with 30.7%, and the latest model IBM System Z10, released in the beginning of this year, has led to a growth of mainframes in Europe with  58%.

With all due respect, mainframes are stable and just as made for cloud computing, but who’s going to operate them? The amount of System Administrators that are familiar with mainframes and applications running on them is barely enough for what’s needed at this point. Same story goes for System Developers that are familiar with languages like Cobol and RPG. My hope is that this lack of competence won’t impede use of mainframes and that more people will see their possibilities for virtualization and cloud computing.