For the past four decades, the glass house has been called a data center, and the key word there has been center, not data. Well, at least for the people selling systems and servers. The fact that the mainframe continues to drive many billions of dollars in sales a year despite all of the many wrenching changes in hardware and software technology in that time is a testament to the technical and marketing genius of BM.
Of course, it takes two sides of the bargaining table to make a transaction, and the mainframe has persisted for so long because mainframe shops have a strong desire to leverage the technologies that they know best to do new things. They wanted to do client/server computing or Internet computing a decade ago, and they did that with mainframes. Today, they want to implement a service oriented architecture (SOA) for their application and middleware software, but they also want to have the mainframe be central to that SOA.
