CNN report - Mainframes making a comeback

It's true: everything old in IT becomes new again. I caught this Associated Press article on CNN.com and couldn't help but chuckle:

Cheap little servers handle so much of the Internet's dirty
work that giant computers known as mainframes, which debuted
50 years ago and often cost more than $1 million, are supposed
to be passe.
...
[if] you were to break modern computing history into its
simplest terms, it would go something like this: There was the
centralized-mainframe era, and then there was the
distributed-computing era. And the former ended a while ago.
...
"For every application, many times it takes five servers in
a distributed environment," said Jim Stallings, who runs IBM's
mainframe division. "Many customers are saying, 'I can't deal
with the complexity."'

It's interesting that this also applies to Domino. One of my key complaints about a open source or MS collaboration solution is the number of products one has to implement and manage. Domino is the mainframe of collaboration software, in more ways than one.

The cool thing is a Brazilian game company called Hoplon is releasing a new game that's hosted on an IBM mainframe. Showing the true flexibility of a mainframe, they aren't even using their own:

But rather than shelling out precious startup capital to own
a mainframe, Hoplon is remotely accessing one stashed in an
IBM data center in Brazil. The same machine manages a retirement
fund for IBM's Brazilian employees and handles operations for
a building-tools manufacturer.

Now that is something nifty. Oh, and the game looks pretty awesome, too.