Ever since the 1980s there’s been a split in computing hardware, on one side the new “cheap and cheerful” world of PC hardware, and on the other side the old school of “Big Iron”, IBM mainframes which run for years or even decades with no downtime.

If you speak to a mainframe engineer, they’ll tell you that 90% of cloud computing isn’t new, they’ve been doing on-demand workloads, billing based on resource usage, multiple customers on one system, and unified system management since the 1960s.

Now that we’re entering the cloud computing era, IBM mainframes are seeing a big rise in popularity, with IBM producing specialised mainframes designed for running 1000s of Linux virtual machines, and Cisco, EMC and VMware are working together on their VBlock systems, which are essentially their interpretation of a modern mainframe – very serious hardware and software mixed together to get a platform that should essentially never fail. This is the modern “Big Iron”, designed to provide service providers and enterprises the security and confidence to move their most critical systems onto a single unified platform powering a private cloud.

In the public clouds though, cheap and cheerful has already taken the lead, with Amazon, Google and others running their systems on what are essentially the cheapest systems they can get their hands on, going so far as to design their own custom systems without components they don’t need, and easily replaceable power supplies and hard drives because they know these components will fail regularly.

The question now is will one concept take a hold in the opposite marketplace – will service providers start buying VBlock systems in large numbers and building large public clouds of 100,000 machines, or will enterprises start buying 1000s of customised PCs from people like Dell Cloud Computing Solutions and putting open-source solutions like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on to it?

Personally, while I can see some cross-over of both, I think in general the 2 solutions will remain largely separate – in the largest of public clouds, it’ll be worth the customisation effort of the service provider to build their own solution, but for enterprise and smaller service provider systems, the cost of customisation and on-going support outweighs the savings of cheaper hardware and software, plus of course the trust factor of buying a complete solution from a supplier like IBM or Cisco is crucial for most enterprise environments.