House Kisses Mainframe Goodbye

While our focus at Nextgov is mainly on information technology in the executive branch, I'd like to take a moment to mark the end of an era in the legislative branch's IT saga. On Friday, the House of Representatives decommissioned its last mainframe, which had been in place at the Ford Office Building since 1997.

"It's a symbolic transition into the latest and greatest in terms of green technology, virtualization, consolidation and all those things," says Jack Nichols, director of enterprise operations at the House of Representatives. "The mainframe plug was pulled, but it was pulled in favor of something that was started in the mainframe world."

The House had been using mainframes since at least the early 1970s, and at one time had a 13,000-square-foot data center dedicated to mainframe and mainframe operations. As mainframes grew stronger, the House moved down to just one machine, in addition to other types of servers.

New mainframes are far more powerful and efficient than those built in the 90s, of course. But the House decided not to buy another mainframe in part because its IT staff has more expertise running x86 and Unix boxes.

"We really don't' have those [mainframe] skill sets in house anymore," Zanatta says. "We try not to maintain architecture that we can't support ourselves."