James McGovern, a renowned and highly outspoken enterprise architect, says it all in a recent blog post headline: “The Mainframe is Not Evil, But COBOL Is.”

So what’s the beef against COBOL? Any language that’s been around for more than four decades has to have some redeeming qualities, right? Esperanto’s been around for just a bit longer, and there’s a language that promises world peace.

COBOL never offered world peace, but it did offer one of the first portable, standard languages that could be run across different vendors’ systems. Sort of a pre-Java Java, if you will.

James says, however, that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with Java. In fact, there’s no logical reason why IT shops are keeping COBOL going, he observes:

“Large enterprises love their mainframes but wrongly assume that they still need to keep COBOL on life support. Haven’t they realized that they can continue maintaining their enterprise applications by extending their functionality by leveraging Java? Java has a special co-processor that makes it run lightning fast on the mainframe and enterprises who aren’t using this technology are just dumb…”

If anything, COBOL is limiting the potential of mainframe, James says. For example, the commands are archaic: “Everything is a MOVE: Over 90% of a typical COBOL program will consist of MOVE, IF and GOTO. Not a very rich way of describing functionality. While COBOL is English-like, it didn’t incorporate the richness of the English language.”

Plus, James adds, the data layer supported by COBOL is too tightly coupled. “The program division contains direct reference to the physical name and size of database fields. This information is repeated in many programs, making changes very time consuming. In the Java world, if you wanted to expand the first name field from ten characters to twelve, this isn’t any work but very tedious in COBOL.”

It was estimated about 10 years ago that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated five billion lines of new code annually. There’s no reason to think that this number was shrunk, so its going to be some time before we finally put COBOL out of its misery.

The technorati has been abuzz lately about the promises of “cloud computing,” in which any and all functions within the stack — from storage to processing to messaging — are handled by third-party services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The impact on large systems and mainframe shops has been unclear, though it’s a sure bet the cloud services themselves will and need to be run out of large, high-availability data centers.

However, in a recent interview with CNET’s Dan Farber, IBM VP Steve Mills said he doesn’t see cloud computing shaping IBM’s mainframe customer base anytime soon. “Our corporate buyers are running mission critical apps, and they are not going to pick up their businesses and take them to some amorphous and ill-defined data centers,” Mills said. “The cloud as some amorphous concept that meets all needs and requirements is science fiction.”

IBM has a long history of competing against itself, and this is certainly in evidence here. IBM is a leading proponent of cloud computing, and is even building new capabilities to make cloud computing a reality, under an effort called “Blue Cloud.” Dan aptly describes IBM “as an arms supplier to the cloud vendors.”

But Mills feels that enterprise computing will demand on-site capabilities for a long time to come. However, he sees plenty of opportunity for Big Iron in this space as things progress. As he put it:

“We are constantly tracking where things are moving to with the IT automation providers. Our challenge is to make sure we sell to them,” Mill said. “You take some Isaac Asimov a thousand years into the future where all businesses source services from service providers, but it’s not likely to happen in my lifetime, my children’s lifetimes or their children’s lifetimes. There won’t likely be only two companies left in business services. There is enough diversity for different business models to exist, and the service bureau model will get bigger and we can sell into it.”

IBM recently released figures estimating that worldwide digital archive capacity is expected to increase at a nearly 60 percent compound annual growth rate by 2012, which means the total amount of data will have increased by 800 percent during that time.

Organizations are facing a sharp increase in the amount of digital content that must be managed with new compliance and discovery requirements. Worldwide file, database and email archive capacity will each skyrocket at an a compound annual growth rate of up to 73 percent — altogether totaling nearly two trillion full filing cabinets of information.

To put it bluntly, that’s a lot of bits and bytes to be managed. We all know that storage requirements — for video, audio files, images, and transactional data — are exploding. Layer on top of that the various compliance mandates that dictate that organizations hold on to certain types of data for extended periods of time, and you get the idea.

A couple of years back, I was chatting with the IT director for one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, who remarked that as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley, when it comes to e-mails — or anything else — the information stays. “Right now, we save everything — no matter how far back,” he said. And this is an organization that handles almost a million and a half e-mails a day. I asked him how they’re going to be able to store and manage all those files. Currently, everything was backed up on disk, and his department was investigating ways to move older files to tape.

Society and the legal system are turning enterprises into pack rats — havoing to spend time and money on the ludicrous exercise of saving and cataloging every scrap of correspondence and data that ever crossed their domains. As a result of this, and some very legitimate data requirements, multi-terabyte databases have become commonplace. Many databases are now cracking the 100-TB market, compared to a few that finally hit the one-terabyte mark a decade ago. Our research with the Independent Oracle Users Group found that multi-terabyte databases are fairly common these days.

I had the chance to speak with Craig Butler, IBM’s storage products marketing manager, on the occassion of the 50th annoversary of disk-based storage. Basically, Butler explained, storage devices have been able to keep up with exploding data demands because of a sort of “Moore’s Law of storage.” Over the past 50 years, capacity has grown by at least 40 percent a year, and even accelerated to 100 percent a year over the last decade. All this came with no change in price, and this is likely to keep pace into the near future.

However, nothing has come along that really can take the place of disk or tape, Butler said, and there is nothing emerging on the horizon.In fact, Butler predicts that we’ll still be relying on disk drives a decade from now — except that they’ll be smaller and more ubiquitous.

There are two challenges that we face with storage as time goes by, Butler said. First, there’s a need to be able to better manage and access the huge proliferation of data piling up in enterprises. “We need new search and retrieval techniques to find thee right data,” he said. “We have amassed all this capacity, but human beings don’t have time to search through it all.” Unstructured information is real challenge — take video files, for example. When the police need to review security cameras for suspects, soemone has to spend time — hours and days worth — watching analog video.

The other challenge is being able to access storage media decades from the time the data or image is captured. “A lot of valuable data could get stranded in an application that no longer exists, or in a file format that no longer exists, or a hard disk storage of some type that no longer works with new systems,” Butler said. IBM has been working on a research initiative that has been looking at storing data and artifacts with descriptive metadata, he said.

In terms of hardware, IBM has been exploring approaches such as molecular-size switches that could toggle molecules to different states — a sort of dense way to store ones and zeros.

Ultimately, Butler pointed out, its not disk technology that will restrain storage — it’s the organization and applications around it. “The energy is shifting from how we store our hard disk drives to the applications, security concerns, how we use all this data, and how we search through all this data,” he said. “Then there’s the privacy and ethical considerations of keeping all this data, because a lot of it is going to be about you and me. Who owns it? How do we keep it safe? We’ve got a lot of legal, ethical, and privacy concerns to sort through.”