3. The mainframe.
Death knells have sounded for this most reliable of servers since the 1980s, when shrinking demand and the advent of personal computers gave rise to the mainframe as dinosaur myth. That was then. Far from extinct (as the many mainframe-oriented visitors know) today's mainframes are sleeker, faster, better versions of their ancestors. DB2 DBA columnist Robert Catterall put to rest many mainframe misconceptions earlier this year and suggested modern ways to use what he calls "these cool pieces of Big Iron," including as part of service-oriented architectures. Earlier this year, I spoke with Mike Moser, product management director and program executive in BMC Software's Mainframe Service Management business unit, about a survey the company had done of its mainframe customers. Of the 1,000 people who had responded to the survey, only 7 percent had a negative impression of the future of the mainframe. What's more, 74 percent felt that, for mission critical workloads, they could not get the same performance, availability, and scalability in a distributed environment, regardless of how much money they might pour into it. Reliability, availability, and scalability have always been mainframe strengths. Now, the mainframe is scoring favorable marks on another front: energy efficiency. IBM In August, IBM announced that it is consolidating 3,900 servers in its data centers onto 30 System z mainframes running Linux. In doing so, it expects to reduce energy consumption by 80 percent. Earlier this week, Willie Favero wrote about IBM's recent announcement to that it would provide energy consumption ratings for its z9 servers and a real-time "gas gauge" for mainframe energy consumption, complete with energy-demand forecasting tools.

Meanwhile, mainframe partners are starting to pick up on the fact that specialty engines like the zIIP (or, more formally zSeries Integrated Information Processor) can reduce another kind of consumption: processing power. Eligible workloads offloaded onto a zIIP don't count toward the MIPs you pay for. You have the cost of buying the zIIP (generally less than the cost of a general purpose mainframe processor), but any MIPs you use on the zIIP are essentially free. You can move existing workloads (assuming they're zIIP eligible) to the zIIP and/or add new (eligible) workloads without incurring additional MIPs costs. Partners BMC, CA, NEON Enterprise Software Inc., and DataDirect are among the partners helping customers exploit the zIIP. At IOD last month, the DataDirect folks told me that up to 90 percent of the Web services work associated with its mainframe integration middleware product Shadow 7 can be offloaded to the zIIP. With SQL access, DataDirect reports between 30 to 70 percent eligibility; however, they point out that SQL workloads tend to consume fewer MIPs than Web services workloads. As SOAs and XML-based processing increase, so will the potential zIIP-related cost savings. Once again, I point to Wille Favero for a much better explanation of zIIP benefits than I can provide.

Bottom line? If mainframes are dead, they're sure enjoying a healthy afterlife.

And the last of the great undead (at least for now) …

4. The PC
It's been almost a decade since Lou Gerstner (then IBM chairman and CEO) declared the end of the PC era. As this CNET article noted, Gerstner wasn't saying PCs would disappear, just that their "reign as the driver of customer buying decisions and the primary platform for application development is over." More recently, folks have cited everything from wearable electronics to the iPhone as harbingers of the PC's death. Will the PC be supplanted by: a) the network b) iPhones, MP3 players, PDAs, and the like 3)wearable computers 4)anything?

I'm reminded of something Anant Jhingran said when we were discussing Info 2.0 for this article: "Typically, the new doesn't replace the old — the new sits beside the old." The people who I know who are furious texting, checking email on a BlackBerry, and loading up their iPhones and iPods aren't chucking aside their PCs. They're still using PCs, they're just adding on whatever other technologies they need.

What's your bet on the PC's future? What other technologies would you nominate for this list? Tell me in the comments below or send an email.