Can beasts from the past actually be part of the future of your enterprise setting? Despite all the buzz around cloud computing, IBM still believes that the mainframe has a future in some situations.
Steven Dickens, Linux go-to-market manager and platform economics lead at IBM, reckons that embracing mainframe to run your applications (more specifically the System z series) can help you save up to 60% compared to the cloud and nearly a third against on-premise standard x86 servers (probably why they got sold theirs to Lenovo then).
Dickens claims that a standard System z server is not only capable of replacing dozens of standard x86 servers but is also more adept at multi-tasking. An example is that of a single server being able of running an entire SAP environment while doing analytics in real time to provide the system user with insights.
The biggest challenge for IBM's proprietary solution remains the complexity of its own z/OS operating system compared to Linux distributions like SUSE or Red Hat.
Big Blue's committed to become a cloud-first company and announced yesterday that it will commit £2 billion (about $3 billion, AU$3.9 billion) to build an IoT division that will rely mostly (if not entirely on the cloud).
Via Computing
