The mainframe evolves into a new beast in the cloud era
February 21, 2014
Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Hardiman.
The cloud world inherited some concepts from the mainframe world that came before it. The consumption-based pricing model, Linux virtual machines, and multi-tenancy came from that previous mainframe generation. NASA got rid of its mainframes, but these massive machines can still be found in many large organizations. In the age of cloud IT, aren’t mainframes irrelevant? Why won’t the mainframe die?
David Hodgson, SVP at CA Technologies, Inc., described the role of mainframes today. CA started 38 years ago as a mainframe software supplier and still does mainframe work. In my interview with Hodgson, he said, "The mainframe business to CA is still just over 50% of our revenue." CA Technologies is not a small company–it’s in the Fortune 500, has billions of dollars in revenue, and employs many thousands of people…
What is a mainframe computer?
A mainframe computer is a type of big, powerful, expensive, and reliable computer that has been around for decades–IBM announced the System/360 50 years ago. A lot of the applications running on these machines were written in COBOL, a programming language that’s just as old as the mainframes…
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