With the world embracing cloud computing who needs mainframes?

July 4, 2013 Off By David

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Colin Barker.

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of that mainstay of computing, the mainframe.   Back in 1964, IBM rolled out the System/360, the first computer that was compatible and upgradable: in other words, while until then all computers were different, any System/360 would work with any other System/360.

The mainframe has stood the test of time – but in the age of cloud computing can the mainframe still be relevant?  Certainly SHARE, the IBM user group, remains firmly of the opinion that the mainframe has a future. According to SHARE member Janet Sun, writing in the user group magazine in May, this user group can claim a membership of 20,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 companies around the world and highlights a few mainframe stats:…

  • 96 of the world’s top 100 banks, 23 of the 25 top US retailers, and 9 out of 10 of the world’s largest insurance companies run IBM’s System z mainframes.
  • Seventy-one percent of global Fortune 500 companies are System z clients,
  • Nine out of the top 10 global life and health insurance providers process their high-volume transactions on a System z mainframe,
  • Mainframes process roughly 30 billion business transactions per day, including "most major credit card transactions and stock trades, money transfers, manufacturing processes, and ERP systems".

So on these figures, there are quite a few mainframes still hanging around and they are doing an awful lot of processing. But aren’t they still antiquated?…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/with-the-world-embracing-cloud-computing-who-needs-mainframes-7000017087/

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