Mainframe of the Future Looks Like A Cloud, IBM Chief Systems Engineer Guru Rao Says - Bank Technology News:
"over the past year I've spoken to many bankers at institutions of all sizes, from Citi to State Street to Highland Banks in Maple Grove, Minn., who are making substantial investments in mainframes.
Rao, who dropped by our office last week, says that both mainframe sales and the capacity of existing mainframes are growing.
'The installed inventory of mainframe capacity has been steadily growing ever since we started keeping records way back in the early 2000s,' Rao says. 'This is an indication that people are moving more work to it. We also know the work that's being done is a combination of traditional work and new workloads, for instance Linux-based based computing and transaction processing.' The reason IBM knows this is because its latest mainframe model, the System z, offers specialty engines for Linux workloads (Integrated Facility for Linux), database work and Java-based application serving work. 'By knowing how many of these things customers are using and buying, we have a handle on what mainframes' traditional workload capacity is versus the new workloads,' Rao says. 'The mainframe is alive and well and accepting new workloads.'"
