If you ask anyone these days, the mainframe or Big Iron market is dying. People are chucking out mainframes everywhere, and at least one bank in Malaysia, has plans to phase mainframes out, in just a few months. NASA themselves, powered down their last mainframe, an IBM System z9 in 2012.
Big Iron is one of the most virtual-efficient piece of hardware on the planet today. And what is IBM aka Big Blue doing about it?
Nothing.
And this is a huge crying shame, because the mainframe is the perfect machine for the cloud.
Current server processors are not efficient at supporting virtualisation, but rather they are designed for handling complex calculations, supporting applications and so on. These processors’ built-in micro codes are not designed to be efficient for virtualisation.
But, mainframes are. And Big Blue has spent decades building a highly efficient, highly reliable and highly virtualised machine in the mainframe.
Sadly however, they have chosen to monetise that asset in a highly complex way that is turning off even their loyal customers.
Mainframes are also way more expensive than smaller boxes. There is no denying that. But Big Blue themselves have claimed that mainframes on a per-VM basis, can price match VMs offered on public cloud using intel boxes.
So why is mainframe adoption still sliding down a slippery slope?
The CEO of SoftLayer, a cloud infrastructure provider that IBM recently acquired, had said this past week, that he is lobbying within IBM to make the mainframe another element of the SoftLayer cloud. But IT Business Edge which carried this news, further reported that this raises many questions that need to be sorted given the ‘complexity’ of IBM’s mainframe licensing terms.
Which brings us to another point as to maybe why mainframes may be dying: Big Blue is making mainframes so ‘elitist’ that potential customers are thinking, “I’ll make my own servers thank you very much. It’s just too much hassle buying this stupid box from you!”
IT BYTES BACK! says: Is Big Blue’s business vision blinding their view to potential of one of the most valuable assets the cloud industry will ever see?
