Powering your new cloud: mainframes?

Recent figures from Gartner suggest the mainframe market, which is classified as ‘other’, accounted for industry revenues of around $US1.28 billion. That’s about 10% of the overall server market’s revenues for a market of just over 2200 machines, with a year-on-year decline in unit sales of around 40%. Dayton Semerjian, general manager of CA Technologies’ mainframe business, argues that the numbers can be deceptive because the actual number of mainframe MIPS being pushed into the market is increasing steadily. Continuing demand for highly-specified government applications, he argues, will keep mainframes more relevant than critics ever would have believed. A 2010 CA survey seemingly supports this, with 80% of mainframe decision-makers confirming mainframes as an important part of their business strategy and 73% saying the mainframe was important to their cloud plans. “The applications sitting on mainframes are the core defence, banking and other apps that power the global economy,” Semerjian explains. “High-volume, high-output applications haven’t gone away – and instead of the Internet replacing the mainframe, those applications have become more dependent on the mainframe because those transaction volumes have gone up.” “The software coming around today will enable the platform to be more agile, flexible, and cloud-like,” he adds. “The apps are there, and they perform really well.”