FWIW, where I was you didn't need the power of a big mainframe anymore and because of the size of the database you could actually buy a super beefy x86 machine

FWIW, where I was you didn't need the power of a big mainframe anymore and because of the size of the database you could actually buy a super beefy x86 machine with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM that could store the entire DB in RAM. However, rewriting 30+ years of legacy code was very difficult. The place had tried and failed on two occasions so far to do it. It seemed a bit like the airline reservation software system GDS and how it's still around.