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> 71% of executives surveyed say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy; and in three years, the percentage of organizations levera

> 71% of executives surveyed say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy; and in three years, the percentage of organizations leveraging mainframe assets in a hybrid cloud environment is expected to increase by more than 2x. Reading between the lines, doesn't this say that the execs are concerned about being so heavily reliant on their mainframes and so are transitioning mainframe workloads to cloud environments at a rapid pace?

kitd 5y ago
I think it means they're incorporating mainfame H/W into their hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  You're right that's probably what they intend it to mean, but I think there is a reading of it that they are moving workloads from mainframes to the cloud, and during that process will be "hybrid cloud with mainframes".
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    You can get Linux VMs running on z15 hardware from IBM Cloud, with all the encryption and misc security features the architecture allows.
luma 5y ago
I'd parse that as customers which have mainframes are also doing hybrid cloud. They don't overtly state that the mainframe workloads are going to cloud, just that some number of customers who have mainframes also have cloud workloads, and that number will probably be bigger than it was before. When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Also, you can virtualize a lot of Linux boxes inside a full LinuxONE machine. And almost a gigabyte of L4 cache for every four 5.2 GHz CPs makes it a seriously fast single-thread machine. Add to that all that hardware offloading for IO and you end up with a lot more capacity that you'd have on the same datacenter volume.
  - deviledeggs 5y ago
    It's not as good as it's sounds, especially with new Ryzen cores. IBM won't let you do benchmark comparisons, but I've found unofficial ones that show Ryzen is almost 3X performance per thread on general purpose workloads. You can get a 32 core 64 thread Ryzen for $2000. And it should have around 2/3 the performance of a top of the line z15 mainframe that costs $200,000+ . And the Ryzen is a single chip, so the rest of the hardware is cheap and compact.
tyingq 5y ago
I think it just means they have non-mainframe stuff running in the cloud that the mainframes need to access. Like "uh, we moved payroll to cloud and this mainframe job needs that data".
raverbashing 5y ago
It seems IBMs business model is to make the customer pay more with time until they give up and leap from their (legacy) platform, at which point they migrate to something ground breaking like... DB2 on x86 (of course it would have been cheaper to migrate things 10 yr. ago but the oxygen restriction caused by neckties usually prevents some kinds of foresight)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kitd 5y ago

I think it means they're incorporating mainfame H/W into their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

danpalmer 5y ago
You're right that's probably what they intend it to mean, but I think there is a reading of it that they are moving workloads from mainframes to the cloud, and during that process will be "hybrid cloud with mainframes".
- rbanffy 5y ago
  You can get Linux VMs running on z15 hardware from IBM Cloud, with all the encryption and misc security features the architecture allows.

luma 5y ago

I'd parse that as customers which have mainframes are also doing hybrid cloud. They don't overtly state that the mainframe workloads are going to cloud, just that some number of customers who have mainframes also have cloud workloads, and that number will probably be bigger than it was before. When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.

rbanffy 5y ago
Also, you can virtualize a lot of Linux boxes inside a full LinuxONE machine. And almost a gigabyte of L4 cache for every four 5.2 GHz CPs makes it a seriously fast single-thread machine. Add to that all that hardware offloading for IO and you end up with a lot more capacity that you'd have on the same datacenter volume.
- deviledeggs 5y ago
  It's not as good as it's sounds, especially with new Ryzen cores. IBM won't let you do benchmark comparisons, but I've found unofficial ones that show Ryzen is almost 3X performance per thread on general purpose workloads. You can get a 32 core 64 thread Ryzen for $2000. And it should have around 2/3 the performance of a top of the line z15 mainframe that costs $200,000+ . And the Ryzen is a single chip, so the rest of the hardware is cheap and compact.

tyingq 5y ago

I think it just means they have non-mainframe stuff running in the cloud that the mainframes need to access. Like "uh, we moved payroll to cloud and this mainframe job needs that data".

raverbashing 5y ago

It seems IBMs business model is to make the customer pay more with time until they give up and leap from their (legacy) platform, at which point they migrate to something ground breaking like... DB2 on x86 (of course it would have been cheaper to migrate things 10 yr. ago but the oxygen restriction caused by neckties usually prevents some kinds of foresight)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]