This is an old study, and a biased poorly written review. Which is a shame. It also should not focus on HUGE cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

This is an old study, and a biased poorly written review. Which is a shame. It also should not focus on HUGE cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Estimating licensing, maintenance costs for running at that scale would need access to their internal documents (as far as I know, none of them have published all the numbers). Hardware costs are hard to pin down. These companies have special specs for what they want. Having custom computers produced should put the price higher than off the rack, but given how mnany servers they buy that probably changess. In today's world, cloud can run high volume transaction loads and most recent IBM z15 and IBM LinuxOne can run normal cloud tasks. I believe that a proper comparison in 2021 would be a lot closer than what most x64 people would expect. As long as we ignore AWS,Azure,Googe scale and think of smaller "in house" cloud like datacenters it should be part of the estimation. In my opinion DB2 running on a z15/zOS is hard to beat on uptime, reliability, and throughput. There would also be less need for sharding and clustering headaches. A z15 can also be loaded up with Specialty Engine Support like IBM Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), or IBM zEnterprise® Application Assist Processor (zAAP) Which means added a bunch of cpus that are dedicated to oen thing, in those mentioned above one is for running Linux and the second for running Java. All offloading the main system One big problem in comparing is that the terminology and smenatics are quite different. Reading specs does not make it easy to compare 1 - 1. I have hoped i would end up at a place that did use modern mainframes for "modern conventional" workloads. I havent had that chance yet.