Mainframes are far from dead, but many businesses periodically revisit their mainframe usage to determine if shifting to a more modern platform makes sense. A recent Gartner report suggests that any site using under 1000 MIPS (million instructions per second) of capacity is a prime candidate for migrating to a Windows or Linux server environment instead.
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Dale analyst Dale Vecchio makes the point fairly directly:
The acceptance of lower-cost commodity hardware for mission-critical workloads will cause IBM mainframe customers to struggle to justify the value proposition of this flagship IBM platform in the sub-1,000 MIPS market segment.
One big reason for the shift? The last of the mainframe-trained baby boomers are nearing retirement, and modern computing science courses rarely emphasise mainframe technologies. That can mean that even when a platform is working well, a migration strategy is required to ensure it can be maintained long-term.
Comments
One response to “1000 MIPS: The Magic Number For Mainframe Migration”
Mainframe born baby boomers?
not sure I agree at all with your conclusion, id say that its much more related to the development of better consumer hardware over time.
Personally I wont accept this statement “The last of the mainframe-trained baby boomers are nearing retirement”.
The article is skewed from its very first sentence. IBM and other mainframe manufacturers are in a constant process of developing and releasing newer and more powerful mainframes and better versions of z/OS; “a more modern platform,” frankly, doesn’t exist.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a coming skills gap (there is), or that some companies couldn’t benefit from moving off of mainframes (they could). But anyone who thinks that modern mainframes aren’t “modern” is showing either a bias or a lack of what the industry truly is.