Do You Know The New Trends In Mainframe? Test Your Expertise!

We’re halfway through the year, which seems like a good time to reflect on what’s happening in the world of mainframe in 2023, and to what degree Big Iron is ready to take on the future.

Keith Allingham does just that in his article: The Mainframe: A Look Back at 2022 & What is on the Horizon in 2023. (♧ HINT) In the article he takes the media – and specifically the IT journalism crowd – to task for what he sees as a glaring omission in their reporting. That omission, of course, is reporting on the mainframe, and Allingham sees the relative invisibility of mainframe news as a result of the continued siloing of mainframes within many organizations. 

IBM’s release of the new z16 was probably the biggest story in mainframe news in 2022, and while that did garner some attention from big publications, we have yet to see how well z16 will perform in terms of sales. Things have started out a bit slowly in this regard, but Allingham makes a prediction that z16 will be a winner, even if it does take a bit of time for businesses to cough up the bucks (or the motivation) to upgrade their shop.

Allingham cites the recently released Arcati Mainframe Survey to show just how undeserved the obscurity of the mainframe is. For example, in the last year “there has been more capacity increase for existing mainframe systems than there has been for existing cloud systems. Generally, mainframe data centers carry a higher percentage of the overall business data than their percentage of overall IT budget reflects.”

Allingham sees a disconnect between the reality of IT budgets and the decisions some people with budgetary authority make…and this leads us to our second article, Leading Businesses Boast a Growing Mix of Cloud and Mainframe. (♧ HINT)

This article, written by a guest contributor, reflects on Dr. Howard Rubin’s findings which answer the question: “Do certain technology spending patterns lead to better business performance?”

Rubin, a leading business analyst specializing in the area of technology economics, studied the IT spending habits of some 2,400 companies in more than 20 different industries. The result is a new economics model he calls Technology Asset Class Optimization, which our article delves into in some detail.

The upshot of Rubin’s study is that mainframes still figure predominantly in the technology investment strategies of the top business performers across industries. While businesses use a hybrid mix of technologies, best-in-class organizations use nearly twice as much mainframe compute capacity than cloud. 

Turns out, for cost efficiency, it’s still just really hard to beat the mainframe, no matter how much media attention other technologies might bask in halfway through 2023. 

Here’s this week’s Trivia Challenge:

1. According to the Arcati Mainframe Survey, most mainframe shops also use cloud services of some sort (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.). What percentage do not?

 10%

 15%

 25%

 30%

2. According to the Arcati Mainframe Survey, MIPS usage has grown how much in 2022?

 10-50%

 15-30%

 20-35%

 25-40%

3. Based on business performance, best-in-class organizations use nearly twice as much mainframe compute capacity than cloud. The winning mix among these top performers includes, on average, what percentage of mainframe usage?

 23.6%

 31.2%

 41.1%

 48.5%

4. Compared to their more average-performing counterparts, top business performers across industries use approximately how much more mainframe in their hybrid environment?

 10%

 12%

 20%

 30%

5. For the largest organizations, moving transactional workloads to the cloud could cost how much of an increase to total cost of ownership (TCO)?

 2x

 3x

 5x

 10x

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