Has cloud computing killed mainframes? You would possibly think so. In fact, mainframes remain supremely important, even within the age of the cloud. Here’s why.
It’s easy enough to know why one might think that mainframes are no longer relevant within the present age of “cloud-native” everything. Today, everyone and their mother is moving workloads to the cloud.
Public cloud computing platforms like AWS and Azure are generating record amounts of revenue, while private cloud frameworks, like OpenStack, are more popular than ever.
You may think that, as a technology introduced quite a half-century ago, mainframes don’t have much to supply during a world dominated by much newer cloud computing technology.
MAINFRAMES ARE THE ORIGINAL CLOUD
Think about it. Cloud computing has become popular because the cloud gives you:
But they are doing. The thing is, many of the qualities that make cloud computing so valuable to enterprises also are true of mainframes.
- On-demand access to compute and storage resources that will scale virtually without limit.
- A more cost-efficient way to maintain infrastructure than relying on local commodity servers.
- The flexibility to spin up differing types of software environments. Within the cloud, you’ll run any sort of host OS you would like. You’ll use virtual servers, or you can use containers. You get tons of flexibility.
- A lower maintenance burden. Once you move workloads to the cloud, you no longer need to maintain many individual on-premises servers.
To a large extent, mainframes offer precisely equivalent benefits. Consider the following points:
- A mainframe provides one infrastructure that delivers massive compute and storage resources whenever your applications require them.
- If you use a mainframe, it’s probably one you already own, so you don’t need to purchase new infrastructure. Additionally, a mainframe can last for many years, whereas a commodity server usually lasts just a couple of years.
- Mainframes offer you many software flexibility. You’ll use a mainframe OS like z/OS; otherwise, you can use Linux. You’ll even run Docker containers on your mainframe.
- Once you run applications on a mainframe, you have just one machine to maintain. This is simpler than maintaining dozens of on-premise commodity servers.
Mainframes have long offered these benefits, but the cloud computing concept as we know it today has been around for only a few decades.
Essentially, then, mainframes were the first cloud. Going back decades, mainframes allowed companies to create cloud infrastructure. (which may be a fancy way of claiming “before the term cloud infrastructure existed”).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-cloud — you should move workloads to the cloud when it’s the best fit for a specific type of workload.
But if you already have a mainframe environment set up, there’s a good chance it can provide many of the same benefits as a cloud platform. In that case, you’ll save time, effort, and money by continuing to use your mainframe to supply an equivalent cloud-like benefits that it’s been delivering for years.
In short, the cloud isn’t a replacement for your mainframe. It’s just a newer, flashier way of implementing an equivalent sort of functionality that mainframes offered starting decades ago.
In fact, employing a mainframe effectively today does require integrating your mainframe environment into the remainder of your infrastructure — whether it involves the cloud or not.
Source: https://blog.syncsort.com/2017/08/mainframe/mainframes-matter-cloud-computing/