Tuesday, 16 January 2007

Butler Group Predicts IBM Mainframe Growth in Emerging Markets

IBM has made known that independent IT Research and Advisory organisation, The Butler Group, believes mainframe adoption will continue to grow in existing markets as well as emerging markets including China, India and South America due to continued advancements in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualisation technologies on the platform.

Butler Group’s 'The King is Dead–Long Live the Mainframe' article specifically points to WebSphere Application Servers on System z as enhancing the ability to utilise SOA and Linux on the mainframe in providing virtualisation tools for a single computing platform. Additionally, the report cites the mainframe’s 'green' capabilities describing the power-saving features and small footprint (27-square feet) as, "desirable for large customers in the financial and government sectors."

Other key differentiators of the System z identified by the Butler Group include:

• One z9 mainframe can support many Virtual Machines (VMs), allowing for quick and simple implementation of new VMs
• The mainframe requires less people to manage it than the equivalent systems. Labor costs can amount to 80 per cent per cent of the total cost of running a data center, so this is an area where mainframes can save money
• The System z mainframes are certified to EAL5 standards, the highest security standards available
• The z9 mainframes can handle up to 6,000 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) handshakes per second due to Crypto-Express2 PCI-X adapters. This allows for secure on-line transactions