Re:IBM Z mainframes revived by Red Hat, AI and security
by leokennis on Thursday August 20, 2020 @11:06AM
(#24224041)
Yep. We migrated from IBM Z13 running COBOL + DB2 to HP machines hosting RHEL VM's running TIBCO, JAVA and Cassandra. Similar load as you mention.
Performance is really not an issue, especially when you factor in the price (we could easily double our servers and still be cheaper than a pretty baseline Z13).
Main pro of the mainframe is: you can basically not touch your code for decades and it'll still run fine, every technology on it and the hardware itself is rock solid.
Main pro of leaving the mainframe is: you don't need to worry as much about expensive/hard technical debt (i.e. EBCDIC text encoding, special hardware for everything), pricing/billing is much simpler and cheaper, way easier to switch technologies.
Performance is really not an issue, especially when you factor in the price (we could easily double our servers and still be cheaper than a pretty baseline Z13).
Main pro of the mainframe is: you can basically not touch your code for decades and it'll still run fine, every technology on it and the hardware itself is rock solid.
Main pro of leaving the mainframe is: you don't need to worry as much about expensive/hard technical debt (i.e. EBCDIC text encoding, special hardware for everything), pricing/billing is much simpler and cheaper, way easier to switch technologies.