DITTON PARK, England, August 20/PRNewswire/ CA today announced the results of a survey highlighting the persistent appeal of the mainframe as a cornerstone platform for multi-tier enterprise computing-as well as the specific attributes of the mainframe platform that IT managers find most compelling.
The survey polled more than 100 IT executives and managers at companies using the IBM System z mainframe from a variety of industries in the United States, Europe and Australia, about their views of mainframe, distributed, and cloud computing models. Respondents repeatedly chose the mainframe as the platform most representative of key positive attributes-especially when it came to reliability, resilience, security, management, and compliance. The mainframe also was selected over the other two platforms when it came to cost-effectiveness, "greenness," and affordability of staff.
The importance of the role the mainframe plays in supporting the delivery of business services in a multi-tier environment was underscored by the fact that 97% of respondents said that at least some of their distributed applications would fail in the event of lack of availability of the mainframe.
76% of survey respondents said that managing a large number of distributed servers in their data centers has become a cost issue, with 67% stating that as the distributed infrastructure grows, the ability to run multiple applications on a single mainframe becomes more attractive.
81% of respondents cited limited data center floor space as another challenge faced by their organizations, giving them yet another argument in favor of adding workloads to a single mainframe-rather than adding additional distributed server infrastructure.
