Illuminata Reports IBM Mainframes Better than Rest
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Dec 29, 2006

Backing the recent IBM study on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantages of five to 60% over the Unix, Linux and Windows alternatives, Illuminata has released a new report.

Titled 'IBM System z TCO: Man Bites Dog', it states, "The mainframe has clearly seen substantial updates over the last decade, becoming more affordable and attuned to modern APIs and middleware."

The report adds that it no longer makes sense for the large enterprise to measure TCO strictly on a one-application-per-server basis but it must be measured for 10-50 applications on one mainframe versus 10-20 blades or a grid of 50 distributed systems.

The Illuminata report finds IBM's approach to TCO credible, noting the following findings:
*IBM demonstrates that mainframe TCO advantages are 30 to 60% better than 30 Sun servers or 300 Linux servers.

*Its focus on cooling technology means the mainframe typically requires less electricity and air conditioning than many 1U servers running the same workload.

*For a mainframe running different workloads, the people costs are a fraction of those costs required for distributed systems. The report notes that, as a percentage of TCO, people costs have skyrocketed over the past decade (from 14 to 43%), while hardware costs have shrunk (from 65 to 20%).

*Mainframe software license costs are competitive with other platforms - IBM's license costs/unit of workload decreases as the workload increases; especially processors like zIIP, IFL, and zAAP offer even lower hardware and software pricing.

*The price of mainframe memory and other components have significantly dropped.

"IBM's TCO results are indeed credible and reflect a new lease on life for the System z," the report concludes.

"The IBM System z's architecture will allow for breakthrough levels of TCO to meet the needs of business today," says Jim Stallings, GM- System z, IBM.