Search390.com | Consolidation sparks mainframe revival
...Last week, IBM announced that Sparkassen Informatik, one of the largest providers of IT services for the German banking industry, has purchased 20 IBM z990 "T-Rex" mainframes to anchor one of the largest IT consolidation projects ever undertaken. The four-year deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, IBM said.
"This is the biggest deal of its kind I've ever seen," said Edward Broderick, principal analyst at the Robert Frances Group, of the Sparkassen Informatik deal. Without a doubt, both deals are a reflection of the growing demand for the z990 mainframe, which Broderick refers to as a "glorious implementation of technology, the maturity of zOS, autonomic computing and on-demand."
"They have taken a legacy mainframe and injected vigor and enthusiasm into what people thought was dead," he said. "It's not dead. It's not in the hospital. It's not even sick. Companies are now figuring out that client/server was a smoke-and-mirror charade." Not only is it not dead, it's actually thriving. According to IBM's fourth-quarter results, sales of the monolithic server were up 33% from the previous year. Some say the surge could just be the natural spike in sales expected following the release of the much-anticipated T-Rex z990 mainframe, which experts say breathed life into an ailing platform...
K-Collector Topics: Autonomic Computing platforms IBM