The Future Of Mainframe In The Datacenters Is In Question

29th October 2009

A latest survey of the datacenter users has predicted a sharp drop in the usage of mainframes, but the analysts say that the results seem to be unlikely. This survey was carried by Afcom, which is one of the best known groups to represent the datacenter workers. Afcom had asked about a range of some topics and has got responses from 436 of the datacenters that have mostly commercial facilities in United States but also include some government as well as the university sites, and also several dozen datacenters that are overseas.

40 percent of the datacenters that have been surveyed have said that they still operate the mainframes, and median number of the mainframes at these facilities is two. Out of those people who use mainframes, 46 percent, or approximately half, have said that they are considering replacing one or more of these in next two years.

Almost two thirds are expected to replacing them with some new mainframe. The part, which looks bleak for the vendors of mainframe, is that the rest of the people have said that they would be replacing the mainframe with some different type of the high end system, presumably with UNIX server or some other resilient type of system.

Afcom has also found the datacenters that are not using the mainframes today, 38 percent of customers have said they did have a mainframe almost 10 years back, and just about over a quarter, 27 percent had a mainframe five years back.