To those of us who have noticed a return to mainframes over the past year or so, a survey software company BMC released today provides confirmation. The survey asked 1,300 global mainframe users about their use of the large-scale computers; about half these companies have revenues in excess of $1 billion.
Most — 93 percent — say they expect their mainframe capacity to grow or remain steady. A majority, 62 percent (compared to 56 percent last year), expect to grow overall capacity. Almost half (47 percent) say new workloads and new business applications are contributing to their capacity growth and 60 percent of respondents say the top IT priority is keeping costs down.
"We continue to see an increased demand for capacity, workload and availability in our mainframe environment as the need for data and business applications continues to grow in our business," said Ing. Gerald Bohm, group leader System Engineering Competence Centre Linz at Drei Banken EDV, an Austrian bank. "As the mainframe demand continues to expand, we are also seeing the platform play a more dominant role in our hybrid data center to help aid in delivering the business services that our customers and company expects."
"Miami-Dade County prides itself on meeting stringent service level agreements so that we can serve our constituents in the best way possible," said Adrienne DiPrima, manager of Strategic Technologies Support for the Information Technology Department, in a press release. "As the county's population and services grow and the county's budget shrinks, we are constantly looking for ways to provide more with less, and in many cases that means planning for new workloads on the mainframe. The mainframe is the backbone to many of the services we provide. Although we maintain a very diverse infrastructure, we are planning a very pro-active strategy to reinforce that the mainframe plays a key role in today's evolving data center."
The survey respondents were also asked about general IT trends. When asked about important concepts to the future of data centers and the mainframe, 55 percent said private cloud support was an important concept to understand for the future of the data center and 60 percent of those respondents said it was important to the mainframe. As well, 31 percent of respondents noted that mobile device support (smartphone or tablet) was an important expectation for accessing the mainframe.
As the mainframe grows within the hybrid data center, respondents to the survey say that the ability to simplify the management across the enterprise with unified solutions is important. Sixty-four percent of respondents cited unified tools for monitoring and managing events across mainframe and distributed systems as either important or critically important. And 61 percent and 55 percent say the same thing about change management and workload management, respectively.
