IBM Mainframe TCO Better Than Unix/Linux

A recent report from Illuminata, an analyst group indicates that the IBM mainframe offers customers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantages between 5 percent and 60 percent over typical Unix, Linux, and Windows alternatives.

“The mainframe has seen substantial updates over the last decade, becoming more affordable, more attuned to modern APIs and middleware, and more network-savvy,” according to the report, titled, “IBM System z TCO: Man Bites Dog.”

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

Noting IBM findings such as mainframe TCO advantages being 30 percent to 60 percent better than 30 Sun servers or 300 Linux Servers; 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 also notes that, as a percentage of TCO, people costs have skyrocketed over the past decade (from 14 percent to 43 percent), while hardware costs have shrunk (from 65 percent to 20 percent).

Mainframe software license costs are competitive with other platforms – IBM’s license costs/unit of workload decreases as the workload increases. The report claims that the price of mainframe memory and other components have significantly dropped.

“The IBM System z mainframe offers an economic proposition for businesses with large or mixed-workload environments,” claims Jim Stallings, IBM general manager, System z. According to Stallings, the IBM System z’s architecture allows for significant levels of TCO to meet the needs of business today."