VMware refugees may find IBM mainframes cheaper than Broadcom’s licensing sideshow.
Gartner vice-president analyst Alessandro Galimberti said that some VMware users should consider IBM big iron as a solution to VMware. He said buyers in several fields are comparing mainframes with modern environments and finding Big Blue’s machines make financial sense.
“I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronisation and high availability are things I need to build into application logic, The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity,” Galimberti said.
Galimberti reckons mainframes suit workloads needing years of transactional consistency and backward compatibility. That is less trendy than pretending every workload belongs in Kubernetes, but it pays the bills.
He does not recommend mainframes for everything; they would not be very good for Call of Duty, for example. Mission-critical applications unlikely to change much for a decade are the best fit, along with Linux applications, because the open source OS runs on IBM hardware.
IBM offers the z/VM hypervisor, which Galimberti said can make Linux “even better and more enterprise-ready”.
That is why he thinks IBM’s ecosystem may appeal to VMware users, especially those running fleets of 500 to 700 Linux VMs. For once, moving to a mainframe is being pitched as the practical option rather than museum work.
Galimberti said he has seen “multiple business cases” where moving from VMware to IBM makes sense. Broadcom’s policy of requiring customers to buy its full Cloud Foundation private cloud stack has made the sums more interesting.
The analyst said he was surprised those business cases worked, but insisted a mainframe makes sense “under some circumstances”.
AI is another workload Galimberti thinks could fit mainframes, because IBM recently upgraded its Spyre accelerators. He said items such as Spyre show IBM continues to invest and innovate, and that the mainframe “is not a stale platform”.
The idea that mainframes are dead has been knocking around for decades. Galimberti said that view made sense at some points, but was oversold by consultants pushing migrations away from big iron.
“Global system integrators were always against the mainframe and encouraged migrations. Now they are halting the mainframe exit, probably because the number of failures they had were more than their successes,” he said.
Big Gr now advises assuming that by 2030, 75 per cent of vendors offering mainframe exit services will change their businesses or disappear. It suggests only 10 per cent of mainframe users will want out by 2030.
That does not mean mainframes are perfect or easy to live with. Galimberti noted that few third-party software developers support them, and those that do know they can hike prices.
Committing to mainframes means planning “to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritising the business value these solutions can deliver”.
Lock-in risk remains obvious. Users may avoid useful customisations because they fear making themselves harder to prise away from the platform later.
Skills are another problem, since kids are not exactly queueing up to work with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in mainframe programmes, which may help, as does the availability of Linux.
He thinks the mainframe will be around for some time because IBM is “very engineering-focussed” and “engages with customers who are hyper-conservative”. Then it builds the kit those customers want, which is a suspiciously sensible way to run a technology business.
