This rise of mobile traffic is an effect of what some call the application economy. “The application economy is creating an unprecedented volume of data that requires a holistic and secure approach to connect the data to applications and support billions of transactions without downtime,” explains Michael Madden, general manager, mainframe at CA Technologies.
The rise in mobile traffic hitting mainframes, however, brings up an important consideration: the fact that IBM charges for mainframes by how much processing they do in millions of service units (MSUs), an average of processing capabilities across a set of workloads. “We’re sticking with MSU-based pricing, as it offers the clearest value to customers,” explains Mauri.
From the perspective of the digital professional, MSU-based pricing may be unfamiliar and reminiscent of the glory days of IBM mainframes back in the 1960s and 1970s. Now with the increase of mobile traffic, some IT managers may wonder if the mainframe is still cost-effective.
Ruben quickly resolves this issue. “The mainframe is a platform well suited to the emerging mobile driven world,” Ruben insists. “The leverage and competitive advantage an organization can gain from a mainframe heavy infrastructure can be critically important to its success.”
For its part, IBM continues to update and simplify its pricing structure while still retaining usage-based pricing. “Customers pay for what they use,” Mauri explains, “and we provide highly granular measurement of usage.”
Ironically, this usage-based pricing is closer to the way companies pay for public cloud than traditional on-premise distributed systems. “The z13 platform has up to 141 processors, but not all of them are running at the start,” Mauri explains. Customers can turn them on when needed, and only pay for what they use.
Furthermore, those dormant processors can come alive automatically when necessary to process spikes in traffic, and then resume their dormant state when the traffic returns to normal levels – an example of elasticity most associated with cloud environments. Clearly, this elasticity helps reduce costs because the mainframe offers usage-based pricing.
Mainframe customers can improve their total cost of ownership even further by leveraging any of a number of products by vendors in the IBM z Systems ecosystem, includingCompuware,BMC, and CA. In fact, Compuware and BMC recently announced a partnership – notable simply because these two vendors have been competitors for so long.
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Original Author Name: Jason Bloomberg, Contributor
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