IBM Mainframe More Cost Efficient Than Other Platforms, Analyst Reports

IBM Mainframe Total Cost of Ownership Is Between Five and 60 Percent Better Than Unix, Linux, and Windows Alternatives According Illuminata Study

Tab navigation

Press release
Related XML feeds

Contact(s) information

ARMONK, NY - 28 Dec 2006: A new report from analyst Illuminata praises recent IBM (NYSE: IBM) studies indicating that the IBM mainframe offers customers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantages of between five and 60 percent over typical Unix, Linux, and Windows alternatives. IBM Big Iron is "no longer your father's System z," the report concludes.

"The mainframe has clearly 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."

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

The Illuminata report finds IBM's approach to TCO credible, noting the following IBM findings:

IBM demonstrates that mainframe TCO advantages are 30 to 60 percent better than 30 Sun servers or 300 Linux Servers.
IBM's 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 notes that, as a percentage of TCO, people costs have skyrocketed over the past decade (from 14 to 43 percent), while hardware costs have shrunk (from 65 to 20 percent).
Mainframe software license costs are competitive with other platforms -- IBM's license costs/unit of workload decreases as the workload increases; specialty processors like zIIP, IFL, and zAAP offer even lower hardware and software pricing.
The price of mainframe memory and other components have significantly dropped.

"IBM's TCO results are indeed credible and reflect a new lease on life for the System z," the report concludes.

"The IBM System z mainframe offers a superior economic proposition for businesses with large or mixed-workload environments," says Jim Stallings, IBM general manager, System z. "The IBM System z's innovative architecture allows for breakthrough levels of TCO to meet the needs of business today."

About IBM

For more information, visit www.ibm.com