Re: “ IBM's mainframe business is cyclical: buyers spend up big when new machines debut.”
That article made me laugh, Santander has been trying to get off mainframes since circa 2004 when it took over Abbey National…
The “lift and shift” has been going on since the mid 1990s, however, back then it was mainframe onto Unix. From my experience from that period the big issue was many mainframe applications dated from the early 1980s when batch and mag tape based databases were the norm. By the mid to late 1990s RDBMS’s, disks etc. meant that you could redesign a 1980s batch system to use an RDBMS etc. with one client that was, on paper, a replacement of a £17m mainframe with a dual processor NT box…
What is perhaps interesting about the Santander Gravity offering is the mainframe to cloud migration. However, without a complete rework of the application, it will still be mainframe code running in the cloud rather than a cloud native application.
Obviously, one of the benefits the Z-series has is in server consolidation (this was obvious in circa 2002) having been designed for the ground up to handle VMs et al., something commodity cloud platforms are only really beginning to grapple with. Not saying the Z-Series is perfect, but it still has features that Unix/Linux and Wintel struggle to implement well.
Given this, it is perhaps educational to understand why mainframes haven’t been particularly successful in cloud datacentres where the ability to add capacity for 1000s of concurrently running VMs would be an appropriate increment in capacity.