Comment by Spooky23
14 hours ago
You have to think of the mainframe as a platform like AWS or Kubernetes or VMWare. Saying “AWS has huge throughput” is meaningless.
The features of the platform are the real technical edge. You need to use those features to get the benefits.
I’ve moved big mainframe apps to Unix or windows systems. There’s no magic… you just need to refactor around the constraints of the target system, which are different than the mainframe.
what you hint at is that most workloads today don't need most of the mainframe features any more, any you can move them to commodity hardware.
There is much less need for most business functions to sit on a mainframe.
However the mainframe offers some availability features in hardware and z/VM, which you need to compensate for in software and system architecture, if failure is not an option, business-wise.
and if your organisation can build such a fail-operational system and software solution, then there is no reason today to stay on the mainframe. it's indeed more a convenience these days than anything else.
I agree with most of this. I believe that mainframes have an advantage when you look at environmental factors (power consumption and cooling).