BMC Software’s Sixth Annual Worldwide Mainframe Survey showed that mainframe use is still strong, is important in driving business applications and services, and continues to be a critical platform for the evolving hybrid data centre.
The survey found 93% of respondents at large companies expect mainframe capacity to grow or remain steady, while 62%, compared to 56% last year, expect to grow overall capacity.
While 47% of respondents said new workloads and new business applications are contributing to their capacity growth, 60% of respondents said the top IT priority is keeping costs down, the survey said.
Companies are still heavily committed to the mainframe and continue to look for new ways to integrate the mainframe into their future data centres, according to the survey.
The BMC mainframe survey said the mainframe is not immune to the changing nature of IT, as respondents indicated that they are starting to take notice of important IT trends, such as cloud and mobile computing.
When asked about important concepts to the future of data centres and the mainframe, 55% said private cloud support was an important concept to understand for the future of the data centre and then 60% of those respondents said it was important to the mainframe.
As well, 31% of respondents noted that mobile device support (smartphone or tablet) was an important expectation for accessing the mainframe.
The survey respondents said that the ability to simplify the management across the enterprise with unified offerings is important, as the mainframe grows within the hybrid data centre.
Sixty-four per cent of respondents cited unified tools for monitoring and managing events across mainframe and distributed systems as either important or critically important, while 61% and 55% say the same thing about change management and workload management, respectively.
The survey found that the need to keep IT costs down continues to be an area of focus as IT organisations expecting growth in their capacity and mainframe processing in the coming year.
IT organisations continue to look at specialty engines, to reduce the mainframe usage cost, as the survey showed that 57% of the respondents used zIIPs with 55% of respondents having installed one or more zIIP engines last year.
BMC president of Mainframe Service Management Bill Miller said it’s always impressive to see that year-over-year the mainframe continues to be an important platform that businesses are using to run and grow their operations.
