blog Over the past several years we’ve begun to see a bit of a trend in Australia of major organisations shifting server workloads away from traditional mainframes and onto Oracle platforms, especially its integrated Exadata and Exalogic systems. The key driver of continued mainframe use has always been the legacy platform’s efficiency, stability and (to a certain extent) flexibility (such as in its virtualisation ability), but it’s also had numerous disadvantages, which we need not go into here. As time has gone on, it appears the performance levels inherent in Oracle’s systems are starting to lure CIOs away from the mainframe environment where appropriate. We saw this in Westpac in January 2013, and now, according to iTNews (in an excellent article, which we recommend you read), we’re starting to see it also at another major financial institution — ASIC. The site reports:
“ASIC has migrated two of its corporate registers off an IBM mainframe and onto a platform running Oracle’s database and middleware, and is now focusing its attention on similarly transforming the remaining 20-odd registers it maintains.”
In the ASIC case, it appears as though it’s using commodity hardware rather than Oracle’s ‘engineered systems’, but the trend is still very clear: Mainframes are gradually being winnowed out of the corporate technology stack, in a trend which we suspect quite worries stalwart mainframe suppliers such as IBM and Fujitsu. Of course, not all is doom and gloom: Some major Australian organisations, such as the Northern Territory Government, are still buying these beasts. There’s still life in the old girl just yet.
Image credit: Oracle, Creative Commons
Been seeing the same articles for the last 20 years.
The mainframe is dead, long live the mainframe :)
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