IBM’s stalwart mainframe computers offer several strong advantages for customers and specific workloads, despite some of the legacy viewpoint that is held toward these enterprise workhorses. The mainframe is 80% more carbon-efficient than the x86 architecture for the same workloads and it takes up far less space, Boville said: a workload that requires 44 square meters to run on x86 can run on a mainframe in six square meters, he said. It’s also offers “seven 9s” of availability; that is, 99.9999999%. In IBM’s approach, applications can get built so they are abstracted from a given platform, and the app can be hosted on the optimal platform from a performance perspective.
