By Arthur Cole
One of the key advantages that the mainframe has in the Big Data era is the difficulty in migrating large workloads off of legacy systems onto the cloud, says Forbes’ Jason Bloomberg. In many cases, these kinds of projects are launched without a clear understanding of the challenges involved, 
only to get bogged down in complexity when it is too late to go back but exorbitantly expensive to move forward. An open source mainframe could prove to be a lifesaver because it affords the flexibility of a distributed architecture with the familiarity of a legacy system.
This is part of the reason IBM has had so much success with the mainframe over the years despite it being out of fashion, according to Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. The z13 machine, on which the Emperor and Rockhopper lines will be based, saw sales improve by 9 percent in the latest quarter, and this is compared to an equally strong quarter in 2014. Meanwhile, recent surveys indicate that legacy mainframes are being repurposed for emerging workloads at a rapid pace and in fact are being seen as key elements in the drive toward greater innovation and the development of new business models.
Read the entire article at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/mainframe-resurgence-big-iron-for-big-data.html.
