Mainframes and their staying power

A fellow IBMer whom I just discovered his blog entry through Technorati is having pretty much the same opinion as I over the ability of the IBM mainframe to stay the course, based on its new positionning in the marketplace in the last few years as a high-end enterprise server, as opposed to simply a COBOL-crunching machine.

I was also discussing the same points on IBM’s internal blogging website, where I was saying how I could today consider learning mainframe technologies and feel I’d have a secure position in the future of the IT industry. I mean, face it, all the buzzwords we keep hearing about, like Resiliency, Grid Computing, High Availability, Virtualization, .. that’s the mainframe, dude!

A single z9 could probably provide enough computing power for a whole neighbourhood of internet geeks through virtual linux machines. Star Trek computing power AND omnipresence may not be that far after all…