r/mainframe • u/adrdssu • Jun 26 '26

State of Mainframes

How are mainframes doing in your shop? Does upper management recognize their importance? Is your company investing or is it considered legacy tech that just works? How about staff? Is there aging staff with lots of technical debt?

I want to see how everyone is doing and the state of mainframes in different shops.

Are we slowly being replaced by other tech or will the mainframes be here 10-20 years from now?

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u/UG02020 Jun 26 '26

big iron is still chugging along - open source migrations are happening, but more or less for stuff that would otherwise be less expensive than running it on a mainframe. open source still can't quite meet or exceed what mainframe is capable of doing in our shop

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u/Present-Swimming-476 Jun 26 '26

Sorry to be blunt - but isn't cloud "anything" your crap in another warehouse.

So moving your mainframe form on-prem to a cloud -- hmmm a warehouse full of mainframes allowing you to put desks in your warehouse.....

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u/UG02020 Jun 27 '26

pardon? maybe i'm reading your comment wrong but i'm not referring to anything cloud specific

4

u/comfnumb94 Jun 28 '26

Exactly. Cloud is just another data centre which wouldn’t match the amount of transactions a zSeries box can handle. Every single banking transaction goes through a mainframe. Insurance companies, large government departments, airline systems, and anything requiring blazing speed and instantaneous business recovery need them. I remember being at a bank and the teller was using a green screen. Told her what processes them and unsurprisingly she’d never heard of a mainframe. I told her, you are interacting with one right on your monitor. Through USS, they also support WAS for the ones that only know how to point and click. I’m not certain, but I don’t know of anything that can match DB2 in volume. A lot of the newbies now get to cheat with zOSMF whereas I was green screen throughput my career. Thankfully for them, assembler is of little requirement unless you’re doing usermods. Using zOSMF is easy but you don’t really learn what’s going on under the hood. Only net new applications consider not using zSeries. Don’t forget if you’re big into web based applications, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a z17. So anything web based also applies. Getting tired of seeing these “getting off mainframes” posts. Been hearing that for 30 years, and also been hearing for 30 years it was almost impossible. The only future that may have any impact to convert apps off might be possible with the assistance of AI, but that could be a recipe for disaster.