Another vote has been cast for the mainframe in the new emerging cloud era. A new analyst report predicts the mainframe will take a leading role in emerging cloud deployments. Building on the service-oriented architecture and web services foundation that are already embedded into today's System z computers, the mainframe is well poised to offer scalability and cost-effective capabilities for cloud computing. "The mainframe is a cloud machine because it is reliable, secure, and available," said the report's author. System z supports sub-capacity pricing, and has little, if any, downtime. "Mainframe computing units are 10 times less expensive than the distributed servers and provide significantly more reliability and security for cloud based computing."

To stay on top of all the trends, subscribe to Database Trends and Applications magazine.