Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner
- Reference: 1777892586
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/05/04/gartner_state_of_mainframes/
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Speaking to The Register to discuss the analyst firm’s mid-April publication, “The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026,” Galimberti said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue’s big iron comes out ahead.
“I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic,” he said. “The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity.”
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He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility.
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That said, Galimberti doesn’t recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM’s hardware.
IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux “even better and more enterprise-ready.”
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Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM’s ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs.
Galimberti said he has seen “multiple business cases” in which moving from VMware to IBM makes sense under Broadcom’s policy of requiring customers to buy its full Cloud Foundation private cloud stack. The analyst said he was surprised those business cases make sense, but insists a mainframe makes sense “under some circumstances.”
AI is another workload Galimberti thinks some users will find works well on mainframes, because IBM recently upgraded its [5]Spyre accelerators
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The analyst says items like Spyre show that IBM continues to invest and innovate, and that the mainframe “is not a stale platform.”
Galimberti said the idea that mainframes were a dead end has been around for decades and was justifiable at some moments in history. But he also feels the idea was oversold by consultants who promoted migrations away from mainframes as sure-fire winners – but under-estimated the complexity of a move.
“Global system integrators were always against the mainframe and encouraged migrations,” he said. “Now they are halting the mainframe exit, probably because the number of failures they had were more than their successes.”
The firm now advises assuming that by 2030, 75 percent of vendors offering mainframe exit services operating in the “mainframe exit” market will either change their businesses or vanish, and suggests that only 10 percent of mainframe users will want out by 2030.
[7]Fujitsu confirms mainframe biz to die in 2035, in time for quantum AI supercomputers to take over
[8]AI-powered mainframe exits are a bubble set to pop
[9]IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge
[10]IBM wants Arm software on its mainframes to better support AI
Which is not to say mainframes are perfect or easy to live with. Galimberti noted that few third-party software developers support mainframes, and those that do understand the potential to hike prices.
Committing to mainframes therefore means planning “to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritizing the business value these solutions can deliver.”
Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customizations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform.
Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don’t contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.
The analyst thinks the mainframe will be around for some time to come, because IBM is “very engineering-focussed” and “engages with customers who are hyper-conservative” – then just creates the products they want. ®
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/01/fujitsu_future_strategy/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/15/gartner_mainframe_exit_analysis/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/ibm_q4_2025/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/ibm_arm_software_mainframes_ai_support/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Choosing between IBM mainframe v Broadcom VMware
Fnar, Fnar
Re: Choosing between IBM mainframe v Broadcom VMware
That's a big choice. Probably needs a few inter-departmental meetings and an external consultant's report.
Good lunch?
The analyst must have been treated to a great lunch, a round of golf and a tickets to something nice.
Don't knock mainframes
If you can fully utilise one, they make a lot of sense. Ultra reliable, great throughput and scalable.
Many boxes have always been more necessity than goal
The reasons for using many boxes have always boiled down to a combination of fault tolerance, system load, and cost. It's a necessity, not a goal.
Admins would rather deal with fewer physical systems. Developers have an easier job when they can deal with only one logical system.
If virtualization license costs or cloud fees get too high, that eliminates one of the major reasons for running applications on Linux on commodity hardware.
Virtualization host
More than a decade ago we were clearly able to demonstrate that massive farms of virtualised Linux instances were staggeringly more cost effective on a single zSeries mainframe than being virtualised under x86. License cost changes since then only improve this position for the mainframe. However, even in customers who already had deployed Linux under zSeries and could measure the cost savings we failed to get traction for application workloads to either move to mainframe Linux or be developed with it in mind. Customers use the different hardware architectures for different purposes and mainframe was not seen as appropriate for anything other than the most critical systems of record with high transactional throughput requirements. Many applications just don’t get the benefits offered by big iron despite any potential cost benefits and developers, system architects and designers stick with what they know. To the current generation of Enterprise Architects the mainframe is the Past, and like the Past, it’s a foreign land…
Re: Virtualization host
The reasons for moving from the mainframe are not about the technology or value, they're about support and skills. VMWare has spent the last 20 years building their own mainframe and Broadcom are trying to monetise that but it's still 30 years behind System Z in refinement. If you're going to move from VMWare though, realistically you're not going to buy Z, you're going to go open source. That has a much smoother on ramp for recently graduated IT students.
Re: Virtualization host
Surely the argument in TFA is that you can have both: Z H/W and Linux instances running on it. Unless you are dealing with an application vendor who only supplies Intel compiled binaries - but in that case you're not open source.
We've come full circle.
> We've come full circle.
again.
Choosing between IBM mainframe v Broadcom VMware
you know you are going to be screwed. The only consolation is that now you get to choose between torx and phillips head.