Mark Shuttleworth: Mainframes Are Going Away

Mark Shuttleworth has spoken on his blog about the decline of mainframes and the rise of cloud computing, in light of the newly launched Ubuntu Cloud 11.10.

The founder of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, said that although the mainframes (or big iron) is about to get a run for its money with the increasing importance of cloud computing, even if the latter is still not considered a safe alternative.  

“With public clouds, we’re learning how to build services that achieve very high levels of reliability despite having low individual node reliability. It doesn’t matter if a single node in the cloud fails – cloud-style architectures route around that damage and keep the overall service available”, said  Mark Shuttleworth.

Sure enough, a lot of important business still uses mainframes and will do so for a long time, but just like Mark said, “after 20 years of imminent irrelevance, there’s finally a real reason to think their time is up”.