Greetings from SHARE! It's been a great week here in Orlando, meeting other mainframers, learning new and interesting things, and finding out about the latest and neatest in technology.
I'll plan to talk more about SHARE in a future blog, but I had to share this insight with you now rather than waiting until I returned home.
And that is: the mainframe is green!
I know: you probably already knew that the mainframe has a much smaller footprint than any other platform for large business workloads in terms of space, power and cooling requirements.
And, you likely are aware that the incremental cost of adding new workloads to a given mainframe is tiny compared to buying more computers for new distributed workload.
But IBM really put the icing on the cake at SHARE when they announced their new z10 EC mainframe (see http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS108-154). While the box is still a dignified yet cool shade of black, its colored stripe is now - you guessed it - green!
Why is this important? Because it's a constant reminder of one of the most important emergent issues in the world of business IT, along with a solution par excellence for this matter.
So, the next time you hear someone complaining about the high environmental cost of business computing, you can tell them, "The Mainframe is Green!"