IBM has ramped up efforts to make mainframes sexy again by adding hybrid cloud capabilities, along with other goodies, to its LinuxOne offering. The Linux-based mainframe was released last year with ability to scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here's what you need to know.

IBM has come out with some powerful hardware which aims to boost the popularity of mainframe servers running the Linux open source OS in large organisations. The vendor has introduced the LinuxOne line with a mainframe that can scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here's more information on the announcement.

The NZ Transport Agency avoided a $70 million rebuild of its driver and vehicle registration system via a carefully-planned migration that moved ageing mainframe apps onto a modern Windows server environment. Its experience provides 10 useful lessons in how to manage large-scale app migrations while minimising risks and costs.

Mainframes are far from dead, but many businesses periodically revisit their mainframe usage to determine if shifting to a more modern platform makes sense. A recent Gartner report suggests that any site using under 1000 MIPS (million instructions per second) of capacity is a prime candidate for migrating to a Windows or Linux server environment instead.

If you're running a mainframe (and many enterprises still are), then one of your biggest expenses will be the monthly licence charges (MLCs) imposed by IBM. Reducing those costs could make a considerable difference, but making those calculations can be tricky.

Mainframes are an extraordinary story of technology survival, having lasted from the very beginning of the computing era and survived PC-based computing, Y2K code rewrites and the onset of cloud. But what would drive someone to buy a new mainframe today?

Cloud computing promises us flexible and reliable service delivery based on charging for what we use, but that's a model which mainframe computing has been using for decades. How will the use of mainframes evolve in the future?