Phillip de Waal, Nutanix, says, for the most part, mainframes are on life support as IT teams look at viable alternatives.

There’s no doubt that the mainframe ruled the IT infrastructure environment for many years and laid the foundation for where IT is today. It did this because it natively converged compute, main memory, and storage, and engineered internal redundancy.

Phillip de Waal, systems engineering manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa, says mainframes laid the groundwork for further evolution, such as the move to stand-alone servers, centralised storage, the rise and maturation of virtualisation, and, ultimately, the birth of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and the cloud.