The worldwide installed base of IBM mainframe exceeded 14 million MIPS* by the end of 2008 ? up approximately 20% from year-end 2007 and roughly double of what it was five years ago. In the mainframe world, MIPS growth is a good indicator of actual growth because users pay for systems based on MIPS capacity and the MIPS growth is based on incremental MIPS added.
It is clear that mission critical systems will continue to run on Mainframes & organizations will not risk moving these applications to alternative plat-forms like UNIX or .Net. Considering the hardware cost per MIPS is around $1500 to $3000 per year, for an average MIPS capacity of 2000 MIPS, the hardware MIPS cost alone will come to a whopping $3M to $6M Dollars annu-ally! A saving of 100 MIPS per year will translate to a saving of $150,000 K to $300,000 K in dollar terms.
In light of the above analysis and the single point agenda of ?cost contain-ment‟, MIPS reduction becomes a viable strategy to reduce the Total Cost of Operation (TCO).