CeBIT: LzLabs Enables Mainframe Code on Commodity Hardware

Swiss startup LzLabs has exited ‘stealth mode’ at CeBIT exhibition in Hanover to reveal what it calls the world’s first Software Defined Mainframe. The product enables IT administrators to run traditional mainframe workloads – typically involving thousands of transactions per second – using Linux and basic commodity hardware.
The company has already established partnerships with Microsoft, which will support Software Defined Mainframe as part of Azure public cloud, and Red Hat, which will ensure compatibility with its popular Linux distribution.

Mainframes are more powerful, more resilient, and much more expensive than traditional servers, making them suitable for specific use cases in industries like retail or finance. Deployed by some of the world’s largest companies, they are estimated to run 70 percent of all commercial transactions. However, the skills needed to manage mainframes are slowly disappearing, and the costs of the hardware remain prohibitively high.

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