LzLabs Wants to Replace Mainframes with White Boxes

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.

The launch version of the platform, codenamed Gotthard, enables IT administrators to run traditional mainframe workloads on commodity servers and Linux, located either on-premises or in the cloud. It requires no changes to the original code, which was likely written in COBOL or PL/1. LzLabs came out of stealth at CeBIT 2016 in March, and has already secured partnerships with Red Hat and Microsoft, with the latter offering Gotthard as part of the Azure public cloud.

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