Does Google use mainframes?

[Supriya Pathak]

Hi,

Does Google use mainframes? If not, then what's the biggest company which make use of mainfames?

[Robert Sample]

From what I've read, Google does not use mainframes but rather a cloud-based server farm (or several of them). As far as who is using mainframes, they are still EXTREMELY widely used in banking, insurance, health care and other industries that have to process a lot of data quickly. The last statistic I saw was in 2019 and said that if you use an ATM machine anywhere in the world, there is a 95% chance that your data will go through at least one mainframe.

[LalitaForums]

This is an interesting question. Then if a company like google can survive without mainframes, what are the chances of mainframes being used in future?

[LalitaForums]

This is an interesting statistics that tells a lot about mainframes but still in todays' world google is comparable:

COBOL supports 90% of Fortune 500 business systems every day

70% of all critical business logic and data is written in COBOL

COBOL connects 500 million mobile phone users every day

COBOL applications manage the care of 60 million patients every day

COBOL powers 85% of all daily business transactions processed

COBOL applications move 72,000 shipping containers every day and process 85% of port transactions

95% of all ATM transactions use COBOL

COBOL enables 96,000 vacations to be booked every year

COBOL powers 80% of all point-of-sale transactions

There are 200 more COBOL transactions per day than Google + You Tube searches worldwide

$2 trillion worth of mainframe applications in corporations are written in COBOL

1.5 million new lines of COBOL code are written every day

5 billion lines of new COBOL code are developed every year

The total investment in COBOL technologies, staff and hardware is estimated at $5 trillion

An estimated 2 million people are currently working in COBOL

[Robert Sample]

Then if a company like google can survive without mainframes, what are the chances of mainframes being used in future?

100 percent. There have been a couple of surveys I've seen in 2019 and 2020 that asked the CIO / VP of IT for the companies that use mainframes how long they expect to continue to use mainframes. Their typical response was that they foresee their company needing mainframes into the 2030's and in some cases longer. So mainframes will be used for at least another 10 years and most likely much longer.

Google does about 3.5 billion searches per day now. CICS (the mainframe transaction processing software) does about 100 billion transactions per day -- almost 30 times as many as Google. Throw in the batch processing mainframes do, and the Unix / Linux work that they do (so the CICS work could be only 20 to 40 percent of the total mainframe workload), and you can see that Google isn't really that big a deal when compared to mainframe processing.

Big companies that use mainframes don't see any replacements in the future as they have a LOT invested in the machines and the software running on those machines; the opportunity cost of replacing that software makes it VERY expensive to move away from mainframes once the company gets to a certain size. A company I used to work for looked into replacing one of their mainframe applications with a server-based solution. The initial anticipated cost was twice the total annual IT budget and the project ultimately cost something like 2-3 times as much. And that company was using a very small mainframe -- one one-thousandth the size of the biggest mainframes at the time.