They also aren't exactly legacy if the performance continues to improve in such a manner that they remain impossibly far ahead of any relevant competition.
That's really the part of this whole (tiring and old) conversion that irks me the most. The total lack of willingness to come up with a better definition of legacy than "not in line with the trends that work for companies mostly interested in serving media content to consumers".
Legacy is a system that is still around that cannot be defended on its technical merits. Mainframes can and are constantly defended solely on their technical merits, and the "competition" doesn't appear to even want to try to compete there. It's always about moving the things that can be moved off platform, which is fine in the eyes of IBM, they'll even help you do it. That's why they offer much lower cost on zIIPs, zAAPs, IFLs, etc in comparison to general purpose processors running native workloads.
That's really the part of this whole (tiring and old) conversion that irks me the most. The total lack of willingness to come up with a better definition of legacy than "not in line with the trends that work for companies mostly interested in serving media content to consumers".
Legacy is a system that is still around that cannot be defended on its technical merits. Mainframes can and are constantly defended solely on their technical merits, and the "competition" doesn't appear to even want to try to compete there. It's always about moving the things that can be moved off platform, which is fine in the eyes of IBM, they'll even help you do it. That's why they offer much lower cost on zIIPs, zAAPs, IFLs, etc in comparison to general purpose processors running native workloads.