Radical changes are foreseen for the data center of the future, and they're not just about technology. Virtualization, blade servers, emerging management frameworks, ILM strategies, and energy efficiency are the result of the need to shift the basic economic balance towards the data center. The best indicator of the viability of mainframes (large-scale computers) is the tendency to use various types of workloads and the resulting level of investment in the hardware and software parts of the mainframe platform required to support these workloads.