Far from extinct. 9 ways the mainframe is taking business into the future

Transcription

1 Far from extinct 9 ways the mainframe is taking business into the future

2 Introduction It happens every few years: Someone, somewhere predicts the inevitable extinction of the mainframe. In the 80s, PCs were going to replace Big Iron; in the 90s, it was going to be the client/server revolution. There was also the famous prediction by venture capitalist and former pundit Stewart Alsop that the last mainframe would be unplugged on March 15, While it s true that Alsop metaphorically ate his words, he also stressed that the mainframe of the early 21st century was not the mainframe introduced in Which is really the point. To avoid extinction, you have to adapt to the world at large. As WIRED noted in their article, Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?, the first mainframes were built to serve Cold War clients, like the Department of Defense. The mainframe of today is designed for use in a very different world and economy. When the mainframe s expected time to be unplugged arrived, the mainframe instead plugged into TCP/ IP and other Internet standards, integrating with the web and delivering e-business solutions. It then adopted Linux and allowed open source software to run on mainframes. The mainframe isn t going anywhere. According to a survey of 1,200 mainframe users worldwide, 91% of respondents consider the mainframe to be a longterm business strategy, with nearly half believing that it will attract new workloads. So how is the mainframe thriving in today s digital age? And what are the workloads it will fuel tomorrow? In this ebook, we explain the 9 ways the mainframe is transforming before our very eyes.

3 Tackling the Workloads of Today It s noteworthy that mainframe users think the platform will attract new workloads. The one attribute today s workloads share is immense size, and they are all growing rapidly. Mainframes tackle today s workloads the way they always have: with untouchable processing power and memory that can handle the bulk workloads that simply can t be handled any other way. Transaction processing, which happens every time someone swipes a credit card at a point-of-sale terminal, is the type of workload mainframes have always handled well. Think about ATM transactions, online travel bookings, and e-commerce. Think also about the exponential growth all of these areas have been experiencing. The mainframe is fit for the gargantuan processing requirements from big data, mobile, social, cloud, and other software-defined environments. Mobile transaction volume, for example, is expected to reach nearly 500 million per second worldwide in just 10 years. Anyone think the mainframe won t be handling them?

4 Bringing Unique Value to the Always-On Business World One of the intriguing discussions today is that the mainframe simply can t compete economically with cloud technology or even a virtualized server environment. Studies showing a 60% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for mainframe environments are often dismissed as unrealistic. However, one analyst explained that real costs reported by executives at thousands of companies indicated that the more distributed a computing solution was, the higher the company s total cost. Why? More complex environments require more types of expertise, and that usually means the company needs more staff. In addition, hardware and software, when combined, was typically less than 20% of the total five-year costs. Staffing, networking, and power costs were significantly higher. The solution? By using a small number of mainframes rather than a large number of standard x86 offerings companies relying on Linux, Java, and databases to support their cloud, analytical, and transactional workloads would experience higher levels of performance at a lower overall cost.

5 Built from the Ground Up for Continuous Availability Unforeseen downtime is simply non-negotiable when it comes to sustaining business in the digital age. In some instances, companies can offset a few minutes of downtime, but it s few and far between. The minutes that add up to hours can sum up to costs that are hard to overcome. In a survey IDC conducted in cooperation with AppDynamics, respondents said that an infrastructure failure can cost $100,000 per hour. 6 Critical application failure can run between $500,000 and $1 million per hour. Nonstop uptime with minimal outages has been a characteristic of the mainframe platform since the first one was powered on. Newer models have been designed with enhanced disaster recovery (DR), high availability (HA), and data integrity measures already configured so users don t have to depend on disparate systems to fill the gaps.

6 Primed for Big Data and Analytics It should be obvious that big data would be at home on a platform nicknamed Big Iron. The reality is that the mainframe is perfectly suited for big data and analytics. The latest revision of the mainframe can process 32,000 transactions per second and has as much as 10 terabytes of local memory. Those specs enable it to keep vast amounts of data close and process it rapidly, especially with the introduction of the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA). That analytical power enables an insurance company, for example, to perform fraud detection analysis on all claims submitted in real time, rather than simply analyzing a fraction of claims based on red-flag rules. Legitimate claims get handled faster and fraudulent claims don t get missed.

7 Processing Power That Packs a Punch Let s say this one more time: No other platform delivers the processing power of today s mainframe. As of 2012, the banks of mainframes at Visa were processing 145,000 transactions per second. Try that with a server farm. To meet such demand, IBM designed its latest mainframe with the ability to process 2.5 billion transactions per day. IBM says that s the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year. The new IBM z13 added 300% more memory than typically found on servers and 100% more bandwidth. That type of horsepower goes a long way to ensure the great application performance businesses are looking for. According to Scott Fagen, engineer at CA Technologies, On the mainframe, when the machines are running at 100%, there s even more work that could be running if you gave it a little more juice. That s something that just can t be done on other platforms.

8 Adapting to Mobile All that processing power makes the mainframe the ideal platform for supporting mobile apps. As organizations across different industries retailers, finance, telecom, insurance, airlines deliver more and more mobile apps to users, more and more transactions that begin with a smartphone have to be processed somewhere. The idea that it would be in a mainframe emerged when IBM and Apple teamed up to develop business apps for iphones and ipads. The most recent model of IBM mainframe is designed to be the powerful backend engine for apps on those devices. with the ever-rising tide of mobile endpoints. Again, that tide is expected to rise to nearly 500 million transactions per second worldwide. Although Google predicts that this transaction tide is still 10 years away, the search engine giant recently confirmed that there are more searches on mobile than desktops. In reaction to the mobile usage onslaught, more than two-thirds of U.S. respondents and 74% of global respondents to a CA Technologies survey stated that they have or are planning to sanction mobile management of the mainframe in the next 18 months. IBM has a highly evolved mobile strategy in which its product offerings are designed to handle interactions

9 Security Control Since its inception, the mainframe has set the standard for secure computing. As ComputerWorld recently noted, study after study finds that the mainframe delivers higher security than virtually any other platform. When it comes to security and reliability on the whole (especially to fuel high-performance computing environments like cloud and mobile), Forrester found that 87% of respondents labeled the mainframe as their most available, scalable, and secure platform. The article further notes that the vast majority of banks and other financial institutions, with the obvious need for the highest level of security, depend on IBM mainframes for computing power.

10 Extreme Virtualization It should surprise nobody that the concept of virtualization was born on the mainframe almost 50 years ago, and the platform has only improved its capabilities in that arena. Using IBM s advanced virtualization technology, thousands of virtual images can run in each mainframe with up to 64 virtual cores per image. Software licensing charges are usually based on the number of physical cores, not virtual cores, which results in a lower price point. As InformationWeek pointed out, virtualization has been instrumental to delivering large-scale workload consolidation and open source computing. Mainframes today run not only applications written in Cobol and PL/I, but also applications written in Java, C/C++, SAP, and others. Databases such as MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and Hadoop also run well on this platform.

11 Private Cloud Hub Organizations looking to move information technology operations to the cloud are usually seeking lower overall costs. They assume that moving off the mainframe and ending their maintenance and software costs will give them lower TCO. However, one survey from a couple years back shows that 70% of potential cloud customers consider security an inhibitor to cloud adoption. The next inhibitor was access to data, with 40% citing it. The obvious question is, if security is so important, why move away from the most secure computing platform there is? When Security Intelligence listed its nine reasons for using a mainframe as a private cloud instead of a thirdparty supplier, security was one of the big reasons. Flexibility, scalability, and, surprisingly enough, cost were also listed. Security Intelligence also referenced a study that found overall total cost of ownership (TCO) over 3 years for a private cloud based on IBM z Server systems was 76% less than a third-party service provider s public cloud.

12 Conclusion In this crazy information-driven world where technology seems to change every day, the mainframe continues to thrive because it has adapted. It is Old Reliable to the users who trust in its processing performance and capacity. More than 75% of US respondents and more than 80% of global respondents believe the mainframe is a highly strategic part of their current and future IT plans. However, today s mainframe is definitely not the room-sized behemoth of a half-century ago. With the many advancements we ve seen in the new-age mainframe, we are looking at a sleeker, flexible, and more adaptable version than its predecessors. Evolution is inevitable. The mainframe is proof. Is your business ready to experience the change? 2015 Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. All rights reserved. LRS is a registered trademark of Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. AppDynamics is a registered trademark of AppDynamics, Inc. Apple, iphone and ipad are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc. Google is a registered trademark of Google, Inc. Hadoop is a registered trademark of the Apache Software Foundation. IBM, DB2 and the IBM Premier Business Partner emblem are registered trademarks and z13 and z Systems are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Oracle and Java is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation in the United States other countries or both. Visa is a registered trademark of Visa in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. SAP is a registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB LIMITED. Contact us to get to know the modern mainframe.