Analysis on Ibm Mainframe
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ANALYSIS ON MAINFRAME
OVERVIEW
IBM’s mainframe family has been an icon of the computer revolution. Its introduction lead the way to enterprise applied computing. Succeeding generations and new systems followed with the spotlight eventually shifting to distributed server-based and personal computing systems. Despite many obituaries, the mainframe never disappeared, providing an unassailable standard for critical and demanding enterprise computing. The introduction of the IBM System z family was one of two events that marked the beginning of the mainframe’s return to the spotlight.
The second event was the explosive growth in global economies as formally closed and underdeveloped countries became serious competitors in global markets. The basic law of economics tells us that limited resources become more expensive as more consumers compete for them. This, combined with the growing mobility of competition, drove a business focus on effective, efficient operation to maintain competitiveness and profitability. By raising price sensitivity, global competition makes being operationally efficient, secure, and dynamically adaptive to changing business conditions, critically important to business success.
With workloads hovering in the 12% to 20% range, distributed computing is notoriously underutilized. Mainframes are just as well-known for efficiency of operation, ability to handle fluctuating 90% to 100% workloads, and reliability. With little fanfare, user interfaces, styles of interaction with, and access to the mainframe adapted as the industry evolved. Changing computing styles, services-oriented computing, the rise of virtualization, the need for end-to-end views of service delivery, security concerns, etc; all play to mainframe strengths. For many in the industry — the changes taking place in the mainframe were unnoticed. Twenty years out of the spotlight left too many myths unchallenged and information outdated.
A combination of inattention, dated styles of cost tracking and allocations, based on presumptive distribution rather than actual costs incurred and resources used, meant that stark differences in mainframe vs. distributed server in TCO, ROI, and efficiency were obscured. IBM tapped the resources of its server, software and services groups to change that. A prime influence is the management software with which IBM Tivoli provides solutions that accurately track computing costs, identify resource consumption, and even dynamically adjusts processor configurations and workload allocations to maximize performance and minimize costs using policies tied to business conditions. These management tools document the mainframe as financially attractive and highly competitive to distributed systems Linux and UNIX mainframes are a growing market segment.
LEGACY TECHNOLOGY; MODERN CHALLENGES FOR MAINFRAME
Organizations with significant processing requirements continue to maintain many of their most important applications on mainframes. Often, their most visible and mission critical business services rely on the performance and availability of these mainframe applications to users within and outside the organization. As IT infrastructures increase in complexity and business demands escalates, mainframes can be at the heart of enabling these organizations to adapt to changing business demands, improve services and contain costs. The challenge is to stay abreast of what is available and to exploit the new technology effectively.
Enterprise customers are facing new challenges with their mainframe installations. Modern application solutions can deliver substantial increases in business productivity, but many of these applications are not available for mainframe platforms, which narrows the mainframe’s ability to address the company’s needs. Although legacy applications provide tremendous value over their life cycle, the inevitable impact of age on the applications is becoming a limitation to many companies’ business imperatives. Even those applications that satisfy current business demands are often seen as difficult and expensive to operate and not agile enough. In addition, new advances related to highly productive software development tools and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions are more commonly available on newer platforms such as Microsoft’s .NET system .Traditional mainframe style batch processing and terminal-based computing are no longer sufficient for real-time customer demands and dynamic market changes. The computing user base now includes virtually every employee, so IT departments must provide modern systems that are intuitive and easy to use.
SWOT ANALYSIS ON MAINFRAME STATUS
STRENGTHS
The increased popularity of the mainframe can be attributed to its ever-increasing openness and its ability to host new workloads. Once seen as a proprietary host of the big three (z/OS, z/VM, and z/VSE), today’s mainframes extend the reach of their traditional scalability, reliability, flexibility and security by hosting Linux and in some cases UNIX environments. The same experts that predicted the doom of the mainframe are now revising their estimates because today’s mainframes are not the mainframes of yesterday. For example:
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It takes fewer people to manage a mainframe than it does to manage equivalent distributed servers.
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Mainframes take less energy and space to operate.
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Mainframes are more secure than equivalent distributed systems.
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Entry-level mainframes are not overwhelming, in price or size.
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Price trends, in cost per MIPS and Megabytes, continue to benefit the buyer.
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Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) is a trademark of the mainframe.
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Mainframes are old-hands at virtualization and include logical partitioning (PR/SM), a virtualization technique, just now starting to appear in today’s high-end servers.
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Mainframes can run many virtual machines