Many industries like banking, retail, manufacturing, public sector, and others use Mainframe for their mission-critical applications. The growth rate of the mainframe is expected to be 4.3% in 2025, growing from $2,094 million in 2017 to a predicted $2,906 million in 2025.
IBM Mainframe was introduced to the world for the first time in 1952. Even today, we continue to depend on Mainframes every day while doing a simple task such as banking transaction, an ATM withdrawal, or an online purchase. This is possible because Mainframes have defended its claim as the most powerful computing system in the world by adapting and re-inventing itself. A single Mainframe can process 2.5 billion transactions in one day.
Mainframe is Robust
It isn’t a surprise that, even in the age of cloud computing, Mainframe continues to adapt to the latest technology trends and continues to grow.
In a transaction-heavy environment that is prevailing in today’s business world, from Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to telemetry capture and high-frequency trading is creating a substantial amount of transactional data. This is the data which needs to be processed at high speed by keeping the production line running and end-user applications responding.
On the other hand, consumer habits are changing. With mobile devices everywhere, people check their bank balance more often. Each one of those lookups is a transactional hit. Things like pre-loading retail baskets, mobile payments, and casual messaging also are transactional hits. This enormous growth of transactions hitting the backend is what mainframes are made for. They operate at high speed and scale that surpasses the capabilities of many systems.
The latest Mainframe in its maximum configuration can process up to 146 million transactions per second (TPS) while the default limit of AWS is somewhere closer to 10,000 TPS on an instance. With these capabilities, it is natural to assume that this processing power comes with a price-tag, but it won’t. Thanks for Open Source Software and Linux on System Z for saving licensing costs and making Mainframes cost-effective as compared to other platforms
Mainframe is Secure
The mainframe is suitable for compliance challenges with its centralized and self-contained nature. The latest Mainframe has very high-security benefits. Security is built into Mainframe at the architecture level resulting in a highly secure environment.
With the release of z14, Mainframes can now encrypt all the data at the database, data set, or disk level in a very cost-effective way. In fact, there are minimal overheads to doing that instead of using cryptographic security devices; enterprises can now use the mainframe as a cryptographic hub.
Surprisingly, many businesses have found this easy, and after all, there is no need to change and adjust the applications, as each mainframe app now has internal encryption-decryption mechanisms.
Conclusion
Since its invention in the 1950s, Mainframe has come a very long way from using sets of punched cards, paper tapes, or magnetic tape to transfer programs and data. With improving technology, the benefits of using the mainframes have also increased.
Today, Mainframe is more powerful and more secure than ever, and this technology is best suited to support analytics, application management, blockchain, cloud, and cryptography, which are all important in today’s economy. Businesses have realized that the modernized and upgraded Mainframe is the solution they have been looking for all long.
