A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
CA Technologies
Mainframes: Bringing Us Back to the Future
Mainframes still providing critical services does not mean they are the mainframes of the ‘70s. The original capabilities that defined the mainframe have been expanded dramatically and combined with modern management and security software to create an integrated, optimized mainframe that is fully up to today’s technological and security challenges.
Why is the mainframe still the favored workhouse of IT?
Mainframes offer significant benefits to IT Ops:
Scalability: To the IT department running mainframes, scalability means they don’t have to continually disrupt their hardware environment to keep up with growth. Growth is good, disruption is not. Sudden explosions of growth are extremely disruptive unless you run mainframes. Designed to be massively scalable, they can run just about any workload you throw at them.
Security: If there is one problem that keeps IT managers and executives awake at night, it’s security. Customers really don’t like their privacy violated and the combination of ever more sophisticated hacking and ever more rigorous regulations, such as the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, makes a sense of security hard to come by.
In the mainframe, security is built into both the hardware and software. And mainframes have the processing speed and power to provide the hardware-accelerated encryption/ decryption that is necessary to keep up with thousands of secure transactions each second. In fact, IBM’s new z14 platform simply encrypts everything. That’s what their customers wanted and it’s a good way to keep data secure in today’s environment. Organizations that don’t like to be on the bleeding edge of new platforms need not worry. CA Technologies is offering “day one” support for the z14.
Ease of maintenance: Mainframes present a smaller physical footprint and use significantly less power than a multitude of smaller, distributed systems, reducing the cost and geographical burden on IT. Fewer updates are required to the computing environment to accommodate growth and configuration changes compared to an environment of thousands of smaller servers, reducing both the effort for operations staff and the chance of introducing errors, as well as being a greener alternative.
Is the mainframe suited for today’s app economy?
Emphatically, yes. Ongoing changes and improvements keep expanding its longevity and relevance. And with most of business data, upwards of 80 percent , residing on it, the mainframe sits at the heart of most transactions. Not only is it suited for the app economy, it is essential to it.
While many businesses benefit from the inherent strengths of mainframes, not all are getting as much value from them as they could. Modern management and security software, using automation and machine learning, can bring its value to new levels.
Let’s consider how the optimized mainframe is a foundational part of today’s enterprise infrastructure:
Scale and diversity: The mainframe scales up rather than out.
Management and monitoring: Mainframes are often managed and monitored separately from the distributed architecture because that’s how the infrastructure developed. There are different, legacy management tools and, sometimes, different management teams. The problem is these different tools provide different sources of truth, requiring manual correlation to get at the root cause of issues and that takes time. App performance is only becoming more important so creating a unified infrastructure to leverage new management and monitoring tools is a good way to improve performance.
Today there are management and monitoring tools that cover mobile to mainframe and give you a holistic view of your infrastructure. They provide a single source of truth for fast resolution of issues regardless of the root cause. They employ analytics and automation that facilitate high availability and performance, sometimes remediating issues before customer impact.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) for increased app uptime and security: A combination of analytics, machine learning and automation adds intelligence to today’s monitoring and management tools. They simplify required configuration changes and ongoing operations by monitoring across the enterprise for anomalies and performing automated remediation per pre-defined policies. Today’s algorithms teach themselves, continually improving their ability to find anomalies and other indications of intrusion, fighting back against relentless security hacks. The result is increased application uptime and a more secure infrastructure with less effort on IT’s part.
Is hyperscale computing the new alternative to the mainframe?
Hyperscale data centers can rightly claim that their use of off-the-shelf, inexpensive computing equipment enables them to respond rapidly to growth without significant cost or disruption. Inevitable failures or degradation in these large, distributed environments are dealt with by massive redundancy. Hyperscale data centers are needed by companies that may have to respond rapidly to increased demand, such as Netflix, Google and Microsoft, leading some to question whether hyperscale computing is the modern-day alternative to mainframes.
But what if the hyperscale data center is built with highly reliable and secure components, such as a next generation mainframe? A hyperscale data center with next-gen mainframes has native security because of the built-in encryption capabilities in the mainframe that exceed any commodity server. In addition, they present a smaller footprint and consume less power than a raft of commodity servers and are easier to manage.
Hyperscale computing and mainframes should not be viewed as an either/or choice. The scaling-out capabilities of hyperscale and the scaling-up capabilities of mainframes combined with enhanced security give you the best of both worlds.
Are you getting the most out of your mainframe?
It’s worth evaluating whether you are getting all you can out of your mainframes. How does your current mainframe stack up against the next gen alternatives? Have you integrated your infrastructure to speed up the identification and remediation of infrastructure issues? Are you making the most out of new intelligent monitoring and security software that will enable proactive performance management? Many companies have made a great choice even better by upgrading capabilities.
A Finnish IT firm that offers consulting, development and outsourcing services, brought in new mainframe monitoring and automation tools to simplify managing their customers’ mainframes. With this consolidated approach, they halved restart times and CPU processing requirements for some customers, realized cost savings on mainframe automation tools and can deliver better service overall.
A data services company that offers data center hosting services simplified their mainframe management solution by replacing their multi-vendor management tools with an integrated management solution for both their customers’ data centers and their own data center. This has saved them time, effort and money and improved their productivity. As a result, they can offer more competitive solutions to their customers, along with better service.
With the improvements in mainframe hardware and software, there is no reason for your infrastructure to get stuck in the past. An up-to-date mainframe deployment can give you:
• a unified infrastructure for better management
• management tools that cover mobile to mainframe
• virtualized environments for faster and easier development and testing
• automation and AI for configuration control, anomaly detection, rapid remediation and increased security
An optimized mainframe will save you time, resources and money and enable you to meet the challenges of the burgeoning app economy. Moving into the future with the mainframe will give you the available, secure and elastic infrastructure your organization deserves and demands.
