The Evolution of the Mainframe

 

Mainframe and its evolution with Cloud Computing

The key attributes associated with mainframe computing are high resilience, high manageability, and scalability. Despite the momentum driving public cloud adoption, there remain workloads that cannot easily be migrated to the public cloud. Whether it is deemed too risky to migrate or reworking legacy code is cost-prohibitive, mainframe computing remains an integral part of IT ecosystem. There is a growing demand for reworking some mainframe workloads to run cloud natively on cloud infrastructure. But the risks associated with this often mean the core back-end mainframe system remains untouched in many organizations. APIs are used to provide external connectivity in order to enable enterprise developers to build modern functionality, combining the best the public cloud can offer with reliable transaction processing embodied in the mainframe.

Over the last few years, Cloud computing has evolved to the point where it is now promising the same level of scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency that mainframe systems have long provided. In fact, in terms of scalability, it exceeds mainframe scalability. With scalability, throughput, operational efficiency, and arguably even resilience and failover, the cloud has arguably caught up with the mainframe of the 1990s or early 2000s. It is fair to say that cloud providers have made great strides in security and privacy, but, the mainframe is still recognized as the gold standard, with security baked into every layer in the systems stack.

The mainframe ecosystem and the z/OS operating system have evolved too and IBM has introduced specialty processors to run Linux workloads and support encryption, greatly increasing the flexibility of mainframe systems. Cloud providers offer support for specialist workloads for non-x86 hardware, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) for machine learning and AI. But the introduction of the latest addition to the z-series mainframe family, the z16, offers what IBM claims is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing.

The mainframe environment is getting bigger with announcements such as those made at the recent launch of the IBM z16. These include quantum-safe cryptography to protect against the development of Quantum computers able to decrypt current encryption standards, on-chip AI acceleration to boost ML and AI execution and flexible capacity combined with on-demand workload transfer across multiple locations to further reduce the chance of service disruption.

On workload optimization, the two environments are developing in different ways. For example, the mainframe strives to deliver a consistent environment that can handle a wide range of workloads but is managed through the same set of frameworks and tools. The cloud, on the other hand, allows you to spin up dedicated specialized environments, e.g. for AI or analytics. Also, IBM Cloud’s ambition to make "mainframe as a service" available from its IBM Cloud and available across data centers, brings the mainframe capabilities closer to cloud-native offerings.

The modern mainframe, particularly LinuxOne version and the new Z16, it's pretty clear any claims of the mainframe being out of date or legacy stem from a fundamental lack of awareness. Indeed, the mainframe has continued to lead the way in many critical areas, delivering IT cost-effectively, and is far away from becoming obsolete.