DECEMBER 2017CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MYVIEWust because mainframes were once the only way a large business could run their critical applications doesn't mean they are any less valuable in that role today. The reliability and scalability of mainframes continue to provide a solid foundation for the massive applications that organizations such as banking, healthcare and the government rely on. In fact, mainframes can handle 2.5 billion mobile transactions per day. Rest assured, behind every great, mobile banking app there's a great mainframe.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. Scaling vertically is more economical in terms of staff, energy and cooling. Modern mainframes can run several different operating systems at once and run them on virtual machines. For IT and developers, this means they don't have to deploy hardware and create environments to develop and test apps that need to run on a variety of platforms.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. BILL TALBOT, VP - SOLUTION & PRODUCT MARKETING, CA TECHNOLOGIESMAINFRAMES: BRINGING US BACK TO THE FUTUREJ
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