There’s no doubt that the mainframe ruled the IT infrastructure environment for many years and laid the foundation for where IT is today. It did this because it natively converged compute, main memory, and storage, and engineered internal redundancy.
Phillip de Waal, systems engineering manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa, says mainframes laid the groundwork for further evolution, such as the move to stand-alone servers, centralised storage, the rise and maturation of virtualisation, and, ultimately, the birth of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and the cloud.
Unfortunately, it also introduced several issues that eventually led to it falling out of favour. These include the high costs of procuring infrastructure, inherent complexity, a lack of flexibility and highly siloed environments.
So is the mainframe dead?
“Not just yet,” he says. “Sure, they no longer dominate the datacentre market, but they’re still used by many banks, airlines, insurance companies and large enterprises to help with heavy lifting. However, many vendors have started to wave the flag, putting plans in place to finally end mainframe production. I think that we can say, for the most part, mainframes are on life support as IT teams look at viable alternatives.”
Mainframes have held their grip on long-time users through the ability to handle multiple terabytes of data without breaking a sweat.
Carl Butler, iOCO
Monique Gunn, lead solution engineer, VMware Sub-Saharan Africa, agrees that mainframes have some life left in them yet, and says the signs are there that they will stay in use for at least another decade. “There are indications that the long life of mainframes is drawing to an end; for example, Fujitsu recently stated that it will cease sales of its mainframes by April 2031. It also put a deadline on support services, saying this would end five years after production stopped.”
A sense of security
Speaking of the benefits the mainframe still has to offer, Carl Butler, Qlik data integration sales lead at iOCO, cites security, reliability, scalability and durability. “Security has moved on a lot from the old mainframe systems. Since mainframe computers are made for corporations, which need highly secured transactions – some mainframes contain the personal data of hundreds of thousands of people – these computers are designed with security as their primary goal.”
Reliability is another feature, particularly when the system undergoes failure, it will try to recover on its own, he says. Mainframe computers are also highly scalable, and because of this, they can easily perform tasks with high complexity.
In addition, Butler says, mainframe computers are mostly considered for their extreme durability – on average, these computers have a lifespan of over 10 years.
Gerard King, mainframe pre-sales and support engineer, CA Southern Africa, says redundancy is another benefit. Mainframe systems can remain online due to redundancies in power supplies, storage devices as well as processors.
He adds: “With mainframes having been around for more than 50 years, they’re still devised to cater for early written code without necessarily being recompiled or re-assembled. Availability is another benefit, because the latest Z Systems (which takes their name from the zero downtime principle), are designed to be up 99.9999% of the time. And, finally, customisation, because all mainframes are built to order to cater for all customers’ needs.”
Butler says mainframes are still hard at work doing the jobs they’ve traditionally done. For example, when it comes to high-speed transaction processing, mainframes simply have no peer in terms of speed, the volume of transactions they can handle, and cost-effectiveness.
“That’s why banks still rely on mainframes for their core operations. Many customer interactions, such as credit card and ATM transactions, are carried out through high volume, real-time, online transaction processing, and banks also continue to depend on overnight mainframe batch runs to process customer statements, internal financial reports, and much more.
“Mainframes have also held their grip on long-time users through the ability to handle multiple terabytes of data without breaking a sweat,” Butler adds. That’s particularly important not only in banking, but in other information-intensive areas such as government, healthcare, insurance, utilities, and education.
In fact, he says, the dominance of the mainframe in banking and finance has never been seriously challenged. “For these companies, which must flawlessly handle large volumes of ATM, online, credit card, and back-office transactions every day, the mainframe’s unique combination of reliability, availability, security, scalability, and performance is critical. Similarly, both traditional and online retailers rely on the mainframe’s unmatched ability to process enormous numbers of transactions each day reliably and securely. Insurance, too, is a highly data-intensive sector, which makes it ideal for mainframes, and the healthcare industry depends on the superior data security and auditability characteristics of mainframes, including pervasive encryption, to meet stringent regulatory compliance mandates.”
Staffing advantage
In terms of limitations and weaknesses, King says one downside of mainframes is that from a cost perspective, they’re generally not an option for the smaller enterprise. “But I don’t believe there are many alternatives to the mainframe when it comes to big number crunching and the fact that millions of transactions can be processed per second.”
Butler agrees that costs can be a major drawback. “Hardware and software for mainframes is expensive,” he says. “However, compared to the cost of other routes to security, IT management, virtualisation, and more, the cost of mainframes is significantly less.”
He also mentions the physical space that the hardware occupies compared to other solutions. “That large space might be a constraint for small entities. But that problem isn’t as severe as it once was. Compared to earlier machines, today’s mainframes are small.”
For the most part, mainframes are on life support as IT teams look at viable alternatives.
Phillip de Waal, Nutanix
And then there’s the age-old problem that affects the entire industry, but is especially acute in the mainframe space – skills. “You can’t operate a mainframe environment without specific training. However, one skilled administrator can serve a large group of mainframe users, so using mainframes significantly reduces people costs and thus offers a staffing advantage,” says Butler.
So if mainframes are slowly on their way out, what are the alternatives?
Cloud, of course, is the hot ticket. Gunn says while many organisations still make use of ‘big iron’ servers, the move to cloud is becoming more prominent, and long-term plans must start being made for the end of the mainframe.
“Working in the end-user space, I’ve often asked datacentre admins if they’re worried about the move to the cloud and whether they’ll be left without a job. The answer is always ‘no’. They know the transition is not an overnight one, and several industries still make use of applications running on both mainframes and physical servers, because they’re not ready to move to the cloud yet.”
Gunn believes application modernisation will be the main reason for the ultimate shift away from the mainframe. But taking an application from a mainframe and modernising it is a journey on its own, she says. “While many industries have already started on this path, it’s more a case that they’ve only just started and the journey is in its infancy.”
Nutanix’ De Waal highlights the HCI approach. It enables automation, self-service, pay-as-you-grow scaling, and saves time to focus on high-value business activities, he says. HCI lays the foundation for the cloud, but it's a bit tough to drag a mainframe into the cloud. “You may be able to derive functionality from back-end systems hosted on a mainframe while operating in the cloud, but you won't be able to create a true hybrid cloud experience. With more modern approaches like HCI, users benefit in three key areas: cost, complexity, and cloud-readiness. HCI also takes up less physical space and enables a just-in-time model where solutions are only rolled out when needed.”
Butler says vendors are providing options to replace mainframes by moving to the cloud. “Last October, Oracle, HP and Intel announced a combined solution to help enable mainframe migration. Major and minor solution providers, such as Unisys, Fujitsu and Microfocus, have all thrown their hats in the ring too. Cloud computing provides several benefits without the need to invest in large computing infrastructures.
“Today’s businesses have become reliant on software and applications for critical business operations so it’s vital to avoid downtime, and cloud services reduce the chances of this happening to almost zero because the cloud is designed for high availability and accessibility. Moreover, it provides them with the flexibility of paying only for the services they need.”
While the cloud might seem like a more modern alternative, CA’s King says the transition needs to be well planned and will take time, and not all applications are suited to it. “Some smaller applications could possibly be moved from the mainframe to the cloud, but it has to be remembered that more than 70% of critical corporate data still resides behind the mainframe and that would need to be accessed, thus running the risk of building in unwanted latency to complete a specific transaction.”
While the mainframe is still not dead, it could use some modernisation to extend its lifespan.
CA’s King says: “There’s a huge drive towards DevOps, and to have integration built in now through the introduction of Zowe – a new open source software framework that provides solutions that allow development and operations teams to securely manage, control, script and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform, and the first open source project based on z/OS. This means that newer uses can code into the mainframe, thus bridging the gap between the open systems and the mainframe, which alleviates some of the pains being experienced with the shortage of mainframe skills.”
Arguments supporting and denying the demise of the mainframe live on, but in reality, the mainframe will be here for the foreseeable future, although it’s fair to say that the age of mainframe technology and its surrounding ecosystem is starting to show, literally.
* This feature was first published in the September edition of ITWeb's Brainstorm magazine.
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