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Mainframes: Business Workhorses Without the Hype
50 years ago NASA scientists used mainframe computers to land a man on the moon. Today’s iPhones have 100,000 times the processing power of those mainframes and cost just a fraction of the $3.5 million price tag from 1969.
Despite the evolution of handheld and personal computers, mainframes have still retained a place in business and scientific computing.
50 percent of businesses continue to use mainframes, according to a recent report by Forrester and Wipro, and of those companies, less than 5 percent are considering retiring or reducing their dependence on those big computers. Why?
Mainframes haven’t stayed still. They’ve evolved into colossal computing machine. A single mainframe can process 2.5 billion transactions in one day, which means that it could handle the internet processing load of 100 Cyber Mondays on a single machine.
One mainframe can process 2.5 billion transactions in a single day, which is the equivalent of handling 100 Cyber Mondays – over $790 billion – on one system. The mainframe market continues to grow at a rate of 4.3 percent annually and is expected to maintain that growth through 2025. Mainframes represent a $2 billion market.
It was 1952 when IBM’s first mainframe computer came onto the market. And today, we continue to interact with mainframes every day, whether it’s for a bank transaction, an ATM withdrawal, a GP appointment booking, or an online purchase.
Don Dejewski, director at Ensono, said that “reliability, availability and serviceability are key qualities of the mainframe that have kept the technology relevant for today’s business challenges. The mainframe’s power makes it ideal for high-volume, data-rich workloads. These are typical in banks, where the processing of high-frequency transactions is essential for day-to-day operations, but you’ll find similarly intensive workloads in sectors like retail, insurance, healthcare, government, and aviation.”
Brian Klingbeil, executive vice president at Ensono, said that “mainframe modernization is giving enterprises not only the ability to continue to run their legacy applications, but also allows them to embrace new technologies such as containerized microservices, blockchain and mobile applications.”
