The mainframe was born some 50 plus years ago when the government needed a machine to support advanced research. Since that time it has taken its rightful place in the world’s financial transactions, transportation management, health care and industry management. Most of that code was written in COBOL and VSAM and ran on systems from CICS and IMS to DB2. Today it still fulfills those venerated roles but it has evolved into the most powerful, flexible, reliable server in the industry, running new workloads from Java to Linux. This is the machine that supports tens of thousands of users working with hundreds of terabytes of data, with response times still in sub-seconds. This is not your father’s mainframe.
Why then do many IT professionals, and as a result industry leaders, believe that migrating these trusted applications and data from a mainframe to rooms of distributed commodity servers can provide the same levels of service, security and reliability that the mainframe still excels at today? The truth is these folks don’t really know what a mainframe is, much less what makes it so powerful. Let’s take a short tour through this new mainframe, the System z10, and see what separates it from the rest. And the best way to review these differences is to look at one of those “mainframe is dead” white papers, in the form of “The Story about the IBM Mainframe Makeover” that HP has posted on their web site2.
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