In today's age of the internet, people seem to have forgotten IBM's mainframe systems. I wonder how people can ignore the fact that the mainframes still drive the commercial projects and that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The scalability, security and performance offered by this platform is unrivaled. I've been working on this platform for over 4 years now and the production environment has not crashed once on my project. There has been no incident of a security breach and no issues with performance. That's a far cry from Windows and/or Linux based systems.
Sure, MVS is not as snazzy as Vista or Leopard, but, it does what it is intended to do faultlessly - processing of files, database transactions and storage. Mainframes were expected to be consigned to the dinosaur heap when the Internet exploded. However, unlike the dinos, they evolved and at the same time retained their key benefits. CICS transaction gateways now connect the 8-color Mainframe to the 65-million-color world of the net. Meanwhile, Mainframes continue to house most of the operational database needs of large projects.
There has been a rather disturbing trend recently to shift business logic out of the mainframe and onto open systems. Clients claim that this reduces cost and removes the dependency on IBM and its hardware. However, this might not be entirely true. Instead of maintaining a single machine, clients often end up maintaining multiple servers to handle the same amount of traffic. As the volumes grow, this results in a nightmare for the admin staff. I also find that the experience with the "legacy" systems has given rise to more mature processes for development, testing and implementation. Is it worth it to re-invent the wheel ?
So where do mainframes go from here ? As I write this, IBM has announced its latest model in the z-series. With India and China growing at a zippy rate, demand for the mainframe will be strong in the short term. The choice of OS will also be varied, with IBM also announcing z-Linux on some of its machines.
The scalability, security and performance offered by this platform is unrivaled. I've been working on this platform for over 4 years now and the production environment has not crashed once on my project. There has been no incident of a security breach and no issues with performance. That's a far cry from Windows and/or Linux based systems.
Sure, MVS is not as snazzy as Vista or Leopard, but, it does what it is intended to do faultlessly - processing of files, database transactions and storage. Mainframes were expected to be consigned to the dinosaur heap when the Internet exploded. However, unlike the dinos, they evolved and at the same time retained their key benefits. CICS transaction gateways now connect the 8-color Mainframe to the 65-million-color world of the net. Meanwhile, Mainframes continue to house most of the operational database needs of large projects.
There has been a rather disturbing trend recently to shift business logic out of the mainframe and onto open systems. Clients claim that this reduces cost and removes the dependency on IBM and its hardware. However, this might not be entirely true. Instead of maintaining a single machine, clients often end up maintaining multiple servers to handle the same amount of traffic. As the volumes grow, this results in a nightmare for the admin staff. I also find that the experience with the "legacy" systems has given rise to more mature processes for development, testing and implementation. Is it worth it to re-invent the wheel ?
So where do mainframes go from here ? As I write this, IBM has announced its latest model in the z-series. With India and China growing at a zippy rate, demand for the mainframe will be strong in the short term. The choice of OS will also be varied, with IBM also announcing z-Linux on some of its machines.
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