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The Mainframe Defined Around Performance, Reliability And Availability

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In this paper I will be describing some of the features that the mainframe defined around performance, reliability and availability. In the last half of my paper I will then describe some of the cutting edge features of commodity server and cloud computing worlds that draw on paths first forged by the Mainframe. Mainframes have always been some of the beefiest computing platforms on the planet. For years they were the most powerful computing platform money could buy. Even with the advent of cloud computing and massive data centers filled with commodity hardware, mainframes are still unmatched in transactions per second. This type of processing is still the lifeblood of banks and many other businesses. To reach these levels of …show more content…

z/OS’s extensibility allows for no single points of failure, allowing 1, 2 or even 3 points to fail all without effecting the workload running on the mainframe. This level of fault tolerance also allows operators to perform rolling changes across a mainframe where they take down whatever pieces they need to perform maintenance or otherwise one at a time, all without the mainframe having a care in the world. Even with all these levels of redundancy however is not important most of the time in IBM’s world. Their mainframes are bulletproof. Mainframes have been known to run for years without going down and it is a point of pride for IBM. All of this parallelism means nothing however without a way to leverage it. Many applications and workloads can be programed to take advantage of the parallelism natively and deal with the inherent difficulties that it introduces. For workloads that haven’t or can’t, IBM provided a product to deal with it. The problems mainly revolve around data sharing and applications that cannot share data, they expect data to be directly connected. Intelligent Resource Director manages the provisioning of workloads that cannot take advantage of the parallelism offered by a Sysplex natively. It will move resources to where they are needed when they are needed for whatever workload is running. The next area that Mainframes

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