Enabling traditional mainframe applications to be seamlessly integrated with cloud-native applications can help the enterprise move to more agile application development and management using processes such as devops or devsecops. When the cloud-native applications are cohosted with the traditional applications, complexity is reduced and performance is improved. Mainframe applications and data can be exposed through APIs for use by rewritten, refactored, or replatformed applications. This gives new life to legacy applications, by enabling them to become part of a service mesh in which their logic and data are selectively exposed for use by other services. In such a scenario, application development and management are integrated with infrastructure management and operations to reduce cost and increase speed to market. Kyndryl can design workshops and education programs for tasks, such as introducing devops, that can provide a first step to enabling integration with public cloud platforms or developing in-house-hosted applications on any platform. The modern mainframe is also an integral part of the hybrid cloud in many organizations. Mainframes provide the security through pervasive encryption, resilience, and scalability to support mission-critical workloads that must be tightly controlled. The mainframe provides vertical scalability that can be used by enterprises to meet their application growth requirements without complete rewrites and without adding cloud/virtual or physical servers.
Regardless of their infrastructure choices, organizations can benefit from extending traditional IT to support hybrid open platforms that enhance organizational agility and flexibility. This facilitates digital transformation, by enabling enterprise-wide automation and orchestration, delivery on common standard platforms, and full utilization of the capabilities of the modern mainframe. When their environment is managed by full-service providers such as Kyndryl that provide mainframe cloud infrastructure hosting and management, customers can take advantage of consumption-based pricing to scale up or down, based on business requirements, with overall TCO savings while still having the security and availability that IBM Z and IBM i offer. IT executives long ago learned that new technologies are subject to an adoption cycle that involves a stage of overhyped expectations followed by a series of disappointments that Gartner has labeled the “trough of disillusionment.” Although executives should always be on the lookout for promising new trends, they should also resist the temptation to discard tried-and-true technologies for the latest fad. Mainframes are sometimes characterized as boring, and if that means they are reliable, time-tested workhorses that collectively process more daily transactions than Google, then the description fits just fine. But IT decision-makers shouldn’t overlook the fact that mainframe platforms have constantly evolved over more than 50 years and today incorporate some of the most sophisticated technology available on the market. It would be hard to imagine a world without them. Thanks to the innovations described here, that isn’t likely to be the case for many years. Today’s mainframes are full participants in customers’ hybrid-cloud strategies, with the capability to process high-volume workloads while coexisting with and enabling the transition to cloud-native platforms. They offer enterprise IT organizations the quality they value most: peace of mind.
As the global leader in end-to-end IBM Z and IBM i services, Kyndryl is the best partner to help ensure that peace of mind, all along the journey from where you are to where your transformation strategy takes you.
Today’s IBM mainframe is an architectural wonder. For example, the system can run up to 19 billion encrypted transactions a day with 99.99999% availability and instant recovery.
It supports up to 40 TB of main memory and processes 183 billion instructions per second while running multiple operating systems simultaneously, including Linux. The Z series remains backward-compatible with applications that were written nearly 60 years ago while also supporting those written with modern cloud-native technologies. It’s not surprising that IBM Z is used by 44 of the top 50 banks and all top 10 insurers worldwide as well as many government, healthcare, airline, and retail organizations and other companies that require the highest standards for performance, security, reliability, and availability.
The IBM i series and its compatible predecessor, the AS/400, are used by more than 100,000 companies for mission-critical workloads. Among IBM i users, 44% say the platform supports between 75% and 100% of their business applications.
And they have big plans for the future. Nearly two-thirds of IBM i customers plan to maintain or expand the platform’s footprint. Over 90% of customers say the IBM i platform delivers a better return on investment than other options. IBM, too, has big plans for IBM i as they continue to expand its capabilities to be a modern OS running on the latest IBM Power servers. With IBM i, security is part of the operating system’s object-based architecture. Allowable actions are predetermined and strictly enforced. Activities can be allowed or prohibited for classes of objects at the file level. An integrated security module makes it nearly impossible for malicious code to affect applications.
