The first mainframe was introduced in 1943, weighed about five tons and filled an entire room. Not many computer technologies can match the staying power of mainframes, which have evolved quite a bit but continue to power many of the world’s largest organizations today.
In fact, a recent survey from BMC found that 92 percent of executives and IT professionals believe the mainframe is very much a viable, long-term computing platform for their organization. That 92 percent figure is the highest since 2013 as organizations work to scale and modernize their mainframe applications and operations to support increased demand for speed and efficiency.
Many organizations rely on mainframes because they offer the reliability and security required to run mission-critical processes, as well as the computing power to process thousands of transactions per second and billions of transactions per year. Nearly half of respondents are using DevOps practices in their mainframe environment. The top benefits of a mainframe environment, according to the survey, are availability, security, a centralized data serving environment, and transaction throughput.
As important and relevant as mainframes continue to be, there are still challenges associated with these systems. One of the reasons why mainframes need to be modernized is the fact that IT professionals with mainframe expertise are aging or have already retired. For example, most younger programmers and developers don’t know how to work with mainframe applications in the COBOL language. In addition to a growing skills gap, organizations are struggling to keep up with hardware and software upgrades.
Also, it’s difficult to set up a disaster recovery solution to work with a mainframe environment. You’re not just going to buy another mainframe and install it in a remote, secondary data center so you can restore your data and applications if the main system goes down. Hosted solutions can help, particularly for disaster recovery. With a hosted solution, you always have access to a cloud provider’s mainframe environment instead of having to build, manage, maintain and upgrade your own. And you can scale services up or down as needed.
The Converge hosting solution offers resiliency and recovery options for all major mainframe platforms and midrange systems. With multiple data centers across the country, managed by a team with enterprise mainframe expertise, we can make sure your data is secure and available when you need it. Organizations in manufacturing, government, healthcare, finance and other sectors that use mainframes rely on Converge to maintain business continuity.
Our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering provides cost-effective replication management and recovery options that accelerate recovery times while protecting your data. You also have the flexibility to implement a hybrid disaster recovery solution, which allows you to combine your tools with our vast equipment and engineering capabilities. With more than 75 engineers who have more than 500 technical certifications combined, we more than overcome the mainframe skills gap that keeps organizations from modernizing their mainframe environments. Let us show you how Converge hosted disaster recovery services can work with your mainframe system without the cost and complexity of purchasing and maintaining a separate mainframe for the same purpose.
