Tag Archive for: Mainframe

IBM sales jump shows the mainframe is not dead, with hybrid cloud alive and well


At a time when most enterprises are planning cloud deployments and many are reportedly sharpening their mainframe exit strategy, IBM is seeing double-digit growth in its big iron business for the quarter ended September.

The company, which declared its third quarter results on Wednesday, reported a 98% jump in revenue for its z line of mainframe computer in terms of constant currency (that is, eliminating the effect of currency fluctuations).  

IBM, which buckets mainframes under its infrastructure line of business, released the z16 mainframe in April before beginning to sell it in the second quarter.

At launch, industry observers said they expected that the performance and scalability of the z16 would pave the way for more use of the mainframes in hybrid-cloud environments. And complementing the jump in mainframes sales, IBM revenue for its hybrid infrastructure business was also up last quarter.

For the quarter ended September, IBM’s infrastructure line of business—which includes hybrid infrastructure, distributed infrastructure, support and mainframes—reported a total revenue of $3.4 billion, up 23.1% year-on-year. Specifically, the company’s hybrid and distributed infrastructure business were up by 41% and 21% respectively.

Meanwhile, in another sign that the mainframe is still alive, Google, during its annual conference Cloud Next 2022 last week, claimed that a significant number of enterprises still run on mainframes when it launched a mainframe migration service, dubbed Dual Run.

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Why Mainframe Data Management is Crucial for BI and Analytics



January 16, 2021
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While the entire purpose of business intelligence (BI) is to find behavioral patterns in the data and infer future trends or actions that can benefit the business, many enterprises have been missing a key component: mainframe data. Without this precious core data, much of which is hidden in mainframe environments, BI and modern analytics won’t live up to their potential.

It has often been stated that data is “the new oil” that can power economic growth. If that’s true, then it is also true that mainframe data has been largely untapped, confined to use in traditional systems of record and given only the most limited exposure to modern analytics.

Enterprises must clearly find better ways of accessing, analyzing, and using the data they already possess. The mainframe must yield its secrets.

 

How Mainframe Data Got Buried

The mainframe environment has evolved with consistency for more than half a century. It’s been the rock on which many businesses built their IT infrastructure. Mainframes reliably sustained business processes, research, and even helped businesses adapt to the World Wide Web.

However, while the rest of IT has galloped toward shared industry standards and even open architectures in on-premises systems and in the cloud, mainframe has stood aloof and unmoved. It operates largely within a framework of proprietary hardware and software that did not readily share data – and perhaps didn’t need to.  But with the revolutionary pace of change, especially in the cloud, old notions of scale and cost have been cast aside. As big and as powerful as mainframe systems are, there are things the cloud can now do better.

Analytics is one of those things. For example, in the cloud no problem is too big. Effectively unlimited scale is available if needed. Just as significant, a whole host of analytic tools like Kibana, Splunk and Snowflake, have emerged to better examine not only structured data but also unstructured data which abounds in mainframes.

These tools have largely been deployed on “new”…

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IBM wants you to encrypt everything with its new mainframe

IBM wants businesses to use its new z14 mainframe to encrypt pretty much everything — an approach to security it calls pervasive encryption.

Encrypting everything, and restricting access to the keys, is one way to reduce the risk and impact of data breaches. It can reduce the threat surface by 92 percent, according to research commissioned by IBM.

To make such pervasive encryption viable, the z14 has four times as much silicon devoted to cryptographic accelerators as its predecessor, the z13, giving it seven times the cryptographic performance.

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Network World Security

IBM launches new mainframe with focus on security

A new IBM mainframe includes security hardware to encrypt data without slowing down transactions and can integrate with IBM security software to support secure hybrid-cloud services.

ravi srinivasan

Ravi Srinivasan, vice president of strategy and offering management for IBM Security

Thanks to an encryption co-processor, the new IBM z13s mainframe offloads encryption and doubles the speed at which previous mainframes could perform transactions, making for faster completion times and lower per-transaction costs, says Ravi Srinivasan, vice president of strategy and offering management for IBM Security.

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Network World Tim Greene