Revisiting 50+ years of IBM Mainframe - Part 2

Having recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of IBM’s existence in 2011 it is almost necessary to also trace their fifty year journey in the mainframe world. Having discussed the First, Second and Third Generation of IBM in its mainframe career in “Revisiting 50+ years of IBM Mainframe - Part 1”, the most celebrated eServer zSeries 900 demands special attention of its own.

The millennium 2000 brought along IBM’s Mainframe zSeries. IBM unveiled the first model, IBM eServer zSeries 900 equipped with e-business as its primary function. This functioned with the help of a new 64-bit operating system, Z/OS. IBM added Z990 to the mainframe eServer family in 2003. The z990 features up to 9,000 MIPS on 32 processors, almost three times the system capacity of the z900, a remarkable improvement in the world of mainframes. IBM announced the strengthened role of mainframe as the data hub of the large enterprises in 2005 with the IBM system/z9. In 2008, IBM added yet another mainframe to its z-family, the z10 Enterprise Class with the first z/Architecture 2 (ARCHLVL 3) of its time. Apart from the usage of z/OS, System z/10 supported various operating systems like z/VSE, z/VM, z/TP, Linux, Open Solaris, UTS, and MUSIC/SP.

IBM created an epoch in the mainframe arena yet again with the announcement of the zEnterprise 196 system in 2010.  The market and producers coined the term “system of systems” to explain the functionality of the zEnterprise 196 due to its path breaking features.  The new mainframes provide a variety of choice of operating systems (z/OS, Linux and AIX), as well as a choice in the processor, running Power and x86 chips in a blade environment via the Mainframe Console.

With the release of zEnterprise, IBM marked record sales in 2010 with an increase of 4% from the previous year and the net income rose by 9.2%. The increase in demand emphasised the growing reception and need for mainframe in different spheres of work in the future.

A company that started with machines merely for accounting purposes has grown to become a legend. IBM has harnessed the potential of the changing technology since its inception and that has caused the drastic transition from the first generation to the most advanced mainframe zEnterprise 196 that is available in the markets today. Critics of the industry, having written off the demand and usage of mainframes are now witnessing the increasing relevance of it in the new computing environment. The key to survival is adaptation and evolution. IBM Mainframe has been in the market this long because it has constantly remodelled to suit the needs of the age. With the increase in more and more new technologies being adapted by IBM Mainframe(SOA, Java, webtechnologies, Cloud Computing, Virtualization etc),  it is evident that the IBM legacy is going to hover around and dominate for much longer than what the doomsayers had predicted. All we can expect from IBM Mainframes at any point is evolution.

Cheers to the insurmountable spirit of the IBM Mainframes!