2023

Mainframe Master Innovations

Chapter 1

Mainframe Hardware Innovation: Beginnings Through Key Moments

“Space, the final frontier…” So began each episode of the original Star Trek, a science fiction TV series that had its beginnings two years after the announcement of the System/360 mainframe and three years before humanity actually landed on our first extraterrestrial planet, namely Earth’s moon, aka Luna. 

While one may debate whether space is actually an ultimate frontier or merely a physical challenge in the pursuit of less physical frontiers, it has certainly been a factor in the journey of the IBM mainframe. Early mainframes were known to require an entire room, and the path that led to the rack-mountable z16 mainframe has involved many innovations, not the least of which are vast orders of magnitude of manifesting Moore’s Law, as the capacity of the mainframe increased exponentially while its size continued to shrink.

Working with customers in the space-constrained Manhattan Financial District, 

now CTO and business development manager for Vicom Infinity, a Converged Company, had first-hand experience of the implications of the space savings from the mainframe during his tenure at IBM when many companies sought less expensive alternatives to non-mainframe blade computing. “It was going to cost them $30 million dollars to add one more blade into their cluster because they had to add a data center, build another data center for $30 million,” he recalls.

In his role as IBM rep at the time, Santalucia was able to rescue these organizations with the IBM mainframe. “So some of them got smart, you know, they started finally listening to my preaching to them and they wanted to come back and talk to me about this virtualization with Linux servers and this mainframe, tell me what it really can do,” he says. 

“And once they started understanding it better, they started putting in these systems to consolidate these servers and they were finding that it was saving them a tremendous amount of heat, power cooling floor, space software licenses, and very expensive data center expansions and all along came more and more of these systems.”

Clearly, we’re looking at more than merely miniaturization. In fact, as 
, IBM Fellow and CIO Dev CTO, points out, the positive environmental impact is astounding. “I'm going to put as much as possible on my Z hardware because it's there, it's running and I'm not going to burn more energy, putting that work there so I can keep my footprint small. I can keep my energy consumption small and I can optimize.

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Protect the Mainframe’s Infrastructure

Leverage the experience of the Vanguard managed services team to protect your organization’s z/OS mainframe infrastructure. The managed services team is available to you 24-7-365 and is always prepared to support any software configurations for the customer’s immediate needs and future requirements.

Proven Solutions for z/OS Infrastructures
  • Mainframe operations and support 
  • z/OS system programming 
  • Db2 administration 
  • CICS administration
  • RACF/ACF2/TSS administration
  • SIEM connectivity 
  • Multifactor authentication
  • Compliance reporting
  • Vulnerability assessments 
  • Pen testing and consulting
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Proven Solutions for z/OS Infrastructures
  • Mainframe operations and support 
  • z/OS system programming 
  • Db2 administration 
  • CICS administration
  • RACF/ACF2/TSS administration
  • SIEM connectivity 
  • Multifactor authentication
  • Compliance reporting
  • Vulnerability assessments 
  • Pen testing and consulting
up arrow
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Protect the Mainframe’s Infrastructure

Leverage the experience of the Vanguard managed services team to protect your organization’s z/OS mainframe infrastructure. The managed services team is available to you 24-7-365 and is always prepared to support any software configurations for the customer’s immediate needs and future requirements. 

Experience and Knowledge Count

Vanguard employs the most qualified and experienced managed services professionals in the industry. Our mainframe managed services team has decades of hands-on experience and continuous in-house training on all z/OS external security managers (ESMs) that include RACF, ACF2 and Top Secret.​

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Experience and Knowledge Count

Vanguard employs the most qualified and experienced managed services professionals in the industry. Our mainframe managed services team has decades of hands-on experience and continuous in-house training on all z/OS external security managers (ESMs) that include RACF, ACF2 and Top Secret.​

up arrow
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Protect the Mainframe’s Infrastructure

Leverage the experience of the Vanguard managed services team to protect your organization’s z/OS mainframe infrastructure. The managed services team is available to you 24-7-365 and is always prepared to support any software configurations for the customer’s immediate needs and future requirements. 

The Benefits
  • ​On-site and remote resources 
  • Improve operational efficiency 
  • Manage operating costs 
  • Decades of experience 
  • Proven customer satisfaction
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The Benefits
  • ​On-site and remote resources 
  • Improve operational efficiency 
  • Manage operating costs 
  • Decades of experience 
  • Proven customer satisfaction
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“And so I think as we look into the future, we need to look at what are we doing to our environment? What are we doing to our world? Computing technology is absolutely critical. We can't get rid of it. We've got to recognize though that we need to use it responsibly and effectively. And if I can co-locate a whole bunch of workload on Linux on Z, then I should do it because it reduces the environmental impact.”

 

Again, though, that’s not all there is to the story. A glance through the generations of IBM’s mainframe holy grail, the Principles of Operation, will tell a story of a profound architecture built to maximize the processing capabilities to meet business needs in the most efficient, effective and advanced manner possible, with constantly emerging innovations, such as vector decimal math instructions that can make business workloads run in a small fraction of their original time with no change to the source code of application programs in languages such as COBOL.

 

While there’s no limit to the number of hardware innovations, often industry-leading, sometimes unique, sometimes the genus of a new functionality, and while the profound capacity for data storage and throughput have always been key differentiators, one other innovation worth mentioning is the Parallel Sysplex, which allows multiple mainframes, already with cavernous capacity, to join and act as a single computer with a sky’s-the-limit ceiling.

 

Today’s mainframe innovations continue in leaps and bounds, surpassing all the boundaries we may have taken for granted in the past, with IBM’s Telum mainframe CPU chip, which offers such leading-edge features as on-chip AI and advanced quantum-resistant encryption.

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