Importance of Mainframe

Is the usage of mainframe decreasing now a days?

Solution 1:

It depends on which part of your question you are emphasizing: importance or usage rates.

Mainframes are still very important. They are still heavily relied upon by the financial industry and for many of the critical operations required by large enterprises. IBM has about 90% of that market. Most vendors have cut back on mainframe software development but IBM has been increasing their R&D in mainframe hardware and has a very fast-growing mainframe software development business.

In terms of overall usage rates, many of the traditional roles of mainframes can now be achieved by networked server farms and even desktop systems. For example:

• Massively redundant operations -- systems that have to run for years continuously -- can now be achieved with individually networked computers or servers with redundant switching.
• Virtualization: A single mainframe system could run multiple operating system and multiple applications so serve the needs of an entire company using remote terminals. Today, desktop systems are more typically installed and customized specifically for each users' task.
• Multi-user operations: In pre-web days, if large groups of users needed access to a central database (and centralized applications) mainframe systems where the only option to support such large utilization rates and massive throughput. Today, the Internet (and intranets) connect users and data through distributed systems (on-site and off-site) which can be sized according to the specific transaction levels needed.
• Scalability - Huge up-front hardware cost (and massive software licensing cost) of mainframes give you vertical scalability (big hardware) to handle huge demand (current and future). Distributed, smaller servers give you horizontal scalability whos costs can be spread out as capacity needs increase.

So, some will say that steadily reducing prices and the economies of large database scale will feed a continuing demand for the largest systems. Other will argue that investing in mainframe technologies is not cost-effective.

Solution 2:

In banks, the answer is a resounding no. There is too much legacy code and too many business rules which are either poorly documented, or written so long ago that the option of moving off mainframe would be too costly.