Benefits of Mainframe

The reasons for mainframe use are many, but most generally fall into one or more of the following   categories: 

 Reliability, availability, and serviceability(RAS)

 Security

 Scalability

 Continuing compatibility

Let us look at each of these categories in more detail.

The reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) of a computer system have always been important factors in data processing.  Ideally, RAS is a central design feature of all aspects of this computer system, including the applications. RAS is ubiquitous in the mainframe.

Reliability:- The system’s hardware components have extensive self-checking and self-recovery capabilities. The system’s software reliability is a result of extensive testing and the ability to make quick updates for detected problems.

Availability:- The system can recover from a failed component without impacting the rest of the running system. This applies to hardware recovery (the automatic replacing of failed elements with spares) and software recovery (the layers of error recovery that are provided by the operating system).

Serviceability:- The system can determine why a failure occurred. This allows for the replacement of hardware and software elements while impacting as little of the operational system as possible. This term also implies well-defined units of replacement, either hardware or software.

Security:- One of a firm’s most valuable resources is its data: customer lists, accounting data, employee information, and so on. This critical data needs to be securely managed and controlled, and, simultaneously, made available to those users authorized to see it. The mainframe computer has extensive capabilities to simultaneously share, but still protect, the firm’s data among multiple users.

Scalability:- Scalability is a desirable property of a system, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. By scalability, we mean the ability of the hardware, software, or a distributed system to continue to function well as it changes in size or volume, for example, the ability to retain performance levels when adding processors, memory, and storage. 

Compatibility:- The ability of a system both to run software requiring new hardware instructions and to run older software requiring the original hardware instructions. Some applications were written many years ago, while others may have been written “yesterday.” The ability of an application to work in the system or its ability to work with other devices or programs is called compatibility.

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