The mainframe sector grew in 2018 and is expected to continue its growth well into 2019 and beyond. This growth is due to several factors, including the mainframe’s unmatched reliability, performance, and security. While mainframes still support many critical workloads and applications, for some organizations, mainframes can seem expensive and troublesome to maintain.
Enter mainframe infrastructure hosting as a service. This is a turnkey purpose-built alternative for mainframe production or disaster recovery. There are several benefits to managed hosting for your mainframe workloads. In this article, we’ll take a look at 4 of the most important benefits: reduced operating costs, access to support, cloud integration, and disaster recovery.
1. Reduced Mainframe Operating Costs
Chances are that your mainframe runs critical legacy workloads for your organization. Often a company’s mainframe is overlooked to use its historic reliability. We find many clients running unsupported hardware and software.
Here are some ways a hosted mainframe solution can save you overhead expenses while delivering the performance you need.
Cost Optimization for Workloads
Going forward, we expect workloads to increase in size and performance requirements. These increases will put pressure on your organization to hold down operating costs. At the same time, increased consumer expectations will put additional pressure on your organization to deliver a high-quality experience.
Improved performance leads to cost savings. One way to improve application performance on a mainframe is to evaluate your capacity needs and optimize your software.
A hosted mainframe solution gives you access to the latest in mainframe technology. This can often result in lower software and maintenance costs. In addition, a modern mainframe infrastructure employs machine learning to continuously monitor and improve performance, which reduces overhead costs. Machine learning can maximize the efficiency of many aspects of operations, including problem prevention, deduplication, and data storage.
Mainframe as a Monthly Operating Expense
A hosted mainframe solution is provided as a utility service, typically including hardware, software, maintenance, power, and cooling. In other words, you only pay for the storage and the processing power you need. It is considered a monthly operating expense vs. the capital expense of an on-premise mainframe.
2. Seamless Hardware and Software Support
Other challenges many organizations face are aging mainframe systems and a shortage of talent to maintain them. More recently, mainframes must also integrate into an increasingly complex environment, presenting challenges with:
- Cloud integration
- Strict regulations and compliance requirements
- Data privacy
- Big data analytics
- Access to machine learning
Depending on the level of services requested, a purpose-built hosted mainframe solution could relieve your organization from the pressures of capacity management, performance tuning, workload balancing, software and hardware updates, and maintenance.
You can deliver the performance your customers and users expect while also holding down operational costs on the back end.
3. Cloud Integration
Over the past few years, public opinion has been that the mainframe is destined to be a dusty relic. However, many companies continue to rely on mainframes for customer-facing applications and other crucial workloads because of their unmatched performance and security.
Today, we are entering a new era for mainframes. With recent advancements in cloud integration and machine learning, mainframes have become more relevant. The latest mainframes support business agility. And they offer the highest levels of performance and security.
As more of your infrastructure (such as test environments and data analytics) moves into the cloud, it is important for your mainframe environment to integrate with the cloud.
For clients and end users adopting mainframe IaaS, nearly everything remains the same. They’ll have access to all the same applications and features. On the back end, you’ll operate at maximum efficiency, with reduced or no maintenance required.
4. Disaster Recovery
Analysts have known for some time that companies with a solid disaster recovery (DR) plan and solution in place recover faster with reduced risk, in comparison to companies with no DR program. Mainframes have long been the bedrock for many organizations’ disaster recovery plans.
Your company relies on its mainframe for key workloads because of its reliability and security. However, a storm, a fire, or an earthquake could destroy your local mainframe.
A hosted mainframe DRaaS solution offers additional layers of data security and reliability since your mainframe can be backed up in multiple locations. If a system failure were to occur at your main site, your infrastructure can be restored from a secondary location quickly and efficiently.
Your company, like many others, is likely to face increased pressure to provide high-quality customer experience and simultaneously hold down operating expenses. An elegant solution to these pressures is a hosted IaaS mainframe solution. It gives you a way to leverage the benefits of a modern mainframe, improving performance and security, while avoiding challenges such as accessing talent and meeting compliance requirements.
PSR offers a complete selection of mainframe services, including IaaS and DRaaS for the mainframe as well as services and consulting.
To learn more about the benefits of a hosted mainframe solution for your company, contact a PSR mainframe expert.
