The z16 mainframe was hailed as the very best, and customers agreed. As we look ahead to its successor, it’s time to ask whether it can get even better and, if so, what it needs to achieve.
Heavenly 17
Not so very long ago, the IBM model z16 was released to great fanfare in the mainframe industry. And what a staggering piece of kit it was, too—dwarfing its predecessors in terms of performance, resilience, security, and practicality. According to IBM, the z16 mainframe is outperforming previous generations of the mainframe in revenue terms.
But even a few short years is a long time in the technology industry, and we’ve since seen the inexorable rise of cybersecurity, the explosion onto the scene of artificial intelligence, and the mainstreaming of hybrid computing. What they all have in common is the continued rise of demand on mainframe resources. As the most successful server on the market continues to deliver, the demands placed upon it to do more and more continue to accelerate.
Enter stage left, on the near horizon, a brand-new mainframe—likely to be labeled z17 (unless there’s an exciting change ahead). If IBM’s recent efforts in terms of the mainframe are anything to go by, it promises to be another ground-breaking release.
But is that the whole story? What else must be in the mainframe’s corner to help businesses deliver an ever-increasing payload of business value?
Must-Have Mainframe Objectives
The mainframe is peerlessly capable as a production engine, serving the needs of big businesses worldwide. Yet mainframe organizations struggle with siloed teams, high cost of change, and inefficient processes, which hamper the rapid delivery of vital business change is worryingly high, often compounded by operational and organizational silos, creating availability bottlenecks.
Let’s look at the top 5 requirements of a mainframe shop :
- Risk—Changing mainframe systems is subject to tight controls because the businesses that use them are highly regulated. Ensuring all mainframe change is undertaken without risk is imperative, yet some of the basic requirements of compliant deliveries, including test automation and data masking, are often beyond the reach of mainframe development teams.
- Speed – mainframe processing times are famously fast, but resource challenges and dated, manual processes hamper the time to delivery of mainframe systems. The latest BMC Mainframe Survey observed “many [organizations] have identified bottlenecks further down the software delivery pipeline.”
- Flexibility—Today’s digital business must move at the pace of the always-on consumer, and the nature of the organization today requires a flexible, agile approach to application delivery. Yet many mainframe systems cannot provide instantly available resources to support rapid development and deployment.
- Cost – Inflexible environments that can only meet a particular delivery velocity have only one place to go to accelerate output—to invest further in the environment. More development seats, more testing LPAR, and additional mainframe tools all add to the cost line of the mainframe environment. At a time when CIOs are under increasing pressure to do more with less and find the optimum balance of resources across their hybrid IT landscape, more mainframe costs are subject to understandable scrutiny.
- Sustainability—IT has a huge role in helping meet sustainability targets, yet precious few organizations have considered innovative solutions to reduce emissions and resource usage. A recent market study showed that while many respondents had sustainability initiatives, only one in five organizations used technology to achieve them.
Mainframe change—often referred to as modernization—is a convenient term for a complex issue that hides a range of issues, often including those listed above. Gartner revealed that 74% of those surveyed were going to spend more on modernization in 2025 than the year before.
We’re running a market survey on the challenges and drivers for change facing mainframe leaders. We expect to have that data later this year.
In the Z corner
2025 promises to hail a new chapter in the peerless journey of the IBM mainframe. It is now surrounded by innovations that provide more significant opportunities for organizational success, tackling a range of essential modernization objectives.
PopUp Mainframe delivers mainframe change faster and cheaper than ever by providing mainframe delivery teams with an immediately available, fully functioning mainframe. We revolutionize mainframe delivery by removing the most common challenge—bottlenecks due to a lack of machine availability—and providing risk-free, flexible delivery that dramatically reduces the cost of change. Our customers are also using PopUp Mainframe to drive towards more sustainable IT.
Imagine a development environment where you can get mainframe resources at the click of a button. And now imagine how much more you could do.