Ask most individuals about mainframes and so they’re prone to suppose they’re a factor from the previous. In a approach they’re proper, in fact. The mainframe has been round for half a century or extra.
However mainframes are nonetheless very a lot alive and kicking, as a result of they will deal with huge quantities of heterogenous processing duties, reliably and with nice redundancy, and are in use at 92 of the world’s prime 100 banks, 23 of the 25 prime airways, all the world’s prime 10 insurers, and 71% of Fortune 500 corporations.
So, what about mainframe storage? What’s particular about it? What makes it totally different from different high-end enterprise storage? And who provides it?
Mainframe resurgence
Why are we speaking about mainframe storage now?
It’s true that some mainframe workloads are being ported to the cloud, particularly by breaking apart monolithic functions into microservices, typically containerised. However these mainframe functions migrated are typically those enterprises can farm out to a cloud that’s inherently much less dependable and performant than its in-house programs.
So, there’s been one thing of a mainframe resurgence.
A giant enhance in net transactions and social safety administration in the course of the Covid-19 disaster has pushed a surge in mainframe expertise demand, equivalent to in Cobol.
Elsewhere, IBM has cited its mainframe deployments’ significance to “mission-critical banking operations” throughout 1 / 4 hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
Google Cloud must overcome inertia among the many mainframe put in base
IBM and mainframe storage
Mainframe computing is one space the place one vendor dominates, and that’s IBM with its z/OS sequence working system. The newest addition to that household got here final September with the launch of the z15.
The distinctive factor about storage for mainframes is that it may join by way of FICON. That is IBM’s mainframe peripheral protocol, primarily based round Fibre Channel, and it’s extremely performant in enter/output (I/O) phrases and multi-channel in operation. FICON has been round since 2000, and it seems right here to remain to guard clients’ (and IBM’s) investments.
FICON-connected storage merchandise can be found from IBM, Dell EMC and Hitachi.
IBM
To coincide with the discharge of the z15, IBM Storage launched the DS8900F. This makes use of IBM’s newest Energy Methods Energy 9 processors.
The earlier DS8880 household included all-flash, all-disk and hybrid disk, and solid-state drive choices, however the DS8900F is all-flash. Most capacities are 5.9PB (petabytes) for the DS8950F mannequin and a pair of.9PB for the DS8910F.
When it comes to availability, the DS8900F affords seven nines in contrast with the DS8880’s six.
The identical launch additionally noticed the introduction of the z-system oriented TS7770 digital tape library, which retains information on disk however in tape format to permit for ease of switch to current tape shops if wanted, and as soon as once more demonstrating the significance of preservation of funding within the mainframe world.
Dell EMC
Dell EMC’s mainframe-oriented storage array is the Intel Xeon-powered PowerMax 8000 sequence, which boasts all-NVMe flash capability and Intel Optane storage class reminiscence. It’s the flash period successor to EMC’s Symmetrix and VMAX merchandise.
Naturally, the PowerMax 8000 comes with FICON connectivity, however has Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports too.
It claims as much as 15 million enter/output operations per second (IOPS), throughput of 350GBps and capability of as much as 4PB useable. PowerMax additionally has connectivity to Amazon Internet Companies (AWS), Azure and Google Cloud capability.
Hitachi
Hitachi’s VSP 5000 sequence is its mainframe storage providing. It is available in 4 product choices with as much as 21 million IOPS claimed and bandwidth of between 25GBps and 149GBps. VSP 5000 arrays come as hybrid disk and flash with choices for NVMe solid-state and storage class reminiscence media. Capability may be as much as 69PB.
