Mainframe strengths: Scalability

Learn the latest in the scalability of the mainframe:

It has been said that the only constant is change. Nowhere is that statement more true than in the IT industry. In business, positive results can often trigger a growth in IT infrastructure to cope with increased demand. The degree to which the IT organization can add capacity without disruption to normal business processes or without incurring excessive overhead (nonproductive processing) is largely determined by the scalability of the particular computing platform.

By scalability, we mean the ability of the hardware, software, or a distributed system to continue to function well as it is changed in size or volume; for example, the ability to retain performance levels when adding processors, memory, and storage. A scalable system can efficiently adapt to work, with larger or smaller networks performing tasks of varying complexity.

As a company grows in employees, customers, and business partners, it usually needs to add computing resources to support business growth. One approach is to add more processors of the same size, with the resulting overhead in managing this more complex setup. Alternatively, a company can consolidate its many smaller processors into fewer, larger systems. Using a mainframe system, many companies have significantly lowered their total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes not only the cost of the machine (its hardware and software), but the cost to run it.

Mainframes exhibit scalability characteristics in both hardware and software, with the ability to run multiple copies of the operating system software as a single entity called a system complex, or sysplex.