Old School Mainframes Still Key to Big Data

December 17, 2015

According to ZDNet, “The Ultimate Answer to the Handling of Big Data: The Mainframe.” Believe it or not, a recent survey of 187 IT pros from Syncsort found the mainframe to be the important to their big data strategy. IBM has even created a Hadoop-capable mainframe. Reporter Ken Hess lists some of the survey’s findings:

*More than two-thirds of respondents (69 percent) ranked the use of the mainframe for performing large-scale transaction processing as very important

*More than two-thirds (67.4 percent) of respondents also pointed to integration with other standalone computing platforms such as Linux, UNIX, or Windows as a key strength of mainframe

*While the majority (79 percent) analyze real-time transactional data from the mainframe with a tool that resides directly on the mainframe, respondents are also turning to platforms such as Splunk (11.8 percent), Hadoop (8.6 percent), and Spark (1.6 percent) to supplement their real-time data analysis […]

*82.9 percent and 83.4 percent of respondents cited security and availability as key strengths of the mainframe, respectively

*In a weighted calculation, respondents ranked security and compliance as their top areas to improve over the next 12 months, followed by CPU usage and related costs and meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

*A separate weighted calculation showed that respondents felt their CIOs would rank all of the same areas in their top three to improve

Hess goes on to note that most of us probably utilize mainframes without thinking about it; whenever we pull cash out of an ATM, for example. The mainframe’s security and scalability remain unequaled, he writes, by any other platform or platform cluster yet devised. He links to a couple of resources besides the Syncsort survey that support this position: a white paper from IBM’s Big Data & Analytics Hub and a report from research firm Forrester.

Cynthia Murrell, December 17, 2015

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, Data, IBM Watson, News, Search, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.