The modern mainframe is touted as the core of trusted digital experiences and operates in some of the largest and most demanding computing environments in the world. From the days of the System/360 in the mid 1960’s through to the modern mainframe of the z14 the systems have been designed along four guiding principles of security, availability, performance and scalability.

From banking, to retail, to healthcare, The modern mainframe is a platform for mission critical apps and blockchain – where fast data access, transactional scale, and the highest level of trust are required.

The modern mainframe provides privacy for transactions and sensitive data by employing a dedicated cryptographic coprocessor, the CP Assist for Cryptographic Function (CPACF), which delivers cryptographic and hashing capabilities in support of clear-key operations. Exclusive to CPACF is the protected key support which provides the speed of processor based cryptography while helping to keep sensitive keys private from applications and the operating system.

The modern mainframe instantaneously allocates resources to handle massive swings in data, users and transactions. It is designed to host large databases in memory without splitting data sets into shards, and increases performance by avoiding latency in accessing data. Get all of this in a highly optimized, maintainable footprint.

The modern mainframe has the industry’s fastest commercially available processor at 5Ghz, on core and on chip cache, large memory and unique dedicated I/O processing. There’s no need to split or shard databases; the modern mainframe can host a 17TB MongoDB database on a single system with 2.4x better throughput.

The modern mainframe is designed to support thousands of virtual machines, has the ability to serve vast amounts of data, and provides real-time insight and scalable sub-second transactional capability. By keeping the main cores free to run multiple mixed workloads in parallel without slowing each other down the modern mainframe gains up to 50% faster Java performance and supports up to 2M Docker containers. The modern handles it all with up to 170 cores (equivalent to over 1,000 x86 cores), hundreds of dedicated I/O processors and the fastest commercial processor available.