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their steps i e instructions together not all applications absolutely need the assured integrity that these systems provide but many do such as financial transaction processing citation needed mainframe audit edit a mainframe audit is a comprehensive inspection of computer processes security and procedures with recommendations for improvement organizations in different industries have different auditing and security requirements some factors affecting the organizations requirements are regulatory requirements and other external factors management objectives and business practices and the organizations performance compared to the industry this information can be obtained by conducting outside research interviewing employees touring the data center and observing activities consultations with technical experts and looking at company manuals and business plans another consideration is the level of mainframe access employees have and if password policies are in place and followed evidence of implementation can be obtained by requesting employee manuals evaluating the software and user histories and by physical observation of the environment 17 physical access is also an area of interest are cables adequately protected from damage and sniffing between the network and the data center this can be achieved by proper routing of the cables encryption and a good network topology physical observation of where the cables are routed and confirmation of the security procedures should be obtained tests of controls should be conducted to determine any additional weaknesses does the mainframe have access to an adequate uninterruptible power supply are physical controls such as power badges for access fire suppression devices and locks in place to protect the data center and the mainframe inside from theft manipulation or damage physical observation is necessary to ensure these requirements an operating system is usually designed with the following considerations there must be controls in place to ensure the software is continually updated is the software configured to do updates or is it done by the system technicians controls should be in place to deter unauthorized manipulation or theft of data proper separation of duties also needs to be verified the company s internal controls need to be tested to determine if they are effective samples of entries into the system should be examined to verify that the controls are effective while unauthorized and suspicious voided transactions need to be investigated 17 there must not be any processes on the system that could needlessly compromise other components procedures and measures need to be in place to minimize the risk of unauthorized access through backdoors in the system such as the program properties table ppt there should be an accurate audit trail that can be followed 18 security audits usually have the following considerations are proper separation of duties implemented and enforced and are technology and procedures in place to make sure there is a continuous and accurate audit trail controls need to be put in place to minimize the risk of unnecessary and unauthorized entry into the system and the protection of passwords computer assisted audit techniques should be used to scan the system continuous monitoring is ideal with human observations conducted to verify procedures such as to verify that protocols like separation of duties are being followed security software such as racf acf2 and top secret need to be constantly evaluated to verify that they are providing the necessary security and if additional protection such as new firewalls is needed 18 these products are the mainframe s main access control mechanism and as such special care should be applied when analyzing verify proper user types are in use and that the sharing of credentials is never accepted current market edit ibm with the ibm z series continues to be a major manufacturer in the mainframe market in 2000 hitachi co developed the zseries z900 with ibm to share expenses and the latest hitachi ap10000 models are made by ibm unisys manufactures clearpath libra mainframes based on earlier burroughs mcp products and clearpath dorado mainframes based on sperry univac os 1100 product lines hewlett packard enterprise sells its unique nonstop systems which it acquired with tandem computers and which some analysts classify as mainframes groupe bull s gcos stratus openvos fujitsu formerly siemens bs2000 and fujitsu icl vme mainframes are still available in europe and fujitsu formerly amdahl gs21 mainframes globally nec with acos and hitachi with ap10000 vos3 19 still maintain mainframe businesses in the japanese market the amount of vendor investment in mainframe development varies with market share fujitsu and hitachi both continue to use custom s 390 compatible processors as well as other cpus including power and xeon for lower end systems bull uses a mixture of itanium and xeon processors nec uses xeon processors for its low end acos 2 line but develops the custom noah 6 processor for its high end acos 4 series ibm also develops custom processors in house such as the telum unisys produces code compatible mainframe systems that range from laptops to cabinet sized mainframes that use homegrown cpus as well as xeon processors furthermore there exists a market for software applications to manage the performance of mainframe implementations in addition to ibm significant market competitors include bmc 20 and precisely 21 former competitors include compuware 22 23 and ca technologies 24 history edit see also history of computing hardware this section needs to be updated please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information july 2026 operator s console for an ibm 701 several manufacturers and their successors produced mainframe computers from the 1950s until the early 21st century with gradually decreasing numbers and a gradual transition to simulation on intel chips rather than proprietary hardware the us group of manufacturers was first known as ibm and the seven dwarfs 25 p 83 usually burroughs univac ncr control data honeywell general electric and rca although some lists varied later with the departure of general electric and rca it was referred to as ibm and the bunch ibm s dominance grew out of their 700 7000 series and later the development of the 360 series mainframes the latter architecture has continued to evolve into their current zseries mainframes which along with the then burroughs and sperry now unisys mcp based and os1100 mainframes are among the few mainframe architectures still extant that can trace their roots to this early period while ibm s zseries can still run 24 bit system 360 code the 64 bit ibm z cmos servers have nothing physically in common with the older systems notable manufacturers outside the us were siemens and telefunken in germany icl in the united kingdom olivetti in italy and fujitsu hitachi oki and nec in japan the soviet union and warsaw pact countries manufactured close copies of ibm mainframes during the cold war citation needed the besm series and strela are examples of independently designed soviet computers elwro in poland was another eastern bloc manufacturer producing the odra r 32 and r 34 mainframes shrinking demand and tough competition started a shakeout in the market in the early 1970s rca sold out to univac and ge sold its business to honeywell between 1986 and 1990 honeywell was bought out by bull univac became a division of sperry which later merged with burroughs to form unisys corporation in 1986 in 1984 estimated sales of desktop computers 11 6 billion exceeded mainframe computers 11 4 billion for the first time ibm received the vast majority of mainframe revenue 26 during the 1980s minicomputer based systems grew more sophisticated and were able to displace the lower end of the mainframes these computers sometimes called departmental computers were typified by the digital equipment corporation vax series in 1991 at t corporation briefly owned ncr during the same period companies found that servers based on microcomputer designs could be deployed at a fraction of the acquisition price and offer local users much greater control over their own systems given the it policies and practices at that time terminals used for interacting with mainframe systems were gradually replaced by personal computers consequently demand plummeted and new mainframe installations were restricted mainly to financial services and government in the early 1990s there was a rough consensus among industry analysts that the mainframe was a dying market as mainframe platforms were increasingly replaced by personal computer networks infoworld s stewart alsop predicted that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996 in 1993 he cited cheryl currid a computer industry analyst as saying that the last mainframe will stop working on december 31 1999 27 a reference to the anticipated year 2000 problem y2k that trend started to turn around in the late 1990s as corporations found new uses for their existing mainframes and as the price of data networking collapsed in most parts of the world encouraging trends toward more centralized computing the growth of e business also dramatically increased the number of back end transactions processed by mainframe software as well as the size and throughput of databases batch processing such as billing became even more important and larger with the growth of e business and mainframes are particularly adept at large scale batch computing another factor currently increasing mainframe use is the development of the linux operating system which arrived on ibm mainframe systems in 1999 linux allows users to take advantage of open source software combined with mainframe hardware ras rapid expansion and development in emerging markets particularly people s republic of china is also spurring major mainframe investments to solve exceptionally difficult computing problems e g providing unified extremely high volume online transaction processing databases for 1 billion consumers across multiple industries banking insurance credit reporting government services etc in late 2000 ibm introduced 64 bit z architecture acquired numerous software companies such as cognos and introduced those software products to the mainframe ibm s quarterly and annual reports in the 2000s usually reported increasing mainframe revenues and capacity shipments however ibm s mainframe hardware business has not been immune to the recent overall downturn in the server hardware market or to model cycle effects for example in the 4th quarter of 2009 ibm s system z hardware revenues decreased by 27 year over year but mips millions of instructions per second shipments increased 4 per year over the past two years 28 alsop had himself photographed in 2000 symbolically eating his own words death to the mainframe 29 in 2012 nasa powered down its last mainframe an ibm system z9 30 however ibm s successor to the z9 the z10 led a new york times reporter to state four years earlier that mainframe technology hardware software and services remains a large and lucrative business for i b m and mainframes are still the back office engines behind the world s financial markets and much of global commerce 31 as of 2010 update while mainframe technology represented less than 3 of ibm s revenues it continue d to play an outsized role in big blue s results 32 ibm has continued to launch new generations of mainframes the ibm z13 in 2015 33 the z14 in 2017 34 35 the z15 in 2019 36 and the z16 in 2022 the latter featuring among other things an integrated on chip ai accelerator and the new telum microprocessor 37 differences from supercomputers edit a supercomputer is a computer at the leading edge of data processing capability with respect to calculation speed supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems high performance computing which crunch numbers and data 38 while mainframes focus on transaction processing the differences are mainframes are built to be reliable for transaction processing measured by tpc metrics not used or helpful for most supercomputing applications as it is commonly understood in the business world the commercial exchange of goods services or money a typical transaction as defined by the transaction processing performance council 39 updates a database system for inventory control goods airline reservations services or banking money by adding a record a transaction may refer to a set of operations including disk read writes operating system calls or some form of data transfer from one subsystem to another which is not measured by the processing speed of the cpu transaction processing is not exclusive to mainframes but is also used by microprocessor based servers and online networks supercomputer performance is measured in floating point operations per second flops 40 or in traversed edges per second or teps 41 metrics that are not very meaningful for mainframe applications while mainframes are sometimes measured in millions of instructions per second mips although the definition depends on the instruction mix measured nb 5 examples of integer operations measured by mips include adding numbers together checking values or moving data around in memory while moving information to and from storage so called i o is most helpful for mainframes and within memory only helping indirectly floating point operations are mostly addition subtraction and multiplication of binary floating point in supercomputers measured by flops with enough digits of precision to model continuous phenomena such as weather prediction and nuclear simulations only recently standardized decimal floating point not used in supercomputers are appropriate for monetary values such as those useful for mainframe applications in terms of computational speed supercomputers are more powerful 42 mainframes and supercomputers cannot always be clearly distinguished up until the early 1990s many supercomputers were based on a mainframe architecture with supercomputing extensions an example of such a system is the hitac s 3800 which was instruction set compatible with ibm system 370 mainframes and could run the hitachi vos3 operating system a fork of ibm mvs 43 the s 3800 therefore can be seen as being both simultaneously a supercomputer and also an ibm compatible mainframe in 2007 44 an amalgamation of the different technologies and architectures for supercomputers and mainframes has led to a so called gameframe see also edit channel i o cloud computing commodity computing computer types failover gameframe history of ibm mainframe operating systems list of transistorized computers master the mainframe contest timeline of operating systems notes edit some had been introduced in the 1960s but their deployment became more common in the 1970s graphics terminals were available but tended to be restricted to niche applic...
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