Introduction to the Mainframe for Enterprise IT Operations

In April 1964, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe computer, and during the 1960s and 1970s, the term mainframe computer was almost synonymous with IBM products due to the company’s market share. These first mainframes were enormous water-cooled systems with only megabytes of real storage housed in raised floor environments, to support cabling and cooling requirements, and requiring a huge physical footprint.

Today’s mainframes in IBM’s line have evolved from the basic design of the IBM System/360, into very small, exponentially faster systems, supporting terabytes of real storage and a variety of operating systems and applications.

While the mainframe has been evolving over the last half century, it has continued to be the platform used for some of the most mission-critical workloads for modern organizations. While the mainframe was evolving, so were the other systems in the platforms in the environment. Computing systems like UNIX, Windows and various virtualization offerings have also come to be commonplace for running mission-critical workloads. In many cases, these workloads are actually spread across multiple computing platforms. In order to get a true picture of the health, performance and capacity of a company’s IT infrastructure, it can be imperative to get a single view of the IT environment to integrate the mainframe information into the tools you are using to manage and monitor the rest of the IT environment. Unfortunately, the mainframe has too often been managed as a silo with specialized mainframe-only tools used by mainframe-only experts.