What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
A mainframe computer is a high-performance enterprise server designed for mission-critical applications that demand exceptional levels of security, reliability, and scalability. They excel at processing massive datasets and performing complex calculations in real-time.
While the term “mainframe” might conjure images of bulky machines from the past, modern mainframes are quite compact and energy-efficient. They remain a crucial technology for many industries like finance, healthcare, and government due to their unparalleled combination of processing power, security, and reliability.
Mainframes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer) evolved into supercomputers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer). Physical computer servers are a small shared general use networked computer that cover a small part of what mainframes do. Virtual servers are the new cloud components that everyone uses in AWS, Azure and other cloud data centers.
Mainframes are how computer networking was done in the early days of the internet. They’re now mostly obsolete, having been replaced by servers, however they’re still used in some older systems that refuse to get with the times (banks and airlines scheduling systems are the big ones that come to mind).
A mainframe is kind of a type of server, the big difference is now a datacenter will have something like 100,000 individual servers. Whereas a mainframe would be one big ass server of roughly the same computational power. This obviously introduces a single point of failure to the system. When you’ve got 100,000 of something, 1 failing isn’t a big deal and the slack can be picked up by the other 99,999. But when you’ve got 1 mainframe and 1 fails, now you’re completely dead in the water.
Mainframes are better than servers at raw computational tasks. So things like optimizing a flight schedule for 50,000 flights, or running encryption/decryption of financial transactions does work better on a mainframe vs a regular server.
Mainframes continue to decline in popularity as servers are cheaper, have better reliability, and are easier to maintain/upgrade. Additionally servers are a lot better at these intense tasks than they used to be, so the difference in raw computing power keeps getting less and less important.
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