It would be easy to look at the current environment, with its ever-increasing reliance on the cloud and cloud-based systems, and say that data center infrastructure is a waste of money and IT professionals’ time. After all, why stock the hardware necessary to run your own operations when you can just rent time on someone else’s hardware, and let them handle the heavy lifting that comes with maintenance and upgrades? Even in this environment, the role of the mainframe is still alive and well, though it’s taken on something of a different structure these days.
How Does Data Center Infrastructure Still Matter in a Cloud-based World?
The rise of cloud has not destroyed the need for the mainframe, but rather changed the mainframe’s role in the overall environment.
Keeping up with competitors. Mainframe platforms are used by the top 10 insurance firms, 88% of the world’s largest banks, 90% of the world’s largest airlines and 18 of the top 25 retailers worldwide. Looking to compete with these firms will all but require some form of mainframe operation.
The stable backbone. Mainframe systems have important operations that many cloud systems aren’t quite so up to tackling. Transaction and order processing, inventory management, and database storage are common uses for local, high-end hardware of the kind commonly associated with data center infrastructure.
Support for the new. While there is an ever-growing number of applications hitting the field, the mainframe and similar data center infrastructure often serves a supportive role, both helping and being helped by new applications. AppDynamics, for example, offers “flow maps” that provide added visibility into app performance running on the mainframe, which helps spot problems in advance and keeps the larger system running more smoothly.
The great storehouse. Since mainframe systems handle so much of the processing mentioned earlier, they’re also repositories of information, a central point the latest applications can fall back to for the necessary facts to run the app’s functions. How far would a customer relationship management (CRM) tool get without customer data? That’s where the mainframe helps by centralizing valuable data.
How Do I Keep My Data Center Infrastructure Up to Snuff?
You’ve seen how important data center infrastructure can be, so it’s important to know how to maintain it, replace systems that reach end-of-life, or supplement current systems. Solve all those problems and more with help from us at EmconIT. We’ve got hardware maintenance options, complete relocations, and cloud/co-location operations that help you get the most out of the infrastructure already in place. Contact us today and we’ll help you make your data center the best it can be.