Consider the historical value proposition of mainframes and the rise of specialty engine processing over the last decade. The history of modern business computing, and the mainframe itself, is driven by the need to drive business functionality at a reasonable cost. That mantra continued to evolve and is now centered on reducing costs while growing capacity. While platforms have come and gone, the mainframe remains focused on this goal and is still the cornerstone of business computing for nearly all of the Fortune 500.
Specialty Engines Power Cost Savings
In the past decade, one change has significantly transformed the economics of mainframes—
IBM’s specialty engines: the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP), and System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP). These engines were created in response to client demand for more economical mainframe computing performance.
As always with mainframe computing, the availability of a more economical delivery model has made organizations take notice and action; customers have purchased many of them and are planning to obtain more. According to Arcati’s 2011 Mainframe Yearbook user survey (www.arcati.com/yearbook11all.pdf), 44 percent of respondents had zIIPs in place, 36 percent had an IFL, and 24 percent had zAAPs.
Only 36 percent of respondents didn’t have a specialty processor installed, but a full 28 percent of respondents had two of the three specialty processors. Nearly half (46 percent) of respondents believed that specialty processors made the platform “a little more attractive” and 34 percent thought they made the platform “much more attractive” in terms of cost-justifying new application workloads.
Let’s explore just what these processors are, why organizations have chosen to adopt them, and then delve into what people are doing with them.
Specialty Engine Purposes
As the new millennium began and Linux gained a foothold in mainframe environments, organizations were hesitant to invest too deeply in it because of the additional costs they could incur by increasing mainframe capacity. The IFL let them run Linux on System z without the typical costs associated with traditional CP capacity.
Java and XML are recent arrivals on the mainframe. To encourage customers to deploy these new workloads on this definitive business computing platform, IBM introduced the zAAP, capable of offloading such processing from traditional CPs up to the extent of available zAAP capacity.
