Due to poor architectural design practices, data centers all around the world have become highly inefficient and fragmented. Distributed systems architectures proliferate network access points, creating tens, hundreds, or even thousands of ports that need to be protected from security intrusions. Distributed servers are notoriously inefficient from a resource utilization perspective, often being used at less than 20 percent of capacity. Underutilized distributed servers waste power and energy due to inefficient power supplies, a proliferation of network interface cards, and an overabundance of supporting network switches, hubs, and routers. Further, distributed systems architectures are rife with program-to-program interoperability issues—such as communicating between Microsoft .NET, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and legacy programming models—and these interoperability issues also hamper the efficiency of business processes.

The State of Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) delivered an application that might sound too good to be true—but isn’t. It’s a difference-maker for the business that achieved green initiative goals, lowered Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), eased management of system assets and their retirement cycles, and was delivered seamlessly and transparently to users.

Highmark, Pennsylvania’s largest health insurer, supports eight insurance offices throughout the state. Based in Pittsburgh and in business for more than 70 years, Highmark has 19,000 employees in healthcare and subsidiary businesses.

Tired of hearing that mainframes are old technology? Looking for proof that mainframes are on the cutting edge and can do things no other systems architecture can? Take a trip with me to Florianopolis, Brazil, the home of Hoplon Infotainment, creators of the massive, multi-player game TaikoDom, which runs on the world’s first IBM gameframe.

Founded in 1964, Davis Vision serves nearly 55 million people and is one of the nation’s leading managed vision and eye care providers. Davis Vision, which has been an IBM mainframe shop since 1989, uses an IBM System z9 BC Model X01 mainframe, and has a total of 58 employees in corporate IT. 

SunTrust Banks, Inc., with nearly $200 billion total assets, is one of the nation’s largest and strongest financial holding companies. 

Headquartered in Columbus, OH, Nationwide is a Fortune 500 insurance and financial services company with more than $161 billion in assets and more than 36,000 employees, including 6,000 in IT. The company operates in a highly regulated industry, which makes the sophistication, failover and industrial-strength security and processing of the System z integral to its operations and governance. In 2005, Nationwide also discovered that migrating independent Linux server applications to Linux on System z dramatically reduced its total cost of operations for hardware, software, data center space, personnel, and power consumption. 

With $20 billion in assets and more than 7,000 employees, First National of Nebraska (www.fnni.com) is one of the top-50 financial services holding companies in the U.S. Its headquarters is Omaha, NE, where it has been operating for the past 150 years. Today, First National serves more than 6.6 million customers in all 50 states, with more than 90 banking locations in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Colorado, Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas. First National is the ninth largest merchant processor, a top-10 commercial card issuer, the eleventh largest U.S. issuer of bank credit cards, a top-20 electronic funds processor, the ninth largest U.S. agricultural lender with customers in 49 states, and one of the leading providers of project finance to the ethanol industry.