Have you been paying attention to how the mainframe’s role will evolve as your enterprise architecture strategy matures? You should be, considering that these systems continue to make up a significant part of business infrastructure. In several recent independent studies on behalf of CA Technologies, a significant majority of senior-level mainframe decision-makers (between 80 and 88 percent) responded that they believe mainframe applications remain a key business asset. 

My advice is that enterprise architects should be thinking of how to help their companies leverage these data center assets as viable candidates for private cloud-based transaction processing. Modern mainframes fit the bill because they are all about redundant internal components, high-speed and high-bandwidth I/O, flexibility to run both modern and legacy software, high security and extreme reliability. And, as Guillermo Merino notes in Saluting the Mainframe, only Google’s massive server farm comes close to rivaling the mainframe’s transaction-processing scale. 

How to allow mainframe workload processing to continue into the 21st century world of private clouds while reducing cost and complexity? The workflow-centric approach integrates well into modern SOA (service-oriented architecture)-based solutions.

The “Big” Event

An efficient way to integrate classic mainframe processing into a modern private cloud-based SOA is through event processing, where events can be used as inputs and outputs to workloads executed on the mainframe. For example, your Java EE software can trigger the batch processing of perhaps hundreds of thousands of transactions on the mainframe, where the results are delivered in real time, and perhaps stored in a database management system (DBMS) or NoSQL database. Thanks to these triggers, the entire system can remain technology agnostic, with no need to be concerned that it’s a mainframe providing the high transaction-per-second (TPS) processing rate behind the scenes. This is particularly important because it allows enterprise architects to strategize around the mainframe even as COBOL and JCL development skills are on the decline. Many CIOs are concerned about the looming mainframe skills shortage, as older workers with these talents retire and the younger generation isn’t equipping itself to replace them (see this article).

In Figure 1, you can see how triggers throughout the system become events that can be processed anywhere in the data center, including on its resident mainframes. On the left are event sources, processed on the appropriate systems (a DBMS, Java EE servers, mobile devices and so on), with the mainframe on the right as a potential producer and consumer of these messages. As daunting as all this may seem, it’s made quite simple, thanks to the level of abstraction the events supply, combined with packages such as CA Workload Automation ESP software.  

Automating processing in this way makes it possible to plug the TPS power of a mainframe into existing systems without concern for the vast differences in technologies. Additionally, things can run in reverse – that is, SNMP or other events from the mainframe can be processed by other components of the architecture. This dynamic workload processing allows enterprise architects to craft their mainframe strategies to efficiently meet the high Service Level Agreement demands that only mainframes can provide, all from the modern platforms and languages that developers are comfortable with.

Integrating existing mainframe software and capabilities with modern software environments through the dynamic workload processing, software from CA Technologies allows enterprise architects to guide developers in finding the “sweet spot” between the processing options.

For more on how enterprise architects and CIOs are getting the message about how to get even greater value from their mainframe environments, read this piece by Tam Harbert and her update here.. And let us know how you envision the mainframe’s place in your own enterprise architecture strategy.