Mainframe – Still going Strong!!! EMC VMAX Turbo Charges Mainframe Performance for Traditional and Next-Gen Workloads

IT is driving explosive business growth and opportunity fueled by the mega trends of cloud, mobile, social and big data. However, businesses can’t neglect their foundation, the applications that continue to run some of the world’s most mission critical applications such as credit card processing, flight reservation systems, and banking systems  – their mainframe systems!

That’s why we’re announcing the Mainframe Performance Accelerator (MPA).  Immediately available, the MPA is a no-charge, non-disruptive software update to the VMAX 40K that significantly improves mainframe performance. This latest innovation improves VMAX FICON connectivity throughput by up to 60% and decreases response time by up to 30%.

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Many of EMC’s customers use IBM System z mainframes and VMAX storage for their business and mission-critical applications. These workloads require the maximum availability, security and performance that both the mainframe and VMAX excel at delivering. Some have been heralding the death knell of the mainframe for a while now—but we continually hear from customers that their mainframe workloads continue to grow in volume and number.  This is supported by industry surveys, which have shown that over 60% of large enterprises plan to increase their mainframe environments.

With the MPA, VMAX 40K arrays can better support multiple workloads across existing FICON ports —turbocharging every transaction running on the mainframe, including applications that support third-platform workloads.  It achieves this by supporting multiple software threads dispatched independently onto separate hardware threads on each core. Even if a customer only uses a single FICON port, they will see performance improvements as a result of multiple threads being active to service it. As a result, existing VMAX 40K customers capture significant investment protection, improved price for performance and better TCO by applying the MPA.

Want to learn more about how flash is improving application performance and customer satisfaction for mainframe?  Hear from one of our customers, Marriott International, about their use of an all-flash workload within VMAX for mainframe to improve their online reservations system here.

About the Author: Fidelma Russo