Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on IBM's latest mainframe system, a machine that's been in development for years and stands to increase performance by as much as 30 percent for user companies.
The features included with this newest offering focus on analytics and an application-friendly strategy that could appeal to developers in the future. Further specs listed by PC World stated that this new system would be able to host thousands of virtual servers as well as more than 2 billion transactions within a single day.
More recently, the company has announced other changes also focusing on better use of major data components. In a press release, IBM Fellow Brad McCredie referenced the work that the OpenPOWER foundation is doing to help innovate the way processors are used for networking. This organization is focused on data center change and has existed for more than two years.
"There is a need for systems that provide greater speed to insight — for data and analytics workloads to help businesses and organization make sense of the data, to outthink competitors as we usher in a new era of Cognitive Computing," McCredie said. Among the related announcements in the release, IBM also said it had ported several applications, including those concerning the Internet of Things and Big Data.
The mainframe is a reality for many modern businesses, and modernizing standard work processes represents a possible way forward in a cloud-centered world. With a mainframe terminal emulator, organizations have the flexibility to access data on different devices through some of the most common browsers, negating the need for invasive, repetitive downloads.