Mainframe computers are designed to support hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously. They can support multiple programs at the same time. It means they can execute different processes simultaneously. These features of mainframe computers make them ideal for big organizations like banking and telecom sectors, which need to manage and process high volume of data.
Mainframe computers are designed to support hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously. They can support multiple programs at the same time. It means they can execute different processes simultaneously. These features of mainframe computers make them ideal for big organizations like banking and telecom sectors, which need to manage and process a high volume of data that requires integer operations such as indexing, comparisons, etc.
Characteristics of Mainframe Computers:
- It can process huge amount of data, e.g. millions of transactions in a second in the banking sector.
- It has a very long life. It can run smoothly for up to 50 years after proper installation.
- It gives excellent performance with large scale memory management.
- It has the ability to share or distribute its workload among other processors and input/output terminals.
- There are fewer chances of error or bugs during processing in mainframe computers. If any error occurs it can fix it quickly without affecting the performance.
- It has the ability to protect the stored data and other ongoing exchange of information and data.
Applications of mainframe computers:
- In health care, it enabled hospitals to maintain a record of their millions of patients in order to contact them for treatment or related to their appointment, medicine updates or disease updates.
- In the field of defence, it allows the defence departments to share a large amount of sensitive information with other branches of defence.
- In the field of education, it helps big universities to store, manage and retrieve data related to their courses, admissions, students, teachers, employees and affiliated schools and colleges.
- In the retail sector, the retail companies that have a huge customer base and branches use mainframe computers to handle and execute information related to their inventory management, customer management, and huge transactions in a short duration.