News Summary

• High-speed processing is no good if processing stops during business hours, and reliable processing is no good if people have to wait minutes for a transaction to process.When you process a financial transaction, it means you’re making money.
• They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies.
• A debit card transaction, for instance, involves the following data that must be processed:All this must happen in seconds, and banks have to ensure they can maintain a rapid response even during high-volume events such as shopping holidays.
• Primitive by today’s standards, these machines provided the functions of scientific calculations and data processing that would otherwise have to be done by hand or mechanical calculators.
• But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today.
• They’re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime—that’s a bit over five minutes' worth of outage per year.