Mainframes and media streaming solutions : How to make mainframes great again

Abstract: Mainframes has been used for well over 50 years and are built for processing demanding workloads fast, with the latest models using IBM’s z/Architecture processors. In the time of writing, the mainframes are a central unit of the world’s largest corporations in banking, finance and health care. Performing, for example, heavy loads of transaction processing. When IBM bought RedHat and acquired the container orchestration platform OpenShift, the IBM lab in Poughkeepsie figured that a new opportunity for the mainframe might have opened. A media streaming server built with OpenShift, running on a mainframe. This is interesting because a media streaming solution built with OpenShift might perform better on a mainframe than on a traditional server. The initial question they proposed was ’Is it worth running streaming solutions on OpenShift on a Mainframe?’. First, the solution has to be built and tested on a mainframe to confirm that such a solution actually works. Later, IBM will perform a benchmark to see if the solution is viable to sell. The authors method includes finding the best suitable streaming software according to some criterias that has to be met. Nginx was the winner, being the only tested software that was open-source, scalable, runnable in a container and supported adaptive streaming. With the software selected, configuration with Nginx, Docker and OpenShift resulted in a fully functional proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the authors never got access to a mainframe, as promised, to test the solution, however, OpenShift is platform agnostic and should, theoretically, run on a mainframe. The authors built a base solution that can easily be expanded with functionality, the functionality left to be built by IBM engineers is included in the future works section, it includes for example, live streaming, and mainframe benchmarking.