Mainframe

A large powerful computer used to handle company wide information. For example an insurance company would have a mainframe to handle accounts. A bank would have a number of mainframes to handle their transactions.

The mainframe may have entire cabinets dedicated to just one part of the overall computer. For example several cabinets of storage, a cabinet for processing incoming requests another one for carrying out calculations and so on.

The thing that separates a mainframe from a standard company server is the built-in reliability of the system. - Failure is not an option, it has to work all the time. There is no single point of failure - multiple CPUs, multiple power supplies, multiple memory blocks. And at an even higher level of reliability, an entire mainframe may be duplicated somewhere else should a fire or disaster happen.

A supercomputer is even more powerful than a mainframe and a mainframe is much more powerful than a desktop or local server.

2026-07