In a world of extreme and unpredictable change, agility is imperative. That’s why large enterprises have rightfully invested in all kinds of agility-enhancing capabilities—from hybrid cloud to DevOps. Unfortunately, any improvement not made at the constraint is an...
In July 2017, IBM unveiled the z14, latest in its family of z-System mainframes. Capable of running over 12 billion encrypted transactions per day, the fastest commercial mainframe in the world opens up new horizons in every field of computer processing. This...
In this series, Janet Sun explores and dispels numerous myths around the mainframe. Continued from Part 1. Mainframes are Expensive? Think that mainframes are expensive? That depends on what you’re looking at. If you are looking at acquisition hardware costs,...
17 July 2017 marked the IBM announcement of the latest IBM mainframe: the IBM z14. Congratulations to the IBM Z team on a successful launch of what looks to be yet another in a long and distinguished history of superb enterprise computing platforms. Similar to the...
Do you know that mainframe systems have several kinds of engines (i.e., processors) not just a Central Processor (CP)? Early mainframes had only one processor – the Central Processing Unit (CPU). As the mainframe industry evolved over the decades, today’s systems...
When I heard about the HuffPost article highlighting a video debunking the myths that Hollywood has been repeating about the mainframe, I was cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately, the writer chose to use only one reference book, and focused on the negative points....
IT and business management are increasingly concerned with the rising costs associated with their highly complex and ever-growing mainframe and distributed systems data centers. They are also concerned about controlling outages and mitigating the lack of transparency...
It’s no secret that the dreaded “skills gap” is affecting the mainframe market. It’s getting harder and harder to find people who know COBOL or Assembler, and organizations that rely on these systems often have open job postings because there’s no perfect match for...
Anyone who has been working on mainframes for any length of time knows that things are always changing. Many people can remember when DB2 was new (1983), the client-server period, and the need for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). And, I’m sure, can come up with a...
Performance management is a key consideration on any platform. A system may have several resources (CPU, I/O, storage, network etc.) that collectively work together to process a workload. To assess overall health of the system, mainframe system reports can be...