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...
Mainframe IT professionals always get excited when IBM announces a new version of its stalwart mainframe z Systems platform. And on July 17, 2017 IBM announced its latest and greatest mainframe hardware, dubbed the IBM z14. Coming more than two years after the IBM...
Having worked ‘on The Mainframe’ for almost 20 years at a variety of clients and sites I’ve come about a number of taboos within the Mainframe ‘ecosystem’ that are sometimes just doing my head in and just need to be broken. These taboos can be seen across the playing...
My wife loves shopping – even for food; I don’t, but we need to get it done. Because we’re both busy with our jobs, we tend to do one big shop at the start of the month, to get much of what we need for the month. For the most part, that means the dry foods like pasta...
Hopefully all System z users are aware of the Monthly Licence Charge (MLC) pricing mechanisms, where a recurring charge applies each month. This charge includes product usage rights and IBM product support. If only it was that simple! We then encounter the...
The IBMz mainframe is the most powerful, scalable and secure platform on the planet. It’s also the most TCO-efficient. If you have any doubts about that, just take a look at these blogs: "Turn Out The Lights...The Party's Over! Mainframes Rout Commodity Servers!"...
The traditional 3270 mainframe development environment deserves respect. It has enabled developers to create and support some of the world’s most enduring business-critical software applications running on ‘Big Iron’ boxes around the word. Many of these core systems...
This is not an article on multidimensional databases, 3D rendering, or spatial databases, but rather how CIOs in IT think, based on their education, experience and professional motivations. A good friend of mine, Pete, recently asked me how many servers does it take...
