I was at a regional CMG meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, giving a presentation on Big Data to a group of about forty Capacity Planners (big turnout for North Carolina a week after Hurricane Matthew hit). The group was interested in understanding the impact the...
Healthcare IT organizations face enormous challenges: Providers such as hospitals, HMOs, and PPOs must deal with spiraling costs, increasingly strict regulatory requirements, rising patient expectations, constrained reimbursements, and more. Payers such as healthcare...
Imagine what you’d think if the latest IT survey—perhaps even the Arcati Mainframe User Survey—said that the majority of mainframers are able to perform above the average. Would you think that sounded right? Or, would some small piece of a math lesson from long ago...
Admittedly, I’m as much a music fan as I’m a technophile—perhaps it’s this combination that makes it easy for me to draw comparisons from the punk music genre to that of the mainframe. After all, punk hasn’t changed—it has simply evolved. From the early days of 1970s...
I've been seeing FUD (Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt!) articles like this one for years now and while it's pretty easy to see through them, this time I decided that I just have to say something. The gist of the article, as the title suggests, is that legacy systems are old...
If you’ve earned your living in the IT field for any length of time, you know that words and phrases come and go with regularity. “Hybrid” is one of the words de jour. And, it’s a good word. My only quibble is that those of us who have built integration technology...
With $6 billion in revenue, VMware is heralded as a great success in the enterprise tech sector. However, VMware’s success is a clear indicator of the failure of distributed computing. Here’s why: Reason #1: A $6 billion band-aid The first chapter of the sad story of...
Part 5: Create New Interfaces for Existing Assets This is the final installment of a five-part series about how mainframe shops can embrace the needs of new mobile workloads. Last time, we looked at a solution that would replace the existing online processing and add...
How proven technology is the only technology for the global mobile paradigm It’s no secret—the disparaging things we hear behind closed doors and in darkened IT lunch rooms, the rumors that the mainframe is dead or, at the very least, going the way of the Dodo....
The FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) provides an in-band management interface defined by IBM that defines the channel command words (CCWs) that the FICON host can use for managing the switch. The protocol used is the IBM version of the ANSI FC-SB4 single-byte command...