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...
Part 4: New Online Processing and Data Storage This is Part 4 of a 5-part series about how mainframe shops can embrace the needs of new mobile workloads. Last time, we looked at a new online processing solution that would replace the existing online processing, but...
Big Lie Revealed: Commodity Servers Not Cheaper Than Mainframe For decades, CIOs have been sold the Big Lie that running workloads on commodity servers is cheaper than running them on the mainframe. Recent studies by Gartner Senior Adviser and MIT Associate Dr. Howard...
Part 3: New Online Processing This is Part 3 in this five-part series about how mainframe shops can embrace the needs of new mobile workloads. Last time, we looked at the forklift option: burning the legacy infrastructure to the ground and building it back up again...
Part 2: Forklifting in a new solution In this first part of this series, we looked at what typical legacy systems look like, and listed 4 ways that they can be modernized. In this post, we’ll take a close look at perhaps one of the most common solutions addressing the...
In today’s multi-platform, multi-OS and multi-data format corporate computing environments, there is a high demand to make the mainframe systems work with web, mobile devices and, potentially, any device that can be connected to the Internet-of-Things (IoT), in...
When people hear talk about in-memory technology, they immediately assume the discussion revolves around Big Data and analytics being run on distributed systems, and that the database part of the discussion focuses on things like SAP HANA, TIBCO, VoltDB, or even IBM...
We’re all familiar with the ups and downs of daily life working on a mainframe, but does it make you happy? Perhaps the best branch of psychology to use to see whether mainframers are happy at work is positive psychology. Positive psychology uses scientific...
Despite utterly foolish predictions to the contrary, the mainframe persists as the core computing engine for global commerce. That’s because 1) investments in mainframe code are irreplaceable and not practically re-platformable, 2) the performance economics of the...
Business transformation and agility are critical in today’s fast moving world. Clients demand insights faster, more often, and with greater accuracy based on up-to-the-second transactional data that is frequently housed in mainframe systems. The dependency on...
