Even the news channels don’t make a big deal about cyberattacks these days. It’s happening all the time. It’s incredible how many people don’t recognize that there is a war going on right now between hackers and organizations with any kind of IT hardware. And when I...
Mainframers who thought the mainframe was too difficult a platform to hack are few and far between these days. However, mainframes can be hacked, and they are being hacked.In terms of security, what spells, incantations, and practices should organizations employ to...
Anyone, whether working on mainframes or not, can reflect on where in their career they are and what kind of help—i.e., training, mentoring, or coaching—will move them forward their career (and their work-life balance) successfully. But first, consider the differences...
When Beliefs Shape Machines Imagine two people talking in a bar—one believes in God, and the other doesn’t. One swears by Apple, the other by Android. One supports Trump, the other can’t stand him. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on; the point is that people...
In 2016, the least expensive city in the U.S. for annual data center operating costs is Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at $9,684,282 in annual operating costs[1]. In Canada, where the lowest risk associated with data centers is second only to the U.S., the costs of energy...
The Mainframe Witch-Hunt The Salem witch trials were an ugly moment in US history. A combination of groupthink, bad religion and confirmation bias led an entire community to act irrationally. And the results were not pretty. Twenty people—most of them women—were...
For years, pundits have predicted that a generational shift in IT would spell doom for the mainframe. But just the opposite is true. The current generational shift in IT is driving a major mainframe renaissance—along with, ironically, abandonment of x86 datacenter...
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...
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...
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...
