Once a month we like to pick blog articles from other sources that we feel are interesting enough to talk about on the Planet Mainframe blog. Here are this month’s picks: The Mainframe Is a Modern Platform An interesting article by Planet Mainframe friend and IBM Gold...
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is among the hottest enterprise technologies today, as it promises simple automation of a wide variety of tasks that humans have heretofore performed in front of computers. RPA is especially useful when the interactions are with older,...
The Mainframe Era In 1970 I joined a company, Databank Systems Ltd, that operated a national network of 6 computer centres, each containing a S360/40. In total this was less than 1/10,000th of the power of my current laptop, at a cost several thousand times...
What can I say? I'm an old guy and I like old stuff. The best example of this is my 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. I bought it about 10 years ago, a little bit before my 50th birthday. I've had older cars before - in my 30's I had a beautiful 1968 Camaro - that...
For many years, it seems, management and the distributed IT team have, more-or-less, ignored the mainframe. The mainframe has been quietly keeping the company in business, running all those transactions, and being reliable, powerful, scalable, and secure. All the...
IT organizations are always chasing better performance. This involves monitoring, tuning, and improving all aspects of the IT infrastructure, encompassing servers, networks, applications, desktops, and databases. But let’s focus on the database, shall we? Five factors...
We all know why mainframes are good – all that reliability, availability, and security stuff that we’ve been hearing about for many years. The question then becomes: how can we make mainframes better? IBM’s new Z15 mainframe announcement shows how security can be...
Okay, that's it - I hate IT security. And I really think that many folks in IT are actually like Mordac, the Preventer of IT, from the Dilbert comic strip. Okay, that’s not fair... Allow me to back up just a bit to explain where I'm coming from. Recently, one of my...
Learn how to import your existing TCP/IP profile into the Network Configuration Assistant Starting with z/OS V2R2, the IBM Configuration Assistant for z/OS Communications Server, also known as the Network Configuration Assistant or NCA, can be used to produce TCP/IP...
This has been a fine summer. And I’m not talking about the weather: I mean the whopping fines proposed for infringements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by Marriott Hotels and British Airways, followed by an even bigger fine in the US for Equifax –...
