Latest Articles
Punk’s not dead and neither is the mainframe
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...
Don’t get fooled by the Mainframe FUD
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...
Why the Mainframe is more relevant than ever in the “Hybrid” World
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...
Six ways to improve IT Efficiency and Profitability for Healthcare Insurance Companies
If you’re a healthcare insurance company, you’ve probably felt the repercussions of the Affordable Care Act. Since its inception, it has created the largest growth in the number of insured people in four decades—greatly affecting the IT burden within the insurance...
3 ways VMware has succeeded – Distributed Computing’s Failure in Masquerading as a Mainframe
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...
Four ways Mainframe shops can embrace Mobile
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...
The New Era of Mainframe and Mobility
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....
FICON CUP and Advanced Diagnostics
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...
Big data – big opportunity
You’ve heard people talking about it and finally your organization has decided that there is a business case for going down that route, but what does big data involve? What do you need to know? After all, mainframes have always been able to store large amounts of...
Four ways Mainframe shops can Embrace Mobile
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...
