Latest Articles
IDUG EMEA 2015 Takeaway
IDUG EMEA took place mid November (15th to 20th) in Dublin, Ireland this year. As a resident IDUG attendee, I’ve noticed that this year there was an even higher concentration of big data talk. But the difference now includes the battle of where the big data analytics...
Happy Holidays from Planet Mainframe
It’s A Trap
As the new Star Wars movie approaches, I recall how much I enjoyed the movies when I was a young boy, and I've been watching Star Wars all over again with my sons. The classic scene in Return of the Jedi where Admiral Ackbar cautions "it's a trap!" caught my ear even...
Have retailers not learned anything from past Black Friday and Cyber Monday disasters?
In my last article, Are You Ready for Growing Mobile Workloads, I asked you to keep an eye out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday success and failure this year. I was really curious to see if retailers had learned their lesson from past years’ online retail disasters. ...
Every IT Professional Should Work in a Mainframe Environment (…at some point)
Talk to anyone who has ever worked on a mainframe and you will see that they are acutely aware of important factors that are sometimes overlooked on other platforms. Things like security, control, scalability, and reliability are second nature to mainframe computer...
Are You Ready for Growing Mobile Workloads?
More and more businesses are introducing mobile applications as part of their business activities intended to be more competitive, to increase market share, and to increase customer satisfaction. The motivation isn't hard to fathom - creating mobile applications...
5 best practices for a well-managed z/Datacenter
Over the past few years, IT departments have come under increasing pressure to plan and manage their budgets more efficiently. End users are more discerning than ever: they demand the ability to do more with less. Consequently, optimization and rationalization are now...
On Mainframe Availability and Performance
On January 14, 2015, IBM announced new mainframe hardware (z13) with a new Operating System version (z/OS V2.2). Together, the new hardware and operating system bring the IBM mainframe firmly to the forefront of supporting mobile smartphone applications and cloud...
Mainframe – the dinosaur on the cutting edge
There was a time, quite a while ago now, when there were serious IT executives announcing that the mainframe was obsolete, overpriced technology and that its days were numbered. It was a dinosaur. But these folks weren’t well informed, and perhaps had certain biases...
My mind is getting cloudy…
I'm sitting in a big Dallas hotel with hundreds of other attendees at a "Microsoft Cloud Roadshow" event. This is not a "C-Suite" event; I've been the only CIO at the table each time. No, these are programming managers, security officers, infrastructure geeks. I've...
