Latest Articles
Mainframe Upgrades – They Happen
System upgrades are a fact of life. If you're running a mainframe system, you're doing it for a good reason—and that’s almost certainly because you need the performance, capacity, throughput and security. Not only that, you're more than likely experiencing growing...
Yes, There Is a Clear Path to Mainframe Agility
The consensus is clear and, now, strongly supported by both Forrester and Gartner. Enterprises must bring agility to mainframe development. After all, large enterprises run on mainframe code and mainframe data. So it’s imperative that they be able to nimbly twist that...
Mainframe News Out There
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: 10 Rules for Succeeding as a DBA An interesting article by Planet Mainframe friend Craig Mullins...
Database security – You need to pay better attention to it
Almost 2 years ago, it was reported that over 10,000 MongoDB databases had been deleted by ransomware groups - and much of that was done in a week's time. Let that sink in for a minute - 10,000 databases in a week - it's mind boggling. Makes you think twice about your...
The Mainframe’s Place In DevOps
Read an interesting article a while back on how to pull off a DevOps implementation successfully: 10 ways to win at devops that identified some important ideas requiring attention in any new DevOps implementation. Some are pretty obvious: get buy-in from the C-Suite,...
Why mainframe shops are procrastinating over multi-factor authentication
In my last article I outlined why, for a number of reasons, mainframe shops are growing increasingly aware of the importance of bolstering security on their ‘Big Iron’ box. Despite that, in this piece I want to discuss why some organizations are procrastinating over...
What You Don’t Know About Your Mainframe Backups Could Cost You
Based on estimates and benchmarks from Technavio and Gartner, the mainframe market—hardware and software—is worth about $44 billion a year. An estimated 90% of all credit and debit cards were still processed on the mainframe in 2017, and IBM continues to sell more...
What is container pricing?
Container Pricing, which was introduced in late-2017, is a new pricing solution that makes scaling workloads more economical. Container Pricing is a framework for hosting simplified and flexible software pricing for qualified workloads running on z13 or z14...
Moore’s the Pity: How the Mainframe can help us Adapt to a Post-Moore’s-Law Reality
Law Brakers According to Wikipedia (Moore's law), Intel co-founder Gordon Moore introduced his eponymous law in a 1965 paper that described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit. By 1975, he had already adjusted that downwards to...
Always On: Achieving continuous availability for non-data sharing workloads in a z/OS Parallel Sysplex
Introduction The z/OS Parallel Sysplex® technology provides a highly reliable, redundant, and robust environment by clustering together multiple z/OS systems with one or more coupling facilities to achieve near-continuous availability. However, simply running your...
