Latest Articles
This November, Vote Yes on the Mainframe
Working on a political campaign back in the day, I consistently found myself assigned to the phone banks. I would manually dial constituents who had voted in a specific way in the past, identify myself as a volunteer for the candidate that matched their preferences,...
Analytics and Machine Learning in the Modern Datacenter
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the latest exciting technologies and buzz in the business and tech worlds, taking over from the past buzz like GDPR, analytics, IoT and Big Data. These topics have already (arguably) become mainstream...
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
Or: We need to talk about mainframe hacking There’s an elephant in the room says Mark Wilson. It’s mainframe-sized, at serious risk of being hacked, and its name is Z. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That was US president Franklin D. Roosevelt at his...
So what Does ‘Mainframe Modernization’ Really Mean?
What is mainframe modernization? Well, a lot of vendors will tell you that it is the replacement of some, or all of your mainframe infrastructure, which is old and costly to run (or so they will tell you), with commodity servers (and their software and services), 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: Monitoring the Cryptographic Protection of Your z/OS Network Traffic Here is a really interesting...
9 ways to Master the Z
So you are now working on the mainframe platform. You wanted to keep up with the latest and greatest or you just wanted to get to know a topic or feature associated with the mainframe. Either you just started your job in a mainframe shop or you are an experienced...
Do I need real-time, continuous, mainframe security monitoring and auditing?
To be honest, mainframes are pretty secure, aren’t they? We’ve had RACF and other External Security Managers (ESMs) for years. On top of that, the new z14 gives us pervasive encryption. And there are any number of logs recording what’s going on on Z, and we can run...
A Lack Of Expertise Does Not Force You To Abandon The Mainframe
“Quick! Abandon the mainframe. …Oh, and by the way, buy a bunch of our platforms and services for millions of dollars!” —Distributed systems manufacturers Craig Mullins did quite an insightful piece a while back about the state of things in the mainframe world...
Sub-capacity Pricing and Capping 101
Soft capping, using IBM’s Defined Capacity (DC) or Group Capacity (GC) options, is an effective method to help control software costs. An even more effective method is to automate the limits of these caps based on application consumption and budgetary requirements. ...
Mainframes and the Cloud: Made for Each Other
April 2018 marked the 54th anniversary of IBM’s mainframes. It is uncertain if anyone could have ever predicted such a long and successful life for them. A quick historical sketch: IBM launched the first modern mainframe, IBM 360, on April 7, 1964. With 229,000...
