Latest Articles
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...
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...
