There are many reasons why companies choose to outsource their mainframe. One of the major reasons is economies of scale—cost per unit (e.g. per MIPS or MSU) for hardware and software falls dramatically as the mainframe gets larger. Similarly, the cost of having the...
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...
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. ...
Part 3 of 4: The Bad As I’ve explained in Part 1 Basics and Part 2 Good, I did a proof of concept port of an Enterprise Application from Amazon Web Services on x86 to Linux on System z in 2017. The good news was I got to the point I needed to, the bad news was it was...
Part 2 of 4: The Good I provided a simplistic overview of what I intended to port to Linux for System z in Part 1. The original application was built for x86 systems. As such, all binaries are built to run on x86 systems. The Docker containers that these applications...
Being in the mainframe business for about 10 years now, I hear interesting anecdotes from time to time, often from the most unlikely sources. I may have taken some liberty with the title, but it’s a true story, and it relates well to what I see in the mainframe...
Today’s mainframe systems run the world’s top industries’ mission-critical workloads. This includes large financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, healthcare organizations, utilities, government, military, and a multitude of other public and private...
Information Technology (IT) is rather young in human history. If you compare this sector with industry, IT is just at the beginning of its development. To illustrate this infancy, let’s consider the evolution of IT jobs. With the multiplication of tasks and jobs left...
