This is the 7th blog post by Patty Driever who I highly recommend you follow on Twitter @MainframeIOLady. To understand what was gained in the move from ESCON to FICON, let’s start with a few comparisons. ESCON had a limit … Continue reading Evolution of the z System Channel – FICON Security, Resiliency, and Performance
Clients are saying they want to move their mainframe workloads to a public cloud platform (Editor: Lets not pull any punches with that first sentence). Clients cite “the mainframe is too expensive”, or “the mainframe is not modern”, or “we are running out of mainframe skills”. Or they may simply have a new executive who is not familiar with the value of IBM z, or is otherwise just pre-disposed to move everything to the cloud. This 2 part blog is intended to help address this topic and debunk some ‘fake news’ put out by organizations who will have you believe … Continue reading Fake News, Mainframes and the myths of rehosting – Part 1
“Think about the future, Eckhardt!” the hoodlum Jack Napier snarls at a crooked cop in the 1989 movie Batman. It was good advice – big changes were about to come to Gotham City resulting from Napier’s transformation into The Joker, one of the most grotesque villains of all time portrayed brilliantly on the screen by Jack Nicholson. It is also good advice for professionals working in enterprise IT. Technology, like time, brings a constant stream of changes that we must come to terms with so our enterprises can adapt to new realities rattling the IT landscape. How do we … Continue reading Theory of Evolution, Fast Cars and the Mainframe!
Many of us in the mainframe community share the passion and belief in the mainframe as the enterprise IT server of choice. The introduction of the IBM z13 as the enterprise class server at the heart of the digital economy further cements the mainframe’s market-leading position. Elsewhere, studies from a variety of sources (including BMC, Compuware, Syncsort and Delphix) reinforce ongoing support for and usage of the mainframe environment. The fanfare greeting the z13 last year was overwhelmingly positive (an example from Motley Fool here) – and IBM’s mainframe revenue results have followed that positive direction. Hot on the heels … Continue reading How 13 fits into 16 perfectly
It’s a numbers game for the z13 and 007 The IBM Mainframe and the movie character James Bond have now shared an illustrious history. Since 1953, James Bond has morphed from Sean Connery into Daniel Craig just as effortlessly as the S/360 has transformed into the mighty z13 – and both have had many ‘models’ along the way. While 007 has always been 007 he has survived many remakes and remodels to be brought up to date. He’s serious box office, just as the z13 is delivering the goods for IBM. With the latest mainframe already going great guns and … Continue reading 007 + z13
Often enough, Docker is mentioned in one breath with portability. However, there are two dimensions of portability: first, running a container on any system of the same platform. Here, Docker really simplifies deploying applications on any system (of the same instruction set architecture). From a Linux on z Systems perspective, the second aspect of cross platform portability is more interesting: portability across platforms. Often enough, getting a container to run on z is not a big deal, but sometimes it is. Let’s decompose this: Start with the Docker interface: whether that refers to the CLI or REST API, it is … Continue reading A Look at Docker and Portability
Summer 1982 in Italy…the typical heatwave from that period, a sporting event many Italians will remember for the rest of their lives (a Soccer World Cup in Spain which ended with quite an unexpected victory for Italy) and a tune that was regularly playing on our radios and in our coffee-bars, the same bars you had to queue in to use the only public phone within kilometres… different times indeed. The tune playing was “Centro di gravita’permanente”(“Centre of Permanent Grativity”) by Franco Battiato: the song of a man looking for increased certainty to lean upon with the changing world around … Continue reading A “centre of permanent gravity” in IT
So many options are available to today’s IT organization. It is therefore something of a surprise how much we agree on; especially when it comes to core systems of record. Derek Britton (Editor – from our good friends at MicroFocus) explains some customer insights from a few recent discussions. Today’s platforms offer unprecedented power, performance and choice. Whether organizations are opting to embrace the power of Linux on z through SUSE or Redhat, build a heterogeneous array of environments based on Power and Intel that map onto the variety of internal operational needs, continue to rely upon and derive more … Continue reading All about the app?
Ok, so call me old fashioned, and take me back (quite) a few years and then the only type of platform I cared about was the size of the one on my shoes! You may remember them too , as they do pop in and out of fashion , quite regularly. In fact platform shoes have been doing so since around the 17th century , although , not really been “in vogue” until just before the 2nd world war . These days platform consideration is more than the basis of a good outfit. Just as we have to consider the … Continue reading What is platform choice ?
Red Hat Summit was a great success with over 5,000 people attending, up from 4,300 last year. In a tough economy with strict expenses policies the norm, getting 5,000 to turn up in Boston for almost a week is no mean feat! So why the buzz? Well, Open Source is going mainstream in data centres, over the last 20 years Linux has gone from an anti-movement to Windows to in most cases the platform of choice for modern business applications. At the IBM booth at the conference it was a stream of attendees from numerous household names, yes there was the … Continue reading A busy week in Linux
