When people use the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” 100-year-old bridges, Jon Snow’s sword and American muscle cars often come to mind. If the topic of discussion happens to be computer technology, however, mainframes are without a doubt the Valyrian steel of the enterprise and lucky for us, are still in production […]
Mainframes: The Cloud Before the Cloud
Here’s something to think about: Despite the fact that IBM stopped manufacturing personal computers in 2005, deciding instead to focus on higher margin business services, the company continues to produce mainframes and by all estimates will continue manufacturing them well into the future. The question is, why? The answer: because there is still significant demand […]
How Mainframes Live On
TL/DR: Highly controlled change is sometimes the best answer. For much of my career, I’ve worked in mainframe shops. I have never worked on a mainframe team, but I have worked closely with them. I’m in Northeast Wisconsin, and at one point we had the highest per-capita number of mainframes in the world, so pretty […]
IBM Adds Automated Testing Tool for Mainframe to DevOps Portfolio
IBM has added an automated testing tool to the portfolio of DevOps tools it has developed for mainframes. Sanjay Chandru, director of Z DevOps for IBM, said IBM Z Open Unit Test adds a continuous testing capability to the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform based on an instance of an open source Git repository developed […]
DevOps Chat: Mainframe Attitudes with LzLabs’ Dale Vecchio
Dale Vecchio has spent many years in the mainframe business, including 18 or so years with Gartner covering the mainframe beat. Today, he works as chief marketing officer at LzLabs, which recently conducted a survey with Microsoft on mainframe use: info.lzlabs.com/lzlabs-microsoft-…ation-survey-2018 The results may or may not surprise you depending on your views on mainframes. […]
Mainframes and DevOps: The Odd Couple of Digital Transformation
I am still surprised when I go to industry conferences and I hear people talking about the imminent demise of the mainframe. More common and equally wrong is how mainframes don’t work in today’s agile/DevOps/cloud/container world. The fact is, with trillions of dollars invested in our mainframes and more every day, the mainframe is not […]
Open Mainframe Project Launches Zowe to Advance DevOps
The Open Mainframe Project has launched Zowe, an effort to make mainframes running z/OS both more accessible and programmable using REST application programming interfaces (APIs). Announced at the Open Source Summit, the Zowe project is being led by IBM, CA Technologies and Rocket Software. Matt Hogstrom, chief architect for z/OS Systems at IBM, said the […]
Implementing DevSecOps in the Mainframe-Driven Enterprise
DevSecOps is emerging as an important trend in corporate IT. It makes sense. With each passing day more applications serve a larger user base. Whereas in the past the typical business application was accessible only from within the confines of an enterprise’s internal network, today, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) paradigm enables millions of users work with […]
Compuware Extends DevOps Push for Mainframes
Compuware has advanced its campaign to erase the DevOps divide between mainframes and distributed systems via an update to Topaz for Enterprise Data that makes it easier to generate data from mainframe applications for testing purposes without compromising the security of some of the most sensitive data in the enterprise. Company CEO Chris O’Malley said […]
A Unified Route to Bring Mainframes to DevOps Speed
Most businesses have mainframes where their key applications and data reside. In today’s digital environment, customer-facing mobile and web systems retrieve critical data from back-end mainframe systems. It is critical to adapt mainframe applications and data to today’s rapidly changing market demands if businesses want to remain competitive. This is the question IT and businesses […]