Posted by Mike on Sunday, October 16, 2011 - 256 views
High obsolescence is a hallmark of information technology. By industry standards, 18 months, at best, is the longevity of a product or technology. But the IT space’s longest survivor, one that is there from the beginning, is the most unlikeliest of them all, the mainframe.
Its epitaph was written long ago. Universities rusticated mainframe from their curriculum decades back, thinking that skinny personal computers will drive out the bulky box that needs almost a whole room and all the paraphernalia, not to speak of a dedicated team of eternally confounded operators, to run it. But now, the storied PCs are on their way out, but the ‘big iron’ is firmly stay put, though a lot slimmer and trimmer.
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Posted by Mike on Sunday, October 2, 2011 - 350 views
New workloads account for almost one-third of MIPS growth, and mainframers are as optimistic as ever about the future of Big Iron.
The mainframe has never been more essential. That’s the not-so-surprising upshot of BMC Software Corp.’s sixth annual Worldwide Mainframe Survey, which — like previous years — suggests Big Iron is doing just fine, thank you.
Big mainframe shops are big MIPS consumers. MIPS capacity continues to expand: more than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) said their transaction volumes for existing applications are growing; almost as many (65 percent) cited business growth as an important engine for MIPS expansion. Almost one-third (31 percent) said new workloads are driving MIPS growth.
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Posted by Mike on Sunday, November 7, 2010 - 770 views
As long as there are mainframes, there will be Cobol. Learn the language and the culture and you might land a job that that lasts until retirement
A career as a Cobol programmer might not be as sexy as slinging Java code or scripting in Ruby, but if you buckle down and learn hoary old Cobol, you could land one of the safest, most secure jobs in IT.
Analyst reports indicate that Cobol salaries are on the upswing. The language is easy to learn, there’s a healthy demand for the skills, and offshore Cobol programmers are in short supply — plus, the language itself holds the promise of longevity. All that loose talk about mainframes going away has subsided, and companies committed to big iron need Cobol pros to give them love.
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Posted by Mike on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - 295 views
Most firms expect to increase Big Iron usage, according to a survey by BMC. So why is the platform still attracting new workloads?
Demand for the trusty old mainframe has survived the recession and is still a vital part of many companies’ IT infrastructure, according to BMC Software’s 2010 Mainframe User survey.
The survey, now in its fifth year, quizzed 1,765 IT professionals, managers and executives from businesses all over the world. The majority of respondents (84%) said they expect to see growing or steady MIPS (millions of instructions per second) usage on the mainframe while 60% believe the mainframe will grow and attract new workloads over the next year.
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Posted by Mike on - 305 views
Big iron isn’t going away anytime soon, say mainframe users polled by BMC. In fact, 84% of mainframe shops expect to see growing or steady MIPS usage on the platform. READ MORE
Posted by Mike on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 344 views
Flashback to the 1980s, when IBM is still shipping source code for big-iron internals, says this mainframe pilot fish.
“IBM discontinued supporting BTAM under CICS, but we had a major customer who communicated via CICS BTAM,” fish says.
Translation: The big customer uses the CICS transaction-processing system, and connects to it over telecommunication lines using the very old BTAM protocol — and IBM has just stopped supporting that approach. READ MORE
Editor’s note: Sharky is one of my favorite ComputerWorld features!
