Posted by Mike on Friday, October 8, 2010 - 291 views
IBM keeps trying to make the mainframe hep. In the latest humiliation, it coerced geeks too young to know better into a coding and systems-management contest with the endlessly updated but still perceptibly ancient and creaky IBM mainframe.
They’re still out there; they still do a good job. So does the Chicago El. Neither is the place you’d go if you were looking for the leading edge of change. Even if cloud computing architectural diagrams do look an awful lot like mainframe-computing models, it’s not worth the effort to mate a 30-year-old, centralized, vertically scaled computing platform with systems designed to run on sophisticated distributed networks of commodity level x86-based hardware.
READ MORE
Posted by Mike on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 252 views
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has shipped the first two generally available IBM zEnterprise 196 mainframe systems to Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers.
The zEnterprise 196, which was announced on July 22 and became generally available on September 10, 2010, has already been selected by a range of financial services companies, retailers and manufacturers around the world, including in the United States, Switzerland, Sweden, Mexico, Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Japan, Brazil and Canada.
READ MORE
Posted by Mike on Friday, September 24, 2010 - 207 views
CA Mainframe Software Manager and Extensive Portfolio of Mainframe Solutions Back IBM z/OS v1.12
ISLANDIA, N.Y., Sept. 24 /PRNewswire/ — CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) today announced “Day One” support for IBM’s next generation z/OS® V1.12 across its extensive line of mainframe management software solutions, delivering timely support for new releases of IBM® System z® hardware and operating systems.
CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA MSM), a key innovation in CA Technologies delivery on its Mainframe 2.0 strategy, can ease the upgrade process and accelerate time-to-benefit as customers move to the new z/OS operating system.
READ MORE
Posted by Mike on Monday, September 20, 2010 - 337 views
When any server maker gets its systems installed at educational institutions to run their back office operations, there are secondary and potentially huge effects that come from that school using those machines. For one thing, if the school partitions some of the machine to have it be used as a resource for students who are taking computer science or engineering courses, as was the case at my alma mater, Penn State, then a new breed of potential customers learns on your box. And that helps grease a sale down the road.
This was one of the reasons why the Penn State engineering labs were packed to the rafters with DEC VAXen minis and Sun Microsystems workstations when I was there, and the compsci department taught COBOL and Fortran on a pretty hefty IBM 3080 mainframe. This is also why Unix took off in academia and then moved into the data center, and how two three decades later, Linux did the same thing. The familiarity with Windows on the desktop 15 years ago is how Windows made its way into data centers from a slightly different angle. Familiarity does not breed contempt–all users have contempt for most systems–but it does breed comfort of a sort. The beast you know is better than the beast you don’t.
READ MORE
Posted by Mike on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 276 views
As an IBM mainframe user, what should be on your wish list for 2010? READ MORE
