Monday, March 3, 2008

Long Live the Mainframe!

In the wake of IBM’s recent announcement for their new generation of mainframe, the Z10 I thought it would be interesting to review some of the other mainframe headlines and related comments of early 2008.

  • January 23, 2008 (Techworld/IDG) By Chris Kanaracus Up to three-quarters of an enterprise data is managed or stored on a mainframe. Research by IBM user group SHARE has revealed that the mainframe, which conventional wisdom had said was old technology, is playing a big part in modern enterprise systems...
  • January 24, 2008 (ITbusiness.ca) COBOL coders needed again as mainframe projects increase. Mainframe installation projects are growing, but the talent needed to run them is in short supply.
  • February 4, 2008 (Computerworld) Palm Beach Community College bought an IBM zSeries mainframe for about a half-million dollars in 2005. Last month, the school agreed to sell it — for $40,000 on eBay.
  • February 26, 2008 (WSJ) Young Mainframe Programmers are the Cat’s Meow … Where do businesses find people who remember how to program the things? That’s a question IBM is grappling with, as well. Most computer-science students these days view mainframe programming as the tech equivalent of learning Latin. They’d rather learn Java, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other hot new Web programming languages. So, since 2004, IBM has been trying to get colleges and universities to include mainframe classes in their curriculums. IBM estimates that 50,000 students have sat through a mainframe class since then…
  • March 3, 2008 (CBRonline) Hitachi to support IBM zSeries mainframe Services oriented storage applications provider Hitachi Data Systems has announced that it will support the IBM z10 zSeries mainframe, which IBM launched earlier this week. Hitachi said it will certify enterprise system connection, fiber connection, and Fibre Channel connectivity for the zSeries. It will also continue to support the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM operating systems.

Interesting stuff, eh? Contrary to the long held popular opinion, the mainframe is not dead. Mainframe usage continues and it continues to be the platform of choice for many critical application systems

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