A computer science student from the University of New South Wales has won IBM Australia’s Master the Mainframe contest.
Now in its fourth year, the contest had some 400 entrants from the undergraduate university sector, with each navigating a series of technical, problem solving and collaboration challenges similar to those in real-life enterprise computing situations.
The winner of the contest, Vernon Tang, said he entered in order to gain greater hands-on experience in the data centre space.
“Knowing that mainframes have continued to run many aspects of today's world relatively unchanged for decades, they embodied a sense of mystique to me,” Tang said.
“I wanted to find out more, preferably in a hands-on fashion, and the contest was a perfect opportunity.”
Tang said the competition opened his eyes to a number of new technologies.
“Participating in the contest was a valuable eye-opener into the vastly different methods of mainframe computing, compared to other IT systems,” he said.
Being provided with remote access to an IBM mainframe server, the contest is part of IBM’s academic initiative for System z program; a global project which aligns colleges, universities and businesses with Fortune 500 companies.
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