mainframe - News, Features, and Slideshows

Despite the mainframe's central and enduring position in the enterprise – or perhaps because of it – new blood is not joining the specialist workforce.

Compuware’s CEO Chris O’Malley is adamant that demand for mainframe technology is not going away.

What did IBM do to celebrate the mainframe’s 51st birthday? Reinvented the Big Iron basically.

The Department of Human Services (DHS), which runs Centrelink, has confirmed there was an outage on Monday that affected Centrelink and Child Support online services.

In its 50-year history the IBM mainframe has been hailed and vilified. It has been born, reborn (many times) and pronounced dead. And yet the Big Iron remains a key computing resource for many large companies and will do so for many years. Here we take a look at the mainframe’s long history, from its use with the US space program to its prominence inside large business datacentres. Take a look.

Union Pacific, the railroad company that transports chemicals, coal, food, minerals and automobiles in and around 23 Western U.S. states, has had two workhorses that toiled tirelessly for the past four decades: the diesel locomotive and the IBM mainframe.

1. Mainframe shops have to make decisions: whether to migrate to other platforms, add service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces or rewrite applications. With a half-baked strategy, IT winds up "bolting on all sorts of unusual, often architecturally inelegant" work-arounds, argues John B. Rabon, manager of legacy modernization at Aflac. "We saw this happening. You hit this wall of unintended consequences." Aflac is now 60 percent finished with a major conversion initiative.