Last of the mainframers: Big Iron's Big Crisis
Despite the mainframe's central and enduring position in the enterprise – or perhaps because of it – new blood is not joining the specialist workforce.
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.
On the 50th anniversary of the Big Iron, see how well you know this iconic computing workhorse
A computer science student from the University of New South Wales has won IBM Australia’s Master the Mainframe contest.
The IT systems of Racing and Wagering Western Australia (RWWA) are off and racing in time for this year’s Melbourne Cup, the culmination of a four-year modernisation program that includes the implementation of a Cisco Unified Computing System and intelligent network.
Despite a reduction in direct mainframe customers from 100 in 2007 to 50 in 2011, IBM continues to have a firm grip on the local mainframe market according to IDC results for 2010.
HP Enterprise Services, formerly EDS, has picked up the Australian Tax Office’s (ATO) centralised computing contract.
Enterprises struggling to fill demands for Cobol skills should consider an application modernisation program which could also pave the way for migration off the mainframe to an open system.
A lot of Cobol-based applications have a plot line similar to the first Star Trek movie.
With the latest version of its Tuxedo online transaction processing (OLTP) middleware, Oracle is hoping to lure IBM mainframe users over to the world of x86-based distributed computing, namely by promising that their applications will run just as quickly and will not need to be rewritten for the new environment.
At the heart of Union Pacific Corp.'s railroad operations is an IBM mainframe-based transportation control system that's been chugging along like a hardworking locomotive for nearly 40 years. According to industry experts, it was a pioneering system when first introduced, and it made the Omaha-based transportation giant one of the first companies in the world to make extensive use of online transaction processing technologies.
IBM's mainframe division finished a disappointing 2009 with a 27% fourth quarter revenue decline, but Big Blue is hoping the next generation of its mainframe computer will boost sales in 2010.