Keeping Mainframes In Step With The Modern Age
When you hear "legacy computing," the image of reel-to-reel tapes slowly feeding data into a mainframe computer that fills an entire warehouse may pop into your mind. Current mainframes can trace their heritage to the IBM System/360 released in the 1960s. It may seem like the technological equivalent of millennia ago, but COBOL, Assembler (HLASM), and other programs written in the '60s, '70s, and '80s continue to run faithfully and process data.
What data? Data and transactions that you do regularly: using your debit or credit card, checking your bank account online, reviewing your medical insurance claims, etc. These transactions likely run on programs and subroutines written sometime between the Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush administrations.
The heritage of System/360 lives on in the latest versions of the IBM Z mainframe platform (Note: the "Z" in IBM Z or System z stands for "Zero Downtime" as IBM Z machines can failover to spare hardware and can run for many years without being turned off). Don't be mistaken to think these programs and systems were installed and just left to run until the end of time. IBM Z has seen several enhancements that let it live up to its best-in-class enterprise computing reputation. For example, a program written in COBOL in 1973 can be compiled and run on a modern IBM Z system in 2023.
IBM has kept its enterprise-class computer in step with an ever-evolving computer environment. The rise of Unix and Linux in the late 20th century allowed IBM to introduce Unix natively on the mainframe in the 1990s. The growth of the World Wide Web in the '90s and 2000s saw Web-enabled applications come to the System z platform. The development of cybercrime, data breaches, and cybersecurity concerns led IBM to introduce pervasive encryption within the z/Architecture. We are now in the cloud era, and this new era of computing brings about new challenges and opportunities, including the proliferation of open-source technologies.
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What if a mainframe customer no longer wants to have the capital expenditure for upgrading their mainframe every few years but is concerned about the cost and performance of migrating to a non-mainframe system? Those mainframe workloads can run in the cloud using zCloud. That changes the capital expense to an operating expense giving businesses more predictability in their budgets.
What about the mainframe customer who wants to build cloud-native applications but still needs to access the systems of record hosted on the mainframe? Further, what about those cloud application devs who have little knowledge about the mainframe, let alone understanding older "green screen" interfaces like TSO and ISPF? That's where IBM's suite of open-source tools, Zowe, will help. Zowe, open-source tools, and the underlying APIs will better equip cloud devs to source data securely from those systems of record on the mainframe.
A lot is happening on the mainframe, and it's an exciting time to see the convergence of mainframe, cloud, and open-source technologies. COBOL and older programs will continue to run, but with the ongoing modernization efforts, they may still be considered "legacy" but far from obsolete.