Deciding on the future of your mainframe

In the very old days, it would have been a smoke-filled room where everyone who had an interest would be sitting down together to hammer out one of the biggest decisions for a company – what to do next with their IT. Should they continue with the mainframe as the main IT platform, and use some Windows servers for everyone to use Windows PCs for their off-mainframe work? But now there seems to be a desire for change as most of the people attending the meeting are sitting in the room nibbling on locally sourced, organic vegan snacks and drinking fair-trade coffee or herbal tea. Other people at this important meeting are using Teams or Zoom to attend the meeting – keeping their carbon footprint as low as possible.

Some time in the 1990s, and probably for the next 20 years, the meeting would have split into three groups. There were those who wanted to carry on using the mainframe in exactly the same was a before, but utilizing the new facilities and features that were available on each new mainframe model. Then there were those who argued that the mainframe was ancient technology that needed replacing with Linux or Windows systems. And the third group were the undecided. For many smaller companies, the migration from a mainframe to distributed systems was simply a painful one-off process that some sites decided to go through. For many larger companies, the risk to customers of migrating was too much and they decided to stay with the mainframe.

Today, at this notional meeting, there is a fourth large group of people who are certain that moving to the cloud is clearly the best way forward because of all the advantages that cloud offers in terms of only paying for what you use and being able to scale applications up and down as needed, plus there’s speedier backups and restores or recovery, and there’s data analytics on all that data, and many other features. The word modernize is used a lot – as if the mainframe hasn’t been enhanced in any way in its nearly-60 years of existence.

Tempers are beginning to flare up as each group feels that the others don’t understand the points they are making. Both the distributed and the cloud people are pointing out that mainframes are hard to use and the only people who really understand them should be retiring very soon. They look at each other and laugh as people mention green screens. As the snacks start to run low, it really looks as if they are winning the day and convincing the undecided people at the meeting that migrating off the mainframe is really the way to go. It’s the only way for the company to stay in business for the next 10 years. Even the distributed people can see the sense in the argument.

It's at this point that one of the mainframe systems programmers at the meeting starts to speak. His voice is quite quiet, causing everyone to stop talking, look up from their laptops or tablets, and listen to his words. “I’m not going to speak up to defend the mainframe”, he says, which brings a smile to the faces of many of the people in the room and on screens round the room. “I’m simply going to explain what the mainframe can do for our company, and then you can make an informed decision about the way forward”, he adds.

And then, in his quiet, but confident voice, he explains about the latest enhancements to the mainframe. He says how pervasive encryption on the z14 and z15 models means that data at rest or in-flight can be encrypted. He mentions how Fully Homomorphic Encryption allows users to perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it first. And he describes how no other platform currently offers that level of security. “In these days of hacking by criminal gangs and nation states, that level of security is vital to the continuity of the business”, he adds. He briefly mentions multi-factor authentication and zero tolerance architecture as additional ways that mainframes and other platforms are staying secure.

He picks up the argument that mainframes are being run by experienced staff who will soon retire by showing how non-mainframe people can now use applications that they are familiar with on the mainframe. Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VSCode), which is a very popular developer environment among non-mainframers, is available. There’s Java, and much more. Plus, there are now applications that make controlling a mainframe much easier like Zowe, which lets non-mainframers treat mainframes like any other servers. Zowe makes CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, and Urban Code available to developers, as well as tools like Ansible and SaltStack available on mainframes. There’s the IBM z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF), which provides system management functionality in a task-oriented, web browser-based UI with integrated user assistance. And there’s Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU), which provides a runtime to support the execution of automation tasks on z/OS through Java, Python, and shell commands. With ZOAU, it’s possible to run traditional MVS commands, such as IEBCOPY, IDCAMS, and IKJEFT01, as well as perform a number of data set operations in most scripting languages.

“And if the applications already run on the mainframe”, he continues, “why not let them stay there and use APIs (application programming interfaces”) to connect them to off-mainframe application APIs and create brand new applications for our customers?”

“But”, he says, bringing everyone’s attention fully back to his words, “let’s not make this an either/or battle. Let’s choose the best platform for each application”. He then goes on to describe how a SIEM running under Windows can be used to collated messages of what’s going on and alert the response team when necessary.

He talks about running IT service management platforms in the cloud – things like ServiceNow or Remedy. And he also talks about the benefits of Kafka and analytics tools such as Splunk, Elastic, and Datadog, and how they can create more benefit from the mountain of data stored in IMS and elsewhere.

Heads round the table begin to nod. The decision is made to stay with the mainframe, but not to treat it, distributed, and cloud as separate silos of computing, but to integrate them – to use each for what it is best at. And to take an overarching view of the IT needs of the company, and not to look at it as a battle of the platforms.

And the meeting ends happily with the best outcome for the company.