Too often, when I have conversations about mainframes with non-mainframe IT people, the picture in my head of the mainframe is a pimped-out rack with flashing lights – you know, the kind of box that IBM takes round to mainframe conferences etc. It’s exciting and modern to look at. Whereas the picture of a mainframe that these other IT people have in their heads is some giant box with hundreds of peripherals filling a computer room and everyone staring at green screens. Plus, like movies from the 1970s, they picture lots of tape drives with the tapes whirring backwards and forwards like there’s some kind of parity check problem. Although we’re using the same words, we have completely different images in our heads.
We also have completely different emotions about the topic in hand. I rather like mainframes and see them as a large part of the answer to the question about the best way to stay in business with a successful modern IT strategy. They see them as being about as interesting as a box containing last-week’s pizza, and as relevant as whether sound will every catch on in movies!
Let me very quickly tell you about your brain and how it works. Most people think that your brain simply responds to stimuli, which it does, but it also acts like a prediction machine. It builds up expectations about what will happen next. So, if you predict that the next Zoom meeting you have to attend is going to be a complete yawn-fest and Bob from accounts is going to drone on about the predicted year-end figures, you will start to act as though those events have already happened. You will, in fact, be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, if you want to beat Bob from accounts at a game of tennis at lunch time, you need walk on to the court like a winner because that’s what you expect to happen, and it probably will happen.
So, the point of telling you that is because when I’m talking to non-mainframers about the mainframe, they expect me to be discussing a box built in the late 1960s running an operating system written about the same time. Their assumptions are so different to mine, their expectations are totally non-congruent with mine, that we could be talking a totally different language because of the lack of communication that is going on.
For example, I was talking to a small group of people the other day and saying that I could run mainframe software on a laptop. You would have thought that I’d just said that I had discovered Atlantis and there was a tunnel to it from the middle of Swindon. Everyone thought that it was a huge joke. And yet, that’s what IBM Z Development and Test Environment (ZD&T) does. It runs z/OS on a PC running Linux (Ubuntu). It doesn’t need mainframe hardware! The idea is that so long as you have an Intel or compatible chip on your PC or workstation, you can run z/OS, middleware, and other z/OS software, and emulate z/Architecture with virtual I/O and devices.
There are three variants. ZD&T Personal Edition lets a single user to run IBM Z on their PC. ZD&T Enterprise Edition comes with a web-based interface. And ZD&T Parallel Sysplex can be used to enable a Sysplex environment that is running within z/VM.
It seems like a useful idea to try out your mainframe software on your laptop without using any mainframe cycles. As well as testing, you could also develop applications, and you could demonstrate them to colleagues or potential customers. Or, I guess, you could train new application programmers using an environment that they can’t break – or at least the consequences of breaking are comparatively minimal.
Alternatively, you could run mainframes in the cloud with IBM’s Wazi as a Service. Again, it’s a development and testing option that doesn’t actually involve any mainframes – because, as I just mentioned, it’s cloud-based.
All this came to mind because I see that Pop-Up Mainframe, a company I know nothing about, has just announced PopUp Mainframe 2.0, which provides virtual environments running ZD&T Version 14.0.0 and IBM’s latest z/OS operating system, IBM z/OS V2.5. They are offering it as a quick, low-cost way for organizations to test business applications on z/OS 2.5, with zero risk to the physical mainframe.
PopUp environments can be spawned and retired in minutes, allowing IT teams to create an environment, perform their testing, then destroy the environment with no long-term maintenance requirements. The company is claiming that it’s a great opportunity to test the new features available in z/OS 2.5.
Like I say, I don’t have any connection to the company, but the idea of running mainframe software off the mainframe (whether that being Intel-chip devices or the cloud) seems like a great way to get those DevOps program developments under way and overcome the development backlog that has built up at some companies.
There are so many ways that the mainframe (and, yes, I know I’ve just been talking about working without a mainframe being present) can be flexibly used by organizations. It just seems so sad and limiting that non-mainframe specialists in the IT team don’t realize what a powerful and significant contribution mainframes can make to the success of a project and the company they work for.
Perhaps, when we speak to these non-mainframers, we should take a leaf our of Socrates book. He would challenge the assumptions of the people he was talking to (it’s called Socratic questioning), and he would keep doing it. If we did that, they might recognize that what they think about the mainframe – their expectations – are old-fashioned, or just plain wrong. And we can help them understand what benefits the mainframe can offer to their organization.
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