Accelerating Mainframe Delivery with PopUp Mainframe

PopUp Mainframe has been busy in the recent past presenting at various live shows across the mainframe community calendar. From SHARE to TechField Day, from GSUK to IBM Z Day, and across various customer and partner events, too, we have outlined the PopUp story far and wide. And at the centre of the discussion is our profound belief that mainframe delivery can be greatly accelerated simply by harnessing the power of the mainframe itself.

Here is a summary of the value PopUp Mainframe provides, as shared by CEO Gary Thornhill at our recent mainframe community presentations.

Foundational Value

The IBM mainframe remains a foundational pillar of enterprise computing. With its unmatched reliability, performance, and ability to support AI innovation, it continues to power mission-critical workloads across industries. Our 2025 Mainframe Market Survey (conducted by Vanson Bourne) showed an overwhelming loyalty to the IBM mainframe and, interestingly, a very high interest in using speciality processors such as the IFL.

The Bottleneck Problem

However, despite its strengths, one persistent challenge remains: mainframe change is difficult, slow, and resource-intensive. Our survey paints a clear picture of several challenges organizations face when delivering change on the mainframe:

• 96% of organizations report development and testing challenges
• 88% cite concerns over environment availability
• Nearly one-third involve four or more teams in a standard delivery
• 86% want more flexibility and faster delivery
• 90% seek better risk and compliance outcomes
• 86% are focused on improving sustainability

These statistics highlight a common theme: traditional mainframe delivery processes are not keeping pace with modern business demands. Bottlenecks, delays, and rigid processes are slowing down innovation and increasing operational costs.

A New Approach: PopUp Mainframe

PopUp Mainframe offers a transformative solution. It provides a fully functional, virtual z/OS environment that runs on Linux on Z, LinuxONE, or x86/cloud infrastructure. Designed to behave exactly like a physical z/OS system, PopUp Mainframe supports all IBM, third-party, and open-source tools, enabling teams to develop, test, and train without waiting for scarce mainframe resources.

This virtual environment can be spun up or shut down in seconds, offering instant availability and significant power and emissions savings. It integrates seamlessly with DevOps pipelines and automation tools, allowing organizations to modernize their mainframe delivery without disrupting existing workflows.

And the real win is that customers, in almost every case, already have the platform (Linux on Z) ready and available to run PopUp Mainframe. The solution is right under your nose – nearly every mainframe shop has access to IFL processors already.

Architecture and Automation

The architecture behind PopUp Mainframe (PopUp, for short) is built for flexibility and scale. A “Gold Copy” of the z/OS environment, including applications and masked data, is created and stored on LinuxONE or IFL. From this master image, multiple PopUp instances can be launched to support development, testing, training, and research activities.

PopUp integrates with modern development tools such as GitHub Actions, IBM IDZ, and VS Code. It also includes built-in automation using Ansible playbooks, which are pre-installed and ready to execute against local or remote PopUp environments. Secrets management is supported via IBM Cloud Secrets Manager, ensuring secure and efficient automation.

FastTrack: The Productivity Multiplier

One of PopUp Mainframe’s most powerful new features is FastTrack: a facility that enables teams to create, reset, and export snapshots of their environments. With FastTrack, users can:

• Refresh environments with the latest production data
• Create multiple snapshots (baseline, delta, etc.)
• Restore to any snapshot in minutes
• Export instances to other virtual machines
• Maintain a continuous history of configuration changes

This capability dramatically reduces administrative overhead and enables rapid iteration, experimentation, and rollback—key ingredients for agile delivery.

FastTrack Use Cases

PopUp Mainframe supports a wide range of use cases across different mainframe technical functions:

• Application Development: Developers can initiate environments instantly, test changes, and roll back if needed.
• Subsystem Testing: DBAs can validate updates across, for example, different COBOL and Db2 versions (or whichever subsystem configuration variances are required) without consuming LPAR setup time or resources.
• Integration Testing: QA teams can scale testing across multiple teams and configurations using exported snapshots.
• Training and Onboarding: New team members can access full z/OS environments without waiting for shared resources.

Each of these scenarios benefits from the flexibility, scalability, and automation that PopUp Mainframe brings to the table.

Real-World Impact using PopUp

Organizations using PopUp Mainframe are seeing measurable improvements across strategic objectives. The table below summarizes the key benefits:

Benefit	Description
Cost Efficiency	Reduces reliance on production MIPS for non-production tasks, and maximizes use of existing infrastructure
Flexibility	Enables instant access to dev/test and training environments, anytime
Speed to Market	Increases delivery velocity by up to 400% by eliminating delays
Compliance	Supports data masking and governance to meet regulatory requirements
Sustainability	Cuts emissions and power usage by up to 50% through dynamic resource management

These benefits extend across the IT organization. Developers can snapshot before and during development to experiment safely. QA teams can reuse clean environments for repeatable testing. DBAs can validate subsystem changes across multiple configurations. System programmers can snapshot configurations to avoid rework. Everyone gains from the ability to innovate without fear of breaking shared environments.

Conclusion

Traditional mainframe delivery is often hampered by rigid processes, limited environments, and siloed teams. Some of those processes are for good reason – yet mainframe teams struggle to find a way to meet business requirements to deliver faster.

PopUp Mainframe changes that. Harnessing existing mainframe resources, we offer a virtual, instantly available, fully compatible z/OS environment, through which IT organizations can empower themselves to accelerate change, remove bottlenecks, and improve outcomes across the board.

Whether you’re modernizing your DevOps pipeline, scaling testing efforts, building out a training bootcamp, or simply trying to move faster without compromising compliance or sustainability, PopUp Mainframe helps harness existing horsepower to provide the tools and flexibility to make it happen. For more information, visit www.popup-mainframe.com