Mainframes: The Strategic Foundation for Modern IT

The IBM Mainframe remains the server of choice for business-critical enterprise IT. But, as the pace of change accelerates, users expect even more from it. And, with a little help from PopUp, the mainframe can meet these modern expectations—as our new blog explains.

Continue reading

X on AWS

As customer interest grows, we’re watching the market to support emerging requirements, and are pleased to make PopUp Mainframe X Edition available via AWS, as this blog explains…

Continue reading

The Mainframe Delivery Revolution Continues

Last year, the PopUp Mainframe team was delighted to attend, present, and exhibit at the GSE UK Conference 2024 – the region’s biggest and best mainframe community event. Rubbing shoulders with industry luminaries, technical experts, household name organizations, it was a fantastic experience. And this year, with a fresh new title of GS UK 2025, the conference looks set to be one of the best ever – we look forward to attending another fantastic event!

Here’s a quick recap of why the PopUp Mainframe team value the conference so much.  

The need for speed – a mainframe market requirement

Mainframes remain the mainstay of enterprise computing. Industry reports (including our own from earlier this year) indicate continued reliance upon IBM mainframes across a variety of sectors, at some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. Often part of a hybrid IT strategy nowadays, the IBM mainframe remains a central component of the organizational infrastructure, the applications it houses business critical in nature.

As important as it is, issues blight the mainframe environment, and none more so than the problem with bottlenecks (also reported in our survey). Mainframe delivery teams often suffer from the shortage of non-production environments for development, test, research, and training, impacting their ability to deliver as fast as the business would like.

Even with the advent of DevOps style tooling on the mainframe, the resource availability restrictions make genuine acceleration of delivery very tough.

Flexible mainframe delivery to match your imagination

We spoke last year of PopUp Mainframe’s breakthrough approach to providing readily-available, virtual mainframe environments to anyone who needs access, whenever they need it. PopUp Mainframe can figuratively pop-up in minutes to provide ready access for situations that demand it – scaling up test environment availability to run some resource-intensive or multi-user testing, to enable dev teams to collaborate on complex merges, to enable system administrators to validate fixes across different versions of the same sub-system, to offer ready access to new trainees before they ‘go live’ with their own LPAR access, to support an urgent application fix to commence while the usual LPAR is down for maintenance. The list goes on.

We were grateful for being invited to speak and for the lively discussion from the audience.

Increased PopUp Capability On Show

Since last year, we’ve released an updated product, widened the scope of our deployment offering to take in the IFL and LinuxONE, and we’ve added some key new capabilities to the product line.

And we’re pleased to return to the conference (now renamed GS UK) to widen the scope of our discussions based on these recent innovations. Join us to learn more about our latest innovations on Linux, with Ansible playbooks, with our new “FastTrack” facility, using mainframe open-source technology, and more.

Our busy conference speaking agenda looks like this.

Monday 3rd November

11am – More Horses! Low Linux on Z speeds up mainframe change

2.30pm – Open-Source Mainframe DevOps demonstration

3.45pm – Automate the heck out of every LPAR (using Ansible playbooks)

Tuesday 4th November

3.30pm – Mainframe IT Skills Overview – part of the WAVEZ 101 Track

4.45pm – Platform Engineering – a real-world use case

Wednesday 5th November

Midday – Market Survey Findings RoundTable (Executive Track – Invitation Only)

The full conference agenda is here.

Team Time

This is a real community show, and the attendee list reads like a who’s who in the UK mainframe world. From the major mainframe vendors such as IBM, Broadcom and BMC, to the crucial resellers, consultancies and service providers like TES Enterprise Solutions and Vertali, to the press presence of Planet Mainframe, to the notable end user organizations present, to the fantastic volunteers at the Open Mainframe Project, there’s an insightful, informative, conversation to be had every hour of the day.

Join Us

The mainframe community has redoubled its efforts in the last few years to engage more proactively and open its doors to the curious, and the Whittlebury Park conference is a real fixture of the mainframe community calendar.

Please make time to join us at one of our sessions or come and chat to us on the Expo floor (we’ll be hanging out with our partners, TES Enterprise Solutions at their booth).

We hope to see you there. If you haven’t yet registered – go here.

Further Reading For more information on how PopUp Mainframe can help revolutionize mainframe delivery in your organization, take a look at the web site, including this list of recent press articles.

The Modern Mainframe: A Ready-Made Hybrid? 

The popularity of the Linux platform continues to rise—but does that apply equally to mainframe users? This blog examines the growing hybrid trend in a mainframe context. 

Wait – Linux on a Mainframe? 

Absolutely! Since its inception a generation ago, Linux on IBM Mainframes–such as IBM Z and LinuxONE–has gained significant traction, particularly in enterprise environments.  

By 2006, Linux on IBM Z had already been embraced by over 1,700 customers. Its promise to combine the flexibility of Linux with the reliability and scalability of IBM’s mainframe systems, met with wide acclaim, and organizations adopted it to support a variety of use-cases, including modern applications, cloud computing, databases, and containerized workloads, benefiting from features like advanced data security, high performance, and sustainability.  

For example, the LinuxONE Emperor 4, is popular among financial services organizations such as Citibank, according to sources.  

Facilitating Innovation 

More recently, IBM introduced the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), a specialized processor designed specifically to run Linux workloads on IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. The IFL provides high server density, reduced operational costs, and

 enhanced performance capabilities, such as Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) technologies.  

Additionally, IFLs can be added dynamically to systems and support various capacity-on-demand options. That flexibility means organizations use Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs) in a cloud computing context to achieve scalability, security, and efficiency. Beyond cloud computing, IFLs are also leveraged – including to house additional development and testing environments: there’s understandable merit in using a flexible, robust and secure environment to simulate critical workloads, to accelerate delivery while keeping vital z/OS cycles devoted to production. 

From an IT sustainability perspective, there are genuine green credentials associated with the platform. According to IBM, running Linux workloads on an IBM z16 single frame or rack mount – instead of on comparable x86 servers in similar conditions – can reduce energy consumption by 75% and space by 67%. Who knew blue was so green? 

Measuring Success  

In 2020, IBM reported “Linux capacity increasing 55 percent year-over-year,” cementing the strategic nature of its investment commitment.  

Industry analyst, Brent Ellis, of Forrester, more recently explained, “[IBM] has a strategy to enable more modern workloads to run on the hardware and the number of people acquiring mainframe hardware to run on Linux is increasing. Over the next few years, it is likely there will be more capability … coming to [mainframe] Linux to ensure a steady and non-disruptive transition to modern environments within the mainframe.”  

Further quantifying that trend, however, is harder than you might expect. While there is plenty of information about the mainframe market – in the form of reports and surveys – details surrounding mainframe Linux are only lightly pencilled in. How Linux supports a modern mainframe-centric strategy is not well-defined, despite the uniformly accepted wisdom of its huge potential.   

To learn more, PopUp Mainframe included a couple of questions about attitudes towards mainframe usage—and specifically Linux environments—as part of the market survey we commissioned this year with research experts Vanson Bourne. We wanted to hear how Linux matters to mainframe decision-makers.  

The survey is still ongoing, so we’re not going to share the numbers yet. But early indications are worth mentioning. Firstly—no great surprise for a mainframe market survey, perhaps—we see an overwhelming loyalty to the mainframe platform, both today and into the foreseeable future.  

What’s perhaps more illuminating, however, is that the initial findings suggest a huge appetite – an overwhelming majority of respondents (we will give you the precise number when the survey is closed) – for using Linux-based mainframe environments in their various forms. Simply put, many who hold the mainframe in high regard see the potential and value of Linux as part of that equation.  

Make the Most of your Modern Mainframe 

Of course, potential is one thing and practical solutions are quite another. Our study therefore also digs into the bottlenecks facing mainframe teams today, and where they most want to improve their capabilities to support the business. 

We look forward to being able to report the full results in the coming weeks – revealing key findings, spotlighting challenges, and offering practical steps towards an even more efficient mainframe environment.  

Update – we are pleased to announce the survey results are now live – visit this page for more details.   

Can the best get any better?

The z16 mainframe was hailed as the very best, and customers agreed. As we look ahead to its successor, it’s time to ask whether it can get even better and, if so, what it needs to achieve. 

Continue reading