In an earlier post, we discussed changes in the technology landscape that should be understood when evaluating an organization’s modernization plans. Another essential reality of the current IT market must be considered as part of a company’s modernization strategy: staffing and skills. For many organizations, staffing changes are driven by the inevitable march towards the retirement of a key constituent of the legacy application technology environment over the last 50 years – Baby Boomers. Baby
Regular readers of my posts here know that zIIPs are a type of mainframe specialty processor that augments the general-purpose CPUs. Instead of running all workloads on the general-purpose CPUs, specific workloads are shuttled to the specialty processors for execution. The zIIP, or Integrated Information Processor, was initially created to process certain types of Db2 […]
Units of work that run on the mainframe, at least those running on z/OS, are dispatched using two different types of control blocks: TCBs (Task Control Blocks) and SRBs (Service Request Blocks). It can be beneficial to understand these two types of control blocks, including how they are used, the differences between the two, and […]
Cost is the primary driver for shifting COBOL compute to less expensive platforms. But once organizations decide that they are going to use shifting COBOL compute they discover there are other benefits to this modernization method. These benefits are realized in three areas: impact, risk, and momentum. Financial Impact The immediate benefit of shifting COBOL […]