News & Articles

By a Mainfram Nerd with Two Monitors, a Standing Desk, and a Deep Respect for Team WhiteboardsWhen the world flipped its working rhythm in 2020, most of us in IT didn’t miss a beat. We kept the systems humming, patched the holes, scaled the VPNs, and figured out how to keep the company’s backbone alive without the benefit of hallway conversations and desk drive-bys.Five years on, it’s time to get

When your system hits 1 million TPS, milliseconds aren’t enough.Every microservice, log, and transaction wants to know: "What happened, exactly when?"And if you're still timestamping in milliseconds — congrats — you just grouped 1,000 transactions under the same time.That’s a challenge for:🔁 Ordering🔍 Auditing🧩 Debugging📦 Replication🧠 ObservabilityLet’s talk timestamp granularity, how to impl

The loudspeaker finally crackled to life, and the terminal buzzed with a new energy. The delayedflight to Spain was now boarding. Gate 21. Final call.Jamie groaned as they unfolded from the low airport seat. “I forgot we were actually goingsomewhere.”Alex stretched like a cat. “Same. Mentally I’ve already aged three years in this terminal.”Dana was packing away her tablet, but slower than before.

The low murmur of the terminal had settled into something almost peaceful. The cleaning crewpassed quietly, wheels squeaking. Somewhere down the corridor, a child was giggling aboutabsolutely nothing. And in their little corner by the oversized windows, the group sat in the mellow stillness that comes after tech debates and caffeine crashes.Dana looked over at Frank. “Alright. No more architecture

The coffee stand had closed. Jamie’s laptop battery had died a noble but silent death. Alex had taken over the only working power outlet, and Sam had turned his hoodie into a pillow and was dozing lightly on the floor.Frank, meanwhile, was rummaging through his bag like a man about to cast a spell.“Behold,” he announced, dramatically producing… a printed diagram. Folded. Laminated. Possibly older

The airport lighting had shifted subtly, from harsh white to that late-afternoon honeyed hue thatmade everything look vaguely nostalgic. The screens still showed the same red DELAYEDmessage, and the terminal speakers had fallen into an awkward silence, as if even the announcement system was unsure what came next.Jamie closed their laptop with a sigh. “You know,” they said, staring into the middle

Chapter One: The Invisible EngineIt started with a ripple—first a faint chime over the airport speakers, then the dreaded flicker of red letters on the screen above Gate 23B:DELAYED – ESTIMATED DEPARTURE: UNKNOWNA groan rolled through the waiting area like a low-pressure front. It was supposed to be a smoothThursday afternoon flight to Madrid. Now it was an indefinite pause in a sea of plastic sea

"Can you IPL the system before the batch window starts? Make sure the PARMLIB updates are in, or RACF will block access again. And watch the ZEBRA logs—if they spike, we’ll have to rerun the FDRs."For someone new to mainframes, a sentence like that can feel like stepping into a conversation that’s already halfway over. It’s easy to get lost. But for those who’ve been working on these systems for y

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is on a mission to replace the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) mainframe systems—decades in the making and battle-tested—with a shiny new Java-based platform. The problem? It’s a wildly reckless move that completely ignores the technical, financial, and logistical realities of such a transition. We’ve seen this before. Big tech swoops i

The Role of Mainframe Teams in Enterprise ComputingIn the world of enterprise computing, Mainframe teams often navigate unique constraints—technical standards, compliance mandates, strict up-time requirements, transparent charge-back models, and the ever-present demand for efficiency. To an outsider, these limitations might seem trivial. But to those within the Mainframe space, they serve as a cat

I was talking to a mainframer the other day—let’s call him Dave.Dave has been in this business for longer than some of his teammates have been alive. He remembers punch cards. He remembers when someone accidentally deleted a dataset and nearly took down the entire payroll system. He remembers when the only way to debug a problem was printing out thousands of lines of logs and physically flipping t

The first GSE UK Region Security Working Group meeting of 2025 is scheduled for 27th February at BMC Winnerish (UK) or virtually via Zoom. We’re now accepting presentation proposals! Whether you’d like to share your expertise, insights, or innovative ideas, submit your title and abstract for sessions lasting 30 minutes [...]

As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to gear up for another round of Advent of Code, the coding event that’s become a December tradition for programmers worldwide. This year, we’re thrilled to announce the return of the Advent of Code for Mainframers leaderboard—a friendly competition where mainframe enthusiasts come together to tackle daily coding challenges using both classic and modern m

New Global Mainframe Study from IBM Institute for Business Value: AI Drives Mainframe Innovation  The IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV), in collaboration with Oxford Economics, has published the […]The post AI Drives Mainframe Innovation and the release of the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant Report appeared first on Planet Mainframe.

The post Eduardo J. Ciliendo Appointed New CEO of 21CS appeared first on 21CS.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.The post Protected: Eduardo J. Ciliendo Appointed New CEO of 21CS appeared first on 21CS.

This powerful update consolidates the Linux on zSeries and Distributed components into a single, unified Linux component, delivering unmatched performance monitoring and reporting capabilities.The post Introducing the Enhanced Linux Component in IZPCA appeared first on 21CS.

IntroductionISPF is my opinion seriously undervalued as a whole, but the ISPF editor specifically misses out on the spotlight it deserves. So while there are endless articles about modern IDE’s like VSCode, IDZ, Topaz etc., and don’t get me wrong, each of those tools is excellent in their own right, there are not nearly as many good articles about the ISPF editor. And even though you might spend m

Technology is more advanced than at any other point in history but it’s still not accessible to all, despite equality, diversity and inclusiveness being key issues in the workplace. Can we learn from past mistakes and improve accessibility? How can we open up what may be a closed-mind organization?Accessibility matters. Especially when you read that disabled people are disproportionately unemploye

Picture thescene: you’re sitting in the boardroom representing the mainframe team, andsitting with you are the new cloud team, and the established distributed team,and there’s also some people from finance, and even a couple of users. Themeeting starts, chaired by the CEO, who wants to get involved in such animportant decision for the organization. Maybe you’re deciding on the bestplatform for som