In an era of rapid digital renovation, the mainframe tells a story of technological endurance and longevity.
A Tale of Continued Adaptation
These granddaddies of modern computer – or “big iron” as they’re called because of their room-sized frame and 5-ton weight – instantly became the hottest thing in town. They could perform bulk data processing like nobody’s business.
Mainframes faced an existential threat as client-server architectures and distributed computing came along. Physically daintier systems designed to perform specific tasks promised better support for business functions like database management and web hosting.
As competition heated up, many industry pundits prophesied a grim future for mainframes. Word on the street was that mainframe computers were going to be buried under the flurry of brisk, zippy computer systems that would sweep these mammoths into extinction.But new lines of mainframe computers continued to add new chapters to the story.
Modern mainframe computers are quite the workhorse for running heavy workloads and mission-critical applications. Worldwide, thousands of corporations rely on mainframes for processes like customer billing, employee payroll processing and inventory management. An estimated 30 billion transactions are processed daily on mainframes.
Mainframe computers also serve as the backbone of IT in sectors like banking and telecommunication predominantly.
Today, 90% of the mainframe market is captured by IBM zSystems. These computers look nothing like their ancestral monoliths. Approximately the size of a big refrigerator – but looking like they could be from another planet – these pack a lot of capabilities for handling heavy data analytics workload.
On-Demand PopUp Mainframe
PopUp Mainframe, a company based in London, is working to modernize mainframe and rehome it alongside modern technologies. PopUp Mainframe’s vision is to give the technology a jolt of refresh without escalating costs or adding technical chores.
At Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024, CEO and founder, Gary Thornhill noted, “There’re a few cases of real ROI coming off the mainframe in this world of big data, security threat and climate change. Mainframe is by far the most sustainable platform in the world.”
But cloud-level resiliency is not one of its strengths. Creating a dev test environment on mainframe is a still painfully slow. It’s a high-tech routine that takes several weeks to months.
“Mainframe tends to exist in silos with old ways of working using waterfall, static environments that are interwoven, and buggy. There’s often quite a lot of delays in being able to actually set up your environment to start your project,” he said.
The costs of maintenance and updates add to the total cost of ownership.
PopUp Mainframe’s flagship product – PopUp Mainframe – provides a neat workaround. PopUp offers instantaneous dev test environments for mainframe systems. Like pop-up stores, these require far less commitment.
“We can pop up a full mainframe platform in roughly 10 mins in the cloud or on-prem,” Thornhill stated.
The goal, he said, is to “revolutionize the developer experience by allowing the developer to test against a production-like environment even at the very earliest stage of testing.”
The instantaneous rollout of ephemeral mainframe environments can hugely facilitate testing, development, R&D, software evaluation and employee education in enterprises.
“If you can do these with quality and meet the demands of the business with far less people, your business is going to win through and naturally beat its competitors,” said Thornhill.
Inside PopUp Mainframe
IBM’s proprietary OS for zSystems mainframes, z/OS, form the bedrock for this solution.
PopUp Mainframe combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution with IBM ZD&T (Z Development and Test Environment) mainframe emulator. It comes preinstalled, preconfigured and can run on any x86-compatible system.
There is a bit to unpack here. As noted, under the covers of PopUp is ZD&T, a fact the company does not try to mask with marketing polish.
“This technology has been around pretty much 20 years in various guises,” Thornhill said.
One of the standing challenges is setting up ZD&T. The technical chores of assembling, deploying and optimizing the environments require a full team of people.
PopUp Mainframe gets enterprises straight to value. With a fully optimized and provisioned z/OS virtual instance that is identical to a physical mainframe, developers have a ready environment to work with that can run anywhere they like.
PopUp comes fully loaded with VM image, additional tooling and helper utilities. System utilities include automated archiving, resource monitoring, and so on.
The PopUp blends smoothly with the rest of the IT estate, and lets developers run z/OS software and code directly on it.
The PopUps are self-service, and come in different flavors catering to specific sets of business needs. Currently, their portfolio includes Vanilla PopUps, PopUp & Delphix, PopUp on Azure, and PopUp & BMC.
Delphix is a tool for masking sensitive data values in non-production environments.
“The way Delphix works is that it uses the same algorithms to mask multiple data sources altogether into one dataset,” he said. “But this can’t work on the mainframe without a PopUp Mainframe.”
PopUp Mainframe provides z/OS Masking Plugin for Delphix. This allows full data masking across all z/OS data sources. Both fixed-length mainframe files, as well as variable-length ones like VSAM and IMS database can be masked with it.
Developers can migrate production data and config to the PopUp environment and that’ll be the gold copy.
“It’s important to note that we can mask directly on the gold copy or mask data at source and then move it. There’re different use cases depending on the risk-adversity of the client,” he mentioned.
Ingested into Delphix, independent copies of the gold copy can be provisioned out via self-service.
“These run in different virtual machines, and can be at different stages of code. All of these can be managed and controlled by the management console. They can be forwarded and rewound.”
Mass data refreshes can be done by refreshing the first gold copy environment.
You can optimize your deployment by creating slim “slices” that have, by default, a lower energy and resource footprint, or by simply turning off the environments when not in use.
To get a complete guide on the delivery mechanism, check out PopUp Mainframe’s PopUp Delivery manual, a document that discusses the steps of reproducing physical mainframes in a repeatable manner with PopUp.
Be sure to check out PopUp Mainframe’s presentations from the Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024 for more on this.
