Why the Mainframe Remains Relevant in 2022

Many of the world’s largest companies are still running their most critical business applications on mainframe computers. Leading enterprises in banking and finance, insurance, retail, and logistics rely on mainframes for their security, reliability, and scalability. Federal, state, and local governments, likewise, depend on these workhorse systems to deliver day in and day out. There […]

Mainframe vs. Supercomputer: Yes, There’s a Big Difference

Are mainframes the same thing as supercomputers? Not at all. Ask a person on the street to explain the difference between mainframes and supercomputers, however, and you might hear the two terms conflated. There is, of course, no official definition of a mainframe, supercomputer or most other types of computer, for that matter. Definitions are […]

Where Will Mainframes be in Ten Years?

How will the mainframe industry change over the next decade? Will mainframes even still be around? The short answers to those questions are  “a lot” and  “almost certainly.” Keep reading for the longer take. The Future of Mainframes While predicting the future is always risky business, it’s easy enough to look at current trends in […]

Just How Big is Big Data, Anyway?

You know that big data involves lots of information. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much, exactly, goes into it? In other words, how big is big data, actually? Defining big data Before delving into the question, let’s discuss the difficulty of defining what big data actually means. There is no […]

Mainframe vs. Server: What Makes Mainframes Different?

A Quick Guide to Mainframe Performance Optimization

If your company is like 70% of the Fortune 500, it continues to use mainframes for its most business-critical IT workloads. In such organizations, finding ways to get more bang for the mainframe buck, in terms of both costs and performance, is always a high priority. If that’s the case in your company, here are […]

6 Industries That Stick with Mainframes and Why They Do

What do 96 of the world’s 100 largest banks, 90% of the largest insurance companies, 92% of the largest retailers in the United States, and 71% of the Fortune 500 have in common? They all continue to depend on mainframes for their most business-critical processing. Despite a drumbeat of tech punditry that for years has […]

Exploring IBM Z Sort Accelerator Support in Syncsort MFX

For organizations running IBM Z mainframe systems, several converging trends in recent years have made it more challenging than ever to achieve the needed organizational performance at the best possible price point. The volume and velocity of data have increased dramatically as mobile devices, IoT sensors, and smart machines have proliferated. An increasingly diverse array […]

4 Ways to Use Dark Data

If you’re like most organizations, you collect a lot of dark data – which means data that you don’t put to work. But your data doesn’t have to stay dark. Keep reading for examples of ways you can put it to use to gain new insights. The sources of dark data Before discussing use cases […]

Making Mainframe Data Available on Snowflake

I don’t like to admit how long it took me to embrace the cloud. Fortunately for me, I was already a cloud believer by the time I saw Snowflake, so I was ready to appreciate what a game changer it was. I would not say I was an early adopter of the cloud. I understood […]

New White Paper! Ironstream for Splunk® Data Model for Mainframe

Precisely has released a new technical white paper, Ironstream for Splunk® Data Model for Mainframe, which is now available for download. The IBM mainframe is a mature computing environment. This business machine first appeared in the 1960’s and has evolved over the decades into a rock-solid, powerful, and feature-rich platform ready for the latest technologies […]

Stream Legacy Data for Continuous, Real-Time Intelligence

Streaming data pipelines enable companies to process large amounts of information from a wide variety of sources across the enterprise. However, these pipelines are still a recent innovation for many organizations. One of their struggles is connecting legacy data sources such as mainframes to streaming data pipelines. That doesn’t have to be the case. Read […]