LzLabs is making available what it calls the first-ever “software-defined mainframe.” The release, Gotthard, signifies the first time ever that mainframe customers will be able to transfer their applications to modern systems with no code rewrite, recompilation, or data reformatting, the vendor stated.
“More than 5,000 of the world’s largest companies are reliant on mainframes for online and batch COBOL applications. These companies face a perfect storm of high costs, a shrinking pool of expertise to run the systems and restrictions on integration and innovation,” said Mark Creswell, CEO of LzLabs. “Mainframe users have waited 30 years for a way to easily transition legacy applications to modern systems. To make such a transition, a managed container is required that faithfully recreates the behavior of the originating legacy hardware mainframe. With this first release of LzLabs’ Software Defined Mainframe, we are providing that environment. "
Gotthard is designed to provide a managed container that recreates the behavior of online, batch, database, file and security subsystems found on legacy hardware mainframes. Also included in this first release are migration tools, facilities for storage management and system utilities. Taken together these components provide the fundamentals that support the reliability, availability and serviceability requirements of legacy applications.
The solution includes LzOnline, which is designed to help enable users to run COBOL transaction programs unchanged in the software-defined mainframe container, and LzBatch, which is intended to facilitate local or remote batch job submission of compatible job control syntax with output and spool management. LzRelational, a relational database management system, is compatible with equivalent systems found on a legacy hardware mainframe.
In addition, the company stated, the solution incorporates data set support for VSAM and others, which is designed to allow support for most track based data formats, with customers’ datasets residing unchanged in the SDM storage facility.
For more information, go to www.lzlabs.com.