Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
July 27, 2020
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: July 27, 2020. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
BMC, a global provider of IT solutions for the autonomous digital enterprise, has introduced new capabilities for the BMC AMI Security solution to automatically protect, detect, and respond to threats on the mainframe. According to BMC, securing the mainframe requires skills that are in short supply. BMC AMI Security is designed to defend mainframes and surface findings that are actionable for incident responders, making both security and operations teams more efficient.
Compuware, a BMC company and provider of software for mainframe DevOps, has added new capabilities that further automate and integrate test data and test case execution, empowering IT teams to achieve high-performance application development quality, velocity and efficiency. The new integration tightly couples the Topaz for Enterprise Data solution with the Topaz for Total Test solution enabling test data set-up to be directly embedded into automated testing. By further automating shift-left testing—testing earlier in the software development process to detect and prevent flaws when they are easier and less expensive to fix—teams can ensure test data consistency, accuracy, and security.
GT Software, a mainframe modernization software company, has introduced Open Banking SmartBridge, a new offering to provide banks and financial institutions with a way to connect their legacy IT systems to third-party apps and services as the U.S. moves closer to open banking adoption.
IBM announced its second-quarter 2020 earnings results. According to Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, the company's cloud message is resonating with customers. Describing the key trends IBM sees and also how they relate to the mainframe, Krishna said that clients want to modernize apps, move more workloads to the cloud, and automate IT tasks. "They want to infuse AI into their workflows and secure their IT infrastructure to fend off growing cybersecurity threats. As a result, we are seeing an increased opportunity for large, transformational projects." IBM's family of Cloud Paks introduced in the second half of last year allows its middleware to run in a cloud-native environment and bridge its clients from the past to the future. "This means clients can now deploy our software anywhere OpenShift runs. It is infrastructure-agnostic, across not just public and private clouds, but also our mainframes and power system platforms."
Nexsan, a StorCentric Company, is launching its Unity Third Generation 3300 and 7900 enterprise-class unified storage—a powerful platform for mixed workloads. The platform offers a new range of features, including Unbreakable Backup, which protects backups in the event of a ransomware attack, and the Data Migration and Cloud Connector Modules that enable enterprise users to move data as needed for tiered storage and optimized hybrid cloud infrastructures.
The Open Mainframe Project has announced that Zowe, an open source software framework for the mainframe that strengthens integration with modern enterprise applications, has marked a technical milestone with the first Long Term Support (LTS) release. "Mainframes are the foundation of businesses in every industry," said John Mertic, director of program management for the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. "Zowe continues to evolve rapidly due to numerous contributions from the open source community. The LTS release is our first major step into longevity and security that will offer innovative possibilities for the next generation of products and solutions."
VMware has announced new capabilities to expand access and lower the costs for organizations of all sizes to migrate and modernize VMware-based enterprise applications to VMware Cloud on AWS.
News From SHARE
For 60 years, COBOL has been the cornerstone language for application development on mainframes. It effectively engages in large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs at a number of companies, government organizations, and other firms.
Think About It
Both development and production database administration are required to support database applications. However, it is not usually necessary to have different DBA staffs to perform the different roles. Indeed, intimate knowledge of how a database application was developed can make it easier to support that application once it becomes operational in the production world. But the bottom line is this: You will need to define, plan for, and staff both development and production DBA roles in order to create useful database applications.