a cura di Peter M. Horbach

The Mainframe and the Cloud

For a large number of companies, the mainframe represents the heart of IT - almost half of all business-critical applications run on a mainframe.

We have been developing software solutions for several decades that allow mainframe users to communicate with other systems transparently and without special mainframe knowledge.

One of these solutions is tcACCESS.

This solution allows a transparent integration of the mainframe into all open worlds, access to mainframe file systems using SQL syntax from Linux, Unix and Windows environments (including Linux on z), linking of traditional mainframe data sources with relational databases and creation of relational views, as well as access to open world databases from mainframe batch and online applications.

tcVISION enables parallel, bidirectional synchronization between productive mainframe and other worlds. For more than a decade tcVISION has been one of the world's leading solutions for data replication and synchronization, exchange and transformation. In the first years the classical application was a synchronization between mainframe resources and Open System data beacons (IMS or VSAM to Oracle, SQL-Server, etc).

Over the course of time, BigData platforms and cloud systems were added as targets for the tcVISION solution.

Cloud solutions have now become "acceptable" for the mainframe world. After initial reticence and many discussions about public, private, hybrid clouds and understandable security concerns, a trend reversal seems to be taking place. The growing trend towards BigData solutions and large providers of cloud solutions (Amazon, Google, T-Online, etc.) means that transformations to the cloud are becoming more and more common.

The much-discussed benefits of the cloud include:

  • Unlimited storage capacity
  • Cloud access from everywhere
  • Enhanced collaboration through workflow and file sharing applications
  • Significant cost reduction for hardware installation and maintenance

Flexibility and business reasons are also present. Cloud infrastructure can be useful and lucrative when computing capacities fluctuate, as performance can be adjusted as required.

Another current - and until months ago unimaginable - reason leads to considerations to transfer data to the cloud. The worldwide pandemic of the COVID-19 virus has prompted many companies to have employees work from their home office and to transfer certain applications - especially when large volumes of data need to be processed - to the cloud.

Our tcVISION solution is perfectly suited to connect the traditional mainframe (no matter whether the operating system is z/OS or z/VSE) to the cloud.

Practical application experiences with customers and B.O.S. are available, and the acceptance and demand is high. tcVISION offers support for the Microsoft Azure Cloud, for Amazon's Web Services (AWS), and for the GOOGLE Cloud.

An overview of all supported input and output targets can be found here.

Peter M. Horbach has been active in the area of data synchronization and replication with more than 40 years of IT experience. He manages the international partner business for BOS Software and writes for our blog.

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