The World of IT evolves. And like things in the real world, we have big revolutions (often viewed as hype) and in between those, we have evolutions. The evolutions are necessary to keep things going and to clean up some of the mess that is left by the revolutions. With this in the back of our minds, what does this make CA Technologies recent “Next Generation Mainframe Management” announcement?

To put it simply, some components have been gradually improved, some have been enhanced to make revolutions possible while others will cause a small revolution by themselves. The mainframe, by nature, is an environment where the word “revolution” does not fit. We like things to be stable, reliable and predictable. But even the mainframe sometimes needs a revolution to make sure it’s still viable in the decades that lie ahead of us.

The revolution in this case is definitely IBM’s zEnterprise and the zBX. The latter allows us to run and manage distributed workloads that depend heavily on the mainframe almost as though they are actually housed of the mainframe. So making sure that this complex environment and new technologies like Cloud are supported is key, and you will see some revolutionary changes in our strategy and products.But we are faced with many other “challenges. Challenges like: lowering the TCO of the mainframe, knowledge transfer to the next generation of mainframers, support for new technologies etc. All these challenges require changes that could be classified as evolutionary but once you look closer, you will realize that even those changes will have revolutionary elements. 

• CA Mainframe Software Manager, a new and easier ways to install, maintain, deploy and configure software using a trusted technology like SMPE but with an interface that allows the less experienced to perform these complex tasks with ease
• The CA Mainframe Chorus platform, that drives DB2-, Storage- and Security management solutions which have been around for 20+ years, offers a huge leap in user-friendliness, productivity, flexibility and knowledge sharing
• Solutions that have been enhanced to allow them to manage Linux on System z as an integrated part of the existing zOS environment and last but not least;
• Mainframe solutions that integrate closely with their distributed counterparts to help manage and monitor complex multi-platform applications