World Congress 2023 • Oct 6, 2023

Unlocking the Power of the Mainframe: Developing modern applications on z/OS

Igor Todorovski

IBM's Igor Roski shatters mainframe myths. Discover how the z/OS Open Tools initiative brings Git, Bash, and Python to the world's most reliable enterprise architecture.

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#1 about 3 min

Dispelling common misconceptions about mainframes and z/OS

Evaluating the realities behind misconceptions about hardware costs, system agility, and user interfaces on the z/OS platform.

#2 about 3 min

Realities and daily prevalence of IBM Z systems

Exploring how mainframe systems efficiently handle billions of daily transactions across global industries without downtime.

#3 about 3 min

Security and resource isolation patterns on z/OS

Securing applications involves resource isolation, fine-grained access controls, and quantum-safe encryption functionality.

#4 about 2 min

High-performance data processing and IO capabilities

Accelerating performance requires leveraging advanced hardware caches, dedicated IO channels, and built-in data compression.

#5 about 2 min

Achieving zero downtime through hardware redundancy

Ensuring continuous availability relies on hardware redundancy and robust parallel sysplex clustering to eliminate single points of failure.

#6 about 4 min

Addressing the open source software gap on z/OS

The z/OS Open Tools initiative brings modern Linux tooling to bridge the open source software gap on mainframes.

#7 about 3 min

Managing open source ports using the zopen package manager

Installing ported open source tools is simplified via the zopen package manager for a familiar UNIX developer interface.

#8 about 5 min

Comparing z/OS and Linux x86 for application porting

Addressing application architecture requires understanding the differences in hardware capabilities and language runtimes when porting software to z/OS.

#9 about 4 min

Handling EBCDIC to ASCII conversion in C applications

Managing file tag attributes and conversion libraries resolves text encoding conflicts between ASCII applications and legacy EBCDIC data.

#10 about 3 min

Automating builds and getting involved with z/OS Open Tools

The zopen build framework orchestrates dependency management and patching for automated open source builds.

#11 about 4 min

Audience questions on learning resources and cloud migration

Additional insights cover accessing mainframe instances for learning, file system interoperability, and avoiding increased latency from cloud migrations.

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