Software Quarterly

Going Big Time With "Big Iron"

For years the Internet was an electronic playground for technophiles reveling in cryptic UNIX syntax ... but that's all changed.

In fact, the Internet has changed so much that some users might not recognize it. Did you know that the World-Wide Web or Internet gopher server you used earlier today just might be a mainframe running MVS/ESA?

That's right. Instead of surfing through a Web of UNIX-based Internet sites, you might have been using a large-scale System/390 server without even knowing it. Yesterday's "big iron" is now another on-ramp to the Information Superhighway, and moving into the Infobahn's fast lane is just the beginning.

New UNIX functions and integrated services, from a host of software vendors, are transforming the once-proprietary MVS operating system into a peer client/server platform for today's world of distributed, multivendor networks.

MVS/ESA-based "super servers" will soon integrate functions supporting NetWare, OS/2 LAN Server, and Network File System clients. Mainframes will be able to provide advanced solutions such as data mining, multimedia, video on demand, and more. An object-oriented execution capability -- based on industry standards -- will help deploy new applications more quickly, at reduced costs. For more than two years, IBM has worked to broaden the role of MVS/ESA in an open environment. MVS development is focused on integrating the IEEE-defined POSIX standards that help define UNIX as an open system.

Today, MVS/ESA supports the XPG4 base branding requirements of X/Open; it supports 90 percent of the X/Open Single UNIX Specification XPG4.2. This adherence to industry standards lets UNIX applications -- such as Tuxedo -- run and interoperate with other UNIX systems in a network using either TCP/IP or SNA.

But the mainframe's transformation hasn't been limited to software. Technological advances have produced faster, more efficient hardware components -- from CMOS microprocessors to I/O subsystems. It's all combining to produce dramatic cuts in the cost of mainframe computing.

In short, MVS is looking more like UNIX all the time, mainframes are looking more and more like servers, and big iron is going big time, and not just on the Internet.


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