LzLabs

LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe

Ben Twomey

LzLabs Announces ARM® Support in a Growing Commitment to Evolving Cloud Deployment Architectures

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LzLabs announces LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® (LzSDM®) version 3

Zurich, 2 February 2021 – LzLabs today announced, with its latest version release, that mainframe IT users can migrate their legacy applications to a variety of cloud infrastructures with LzSDM on Linux. Migration to LzSDM does not require any program recompilation or data changes.

LzSDM version 3 not only operates on multiple processor architectures, including Intel x86 and ARM systems, but also represents the building block for future cloud deployments. LzSDM with Linux enables original legacy mainframe application programs to operate in native hardware mode, regardless of the underlying hardware system implemented in the cloud or on premise.

The wide range of platform choices enhances LzLabs’s commitment to high performance computing for applications, including legacy databases and transaction processing systems.

LzLabs CEO, Thilo Rockmann, said: “LzSDM is the only enterprise software product which enables legacy mainframe applications to run on multiple hardware platforms without recompilation or data changes. With this release of LzSDM we are increasing our commitment to cloud deployment choices.

“Whether companies use x86 on premise or in the cloud, we expect ARM to have a growing impact on the enterprise market. LzLabs has run LzSDM internally on a variety of platforms, including x86, ARM and Power, for the past few years in anticipation of this market evolution.”

LzLabs Executive Chairman, Mark Cresswell, added “LzSDM was designed to run on Linux and other common hardware platforms enterprise users require. ARM has attracted significant awareness in the enterprise sector because of its high computing power and low power consumption.

“Enterprise customers do not want to be locked into any hardware architecture again. LzSDM could only have been developed in an open software era, which leverages significant software development specifically designed to overcome vendor lock-in.”

IT Administrator: Mainframe goes Software

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Etliche Unternehmen nutzen Mainframes für unternehmenskritische Geschäftsprozesse. Die Entwicklung und Modernisierung der dazugehörigen Applikationen verschlangen Unsummen. Fachkräftemangel, Vendor-Lock-in und die enormen Betriebskosten sind zusätzliche Herausforderungen. Mittels eines Software-defined Mainframes (SDM) können sich Organisationen schrittweise von ihrer Mainframe-Hardware lösen, weiterhin Legacy-Applikationen nutzen und so das Risiko für den geschäftskritischen Betrieb minimieren.

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The Stack: Mainframe to Linux – still a howling headache of a job?

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COBOL has hit the news in 2020 in unexpected ways. In November, popular longform story aggregator Longform.org led with a prominent piece on the “code that controls your money” — “COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system,” wrote Clive Thompson.

Earlier in the year, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy drew international media attention with a plaintive request for help knocking the back-end systems powering New Jersey’s emergency care system into shape: “Literally, we have systems that are 40 years-plus old, and there’ll be lots of postmortems,” he said, as New Jersey ran into issues modernising the system . And one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” Murphy told the world.

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InfoWorld: The future of COBOL is now

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The COBOL skills gap is neither as extreme nor as straightforward as you might imagine. Here’s what companies can do to keep their COBOL systems running, and what would-be COBOL developers should know before taking the plunge.

Early in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the New Jersey state government had a very specific IT staffing need—and it got a lot more publicity than hiring moves usually get. The recently passed CARES Act had added $600 to weekly unemployment payments nationwide, but New Jersey’s archaic unemployment software, written in COBOL, couldn’t incorporate the extra money without reprogramming, and there was nobody on staff capable of doing the job.

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Telecom Ramblings: Industry Spotlight – Software-Defined Mainframes with LzLabs’ Mark Cresswell

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As the wave of migration of applications to the cloud continues, we sometimes forget that this is not one problem but rather a multitude of problems, each with its own special issues and considerations.  That leaves room for companies to dial in on opportunities that the broader solution sets don’t handle.  LzLabs is one of those companies targeting a unique enterprise computing niche that many people have forgotten is still out there: mainframes.  With us today to talk about LzLabs’ unique position within enterprise cloud migration is Executive Chairman Mark Cresswell.

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