First Ever Software Defined Mainframe Now Available
By LzLabs GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland
Zurich, 5 July 2016 – LzLabs announced today the availability of Gotthard, the initial release of the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®. The release signifies the first time ever that mainframe customers will be able to transfer their applications to modern systems with no code rewrite, recompilation, or data reformatting. This technology advance means that the applications that now run 70% of the world’s financial transactions can finally be moved to Red Hat Linux-powered servers or the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
“More than 5,000 of the world’s largest companies are reliant on mainframes for online and batch COBOL applications. These companies face a perfect storm of high costs, a shrinking pool of expertise to run the systems and restrictions on integration and innovation,” explains Mark Creswell, CEO of LzLabs. “Mainframe users have waited 30 years for a way to easily transition legacy applications to modern systems. To make such a transition, a managed container is required that faithfully recreates the behaviour of the originating legacy hardware mainframe. With this first release of LzLabs’ Software Defined Mainframe, we are providing that environment.”
Gotthard, as the first release of LzLabs’ Software Defined Mainframe, provides a managed container that faithfully recreates the behaviour of online, batch, database, file and security subsystems found on legacy hardware mainframes. Also included in this first release are migration tools, facilities for storage management and system utilities. Taken together these components provide the fundamentals that support the reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) requirements of legacy applications.
Components of the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®
The components of LzLabs Gotthard release of the Software Defined Mainframe (SDM) comprise:
- LzOnline™ – Enables users to run COBOL transaction programs unchanged in the SDM container. All transaction programs and online subsystem definitions are migrated easily using the provided migration utilities.
- LzBatch™ – Local or remote batch job submission of compatible job control syntax with output and spool management.
- LzRelational™ – Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), compatible with equivalent systems found on a Legacy Hardware Mainframe. Includes comprehensive utilities to support easy migration.
- LzVault™ – Authentication and authorization subsystem using security rules migrated from Legacy Hardware Mainframe.
- Data Set Support for VSAM and others – Allows support for most track based data formats, with customers’ datasets residing unchanged in the SDM storage facility.
- Migration Tools – Easy migration of application, data and configuration objects from Legacy Hardware Mainframe to the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe.
- Managed Storage Facilities – Supports automated storage classes and routines to manage datasets on the SDM.
- Mainframe System Utilities – Supports common mainframe utilities, which have been recreated to require no change to existing procedures.
