Faster mainframe delivery? Imagine that!
PopUp Mainframe
Revolutionize mainframe delivery with your own on-demand mainframe environment, a PopUp Mainframe.
Dream if you want to go faster
Mainframes remain the mainstay of enterprise computing. Celebrating its 60th birthday, reports reveal continued reliance upon – and investment in – IBM mainframes across a variety of sectors, at some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. Often part of a hybrid IT strategy nowadays, the IBM mainframe remains a central component of the organizational infrastructure, the applications it houses business critical in nature.
As important as it is, issues blight the mainframe environment, and none more so than the problem with bottlenecks. Mainframe delivery teams often suffer from the shortage of non-production environments for development and test, impacting their ability to deliver as fast as the business would like.
Why? Mainframe environments have very regimented, and restricted time periods (and LPAR capacity) for dev and test activities. And for good reason – regulatory pressures, internal audit requirements, extensive system and functional testing cycles, as well as the need for efficient resource management of mainframe LPARs means much of the mainframe world lives by stringent rules on availability, timeslots and schedules. In such environments, asking for ad-hoc or out of cycle resources to test something new – or whatever the reason – is handled as an exception, and often refused. Simply, the mainframe is too busy, and every minute (and every associated dollar) is already accounted for.
What this means for application and system teams is that new releases must be planned a long time in advance, the delivery and testing slots are sacrosanct, making any more creative, agile initiatives, impractical to include. There’s just no extra time, and no additional budget, to do other things that haven’t already been scheduled.
Even with the advent of DevOps style tooling on the mainframe, the resource availability restrictions make genuine acceleration of delivery very tough.
Flexible mainframe delivery to match your imagination
Those who own the mainframe environment wish they could do more, without spending any more, while those who own the applications wish they could deliver faster.
But is that wish just a pipedream?...
Imagine a world where you can have immediate access to fully functioning mainframe resources, instantly, but without the associated cost and effort involved. Imagine clicking your fingers and having your own mainframe sandpit to play in. What extra innovation would you work on? What new capabilities or integrations might you test? What could a personal virtual mainframe help you deliver? What could you achieve that you haven’t attempted before?
That is the imagined reality brought to life by the team at PopUp Mainframe. Their solution directly addresses need for more instantaneous access to mainframe resources with an immediately available, fully functioning mainframe in the form of its ‘PopUp’ product. The PopUp comes to life in minutes, and behaves the same as physical mainframe environments, and you can install any mainframe subsystem or bespoke application there – enabling you to use it for new dev and test purposes. The personal virtual mainframe is here.
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Where it can help you
Because PopUp Mainframe – as the name suggests – can appear anywhere you need it in the mainframe delivery process**, it effectively adds the flexibility that might have been missing before.
Rapid application testing, intensive spikes of regression or performance assessments, interactive CI/CD build and test activities, code reviews, training exercises, hackathons, a ‘safe sandpit’ area for junior developers to work on new ideas, you name it - PopUp Mainframe revolutionises the mainframe SDLC, accelerating delivery and cutting hardware costs, and helping teams deliver on the promise of mainframe DevOps.
PopUp makes delivering projects on mainframe identical to delivering projects on distributed environments, as PopUp is fully compatible with standard DevOps toolchains (Git, Jenkins, BMC, IBM, open source) and can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud.
Traditionally waterfall, siloed groups, with limited time slots and rigid schedules, may have long imagined a more flexible environment for mainframe delivery. Well now, it is finally here - true mainframe delivery agility is now a real opportunity.
Look what just popped up
PopUp Mainframe tackles typical mainframe delivery bottlenecks through the provision of on-demand mainframe environments, to accelerate flexible and low-cost mainframe delivery.
Using IBM’s ZD&T as the underpinnings for its solution, PopUp Mainframe can be commissioned within minutes, with applications and data transferred (and masked) as required. Your very own mainframe sandbox is just minutes away. PopUp Mainframe supports a variety of popular mainframe DevOps toolchains, cloud or distributed platforms, to ensure it is available wherever needed, and with whatever tools are required.
One of our customers said that, previously, it took 6 months to create a new z/OS environment, and now – with PopUp Mainframe - it takes just 30 minutes.
Do you want to revolutionize your mainframe delivery? Get in touch.
** note – PopUp Mainframe cannot be used as a production engine.