I’m sure most of you remember what it was like working in IT during the late 90s. The buzz of Y2K was everywhere. While some prepared for the end of the world and for planes to fall from the sky, software vendors and IT organizations worked tirelessly to ensure that come the new millennium, applications continued to properly calculate things like social security payments, insurance claims, and credit card bills. And this work began well in advance of January 1, 2000.

Bob Thomas, MainframeZone--Publisher of Enterprise Executive and z/Journal

IBM’s April 11 announcement of PureSystems family of products was focused on POWER and x86 systems. A closer look, however, suggests the initiative both leveraged some of the advances of the zEnterprise and zBX and hints at extending the PureSystems approach to the zEnterprise.

The job market is flooded with young IT’ers who have Microsoft certifications in networks, databases and office software. This is good news for enterprises, because nearly everyone runs their office with these products, and there isn’t a company out there that doesn’t have PCs and Intel-based servers to manage.

Finally, someone has launched a comprehensive storage and data management conference! Since mainframes aren’t limited to using only channel-attached storage devices, our readers want to know how to best use the options available. Security and compliance issues related to storage are other important topics for our readers. Yet, there was no conference available that really met our needs until now. (A special discount code is available to our readers, too!)

We are extremely proud of the new look and feel of our MainframeZone.com website. I hope you’ll drop everything and take a look.

Nearly three decades ago, Pat Riley was on his way to coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to a series of NBA championships. At the time, a reporter asked Riley how he determined who to play. The writer asked Riley whether he relied on field goals, assists and rebounds during the game as metrics. Riley actually said no. He said he didn’t really look at any of the common statistics—but instead, he used what he called an “effort index.” The effort index was not something an official scorekeeper tracked, so Riley had one of his assistant coaches manually track who went up for the ball at both ends of the floor.  The theory was that the team exerting the most effort under the basket at both ends of the court was going to win the game—so he was identifying the “difference makers” who might not turn up in any of the official statistics, but who were facilitating the situation most advantageous for the team.

Virtualization continues as a driving force behind data center optimization and the movement to private cloud infrastructure—but in many ways, organizations’ ability to define and enact best practices for virtual system creation, deployment, costing and deallocation have failed to keep pace.

Just one year ago, industry reports heralded that 30 percent of businesses were utilizing cloud, and that cloud adoption was moving forward at exponential rates http://www.businesscloudnews.com/platform-as-a-service/205-cloud-use-by-tech-companies-rises-29.html. These same surveys also pointed to sizable percentages of C-level executives who remained concerned with cloud, especially in the areas of governance and security.