Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Mainframe jobs

There are lots of Mainframe jobs available in India.They are:

http://www.prgjobs.com/Jobs.cfm
An updated list of the latest Mainframe jobs in. Respond to these employers and post your resumes, get employment tips.

http://www.ibmmainframes.com/jobinfo.html
Mainframe Job Seekers please visit the JOB category in our EXPERT FORUM to view current mainframe openings. Also send your resumes to hr at ibmmainframes dot com for free placement assistance.

Maintec Technologies
Mainframe Career
Maintec Technologies helps business to optimize their global capabilities using its Smart Global Delivery Model. Maintec is acquainted to an adaptive team centric approach and respects individual qualities such as cultures, honesty and innovativeness. Its mainframe services include maintenance, development, web-enabling and re-engineering.

Cellnext Solutions Limited
Career
Cellnext Solutions Limited is India's leading wireless application services company providing wireless solutions to cellular operators of India. Cellnext product portfolio include Wireless messaging engines, Content aggregation application and delivery platforms. Cellnext offers a highly charged working environment with a high tech platform to work on.

Axis Software Pvt. Ltd.
Career
Axix India makes authentication products, solutions, Integration suits and services using Biometrics, PKI & Systematic Encryption, smart cards and other technologies targeted on clients in banking sector, insurance, defence organizations, Public sector, and government organizations. Axis is looking for people who can harness new ideas, unleash their imagination and contribute by their core ideology to enhance organizational abilities.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Mainframe Jobs require candidates to implement client security solutions in I/T environments

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IBM has a rich and storied history in the field of mainframe computing as the pioneer in this industry. Mainframes are the core of corporate computing infrastructure and we seek talented mainframe job professionals to meet the industry needs.

Mainframe Jobs require candidates to implement client security solutions in I/T environments on mainframes. Responsibilities include development, security administration, system security monitoring and security tool installation and maintenance. Expertise preferred in AS400 and Cobol languages. IBMers in these roles use design documentation, such as Functional Programming Specifications and high level design documents to implement the identified components. They also ensure that the implemented components are unit tested and ready to be integrated into the product. Mainframe developers also provide fixes to defects identified by the verification team during the software development life cycle.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Mainframe Vs Mid-Tier Computing

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I have been in Technology for more than 25 years. I have supported systems on both mainframe and midtier platforms. I'm often questioned as to which platform is better. To be open and honest, I'm a mainframe person at heart. I grew up on the mainframe and feel more comfortable working on mainframe systems. But as I've progressed into management, I've had to take a more open look at mid-tier systems and become more cynical of the mainframe.

Mid-tier systems have grown significantly over the years. The hardware platform has become much more dependable and cost effective solution.

Let's review a couple of trends in technology:

  • Linux has taken the world by storm. This operating system has claimed its place in many mainstream I.T. shops. The company that I work at has openly embraced Linux. It has almost completely replaced the UNIX/AIX/SUN environments that have been in place. One big thing to note about Linux is that is really is hardware independent. Linux can even run on the mainframe.
  • Vitalisation has been the rage in Technology. Virtualisation has enabled mid-tier solutions to become much more cost effective by increasing the overall utilisation of hardware. But virtualisation is not new. Virtualisation has been a mainframe stronghold for many years. Work Load Management (WLM) has been around the mainframe for what seems like forever. The mainframe has excelled in balancing a variety of workloads. Adding vitalisation to the mid-tier environment has enabled the mid-tier systems to function much more like a mainframe.

So if Linux can run anywhere and virtualization makes mid-tier seem like a mainframe, why use a mainframe?

There are still many functions that the mainframe still excels at. The mainframe's WLM still far exceeds the capabilities of mid-tier servers. Mid-tier virtualization is much better at horizontal scaling. The mainframe does vertical scaling significantly better. Large volume transactions that utilize high input output processing are better suited for the mainframe. High computing processes are better suited for the mid-tier.

There are probably a lot more packaged software solutions available for the distributed world. But the reliability, availability and scalability of the mainframe are still incredible.

In the mainframe world, parallel sysplex will enable a group of mainframes to operate as though they are one machine. This provides an organization with a lot of options as to how they wish to deploy their technology. These mainframes do not even need to be located near each other. Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) would enable an organization to run multiple data centers and have them all look like one to the customer.

So which is better? It really depends upon your workload and the amount of existing work that you may have on the mainframe today. If you were starting from scratch, I'd probably start with servers. But if I had a large investment in the mainframe, I'd look to keep the mainframe and exploit servers where it makes the most sense. I'd use the servers for presentation and application layers. The mainframe is the best and safest platform for data management.

Decide for yourself which better fits your needs and your budget.

Linux is probably one of the biggest improvements that have come down the road. The Linux operating system takes many of the advantages of UNIX and improves it. Linux is able to run on just about any platform - including the mainframe.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Why Mainframes Rarely Crash?

Mainframes can achieve "four nines" or "five nines" availability: 99.99 or 99.999 percent uptime. That translates into only 5 to 53 minutes of downtime per year. In fact, IBM's Server Group claims that the mean time between critical failures (MTBCF) for its System/390 mainframes -- that is, the average time between failures that force a reboot and an initial program load -- is 20 to 30 years.

Millions of PC users would be overjoyed with an MTBCF of just one day. Yet mainframes are big, complex systems that often have clusters of CPUs, gigabytes of main memory, and thousands of users. What makes them so reliable?

Mainframe experts say that it's a matter of priorities. When a PC crashes, even the system administrator might not hear about it, much less the vendors who made the system, the OS, and the application software. The user shrugs, reboots, and keeps right on working. When a mainframe crashes, however, it's a major catastrophe. It's General Motors calling up IBM to demand answers. And even if GM doesn't make the call, the mainframe does. Periodically, the massive machines dial up IBM's lab in Poughkeepsie, New York, to upload error logs and download updates. "Even if it doesn't crash, we know about it," says Lisa Spainhower, System/390 senior technical staff member.

During the beginning of the 1980s, Big Blue set a goal of increasing availability by a factor of 100, as measured by yearly uptime. IBM achieved that goal, says Spainhower. "Frankly, we didn't do it because it was a fun engineering project," she explains. "We did it because our customers demanded it."

Because everyone keeps detailed logs, problems rarely get ignored for long. There's too much at stake. Of course, it helps that mainframes have full-time technicians available to keep them up and running. They also have redundant hardware, extremely protective OSes, and stable applications.

"The design of a crash-proof system must be pervasive," explains Guru Rao, System/390 chief engineer. "It starts with your choice of technology and components, and it extends all the way to the design of the OS, the hardware and software, and the customer's applications."

System/390 maintains separate memory partitions for the OS (OS/390), the software-subsystem components (e.g., DB2 database drivers), the transactional middleware (e.g., the Customer Information Control System, or CICS), and the applications. IBM introduced this so-called Enterprise Systems Architecture (ESA) in the late 1980s, basing it on the earlier partitioning of MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage). Compared to MVS, ESA has more partitions and faster interprocess communications (IPC).

As a result, it's exceedingly rare for a crashed application to bring down the entire system. Even if a critical middleware component, such as CICS, fails, System/390's automatic restart manager can restore the task.

"These systems, like PCs, do fail," notes Spainhower. "It's just that when they fail, they detect the errors and recover from them with greater reliability."

Interestingly, mainframe OSes aren't any bigger than OSes for PCs. They contain a lot less code to support GUIs, and a lot more code for error detection, error isolation, and recovery. They're not growing as fast as OSes for PCs are, and their code tends to remain more stable.

"It would almost take an act of God to change the dispatcher in IBM's mainframe OS," says Dr. Barry Feigenbaum, senior software engineer for IBM network-computing software solutions. "It's not quite the same on PC OSes."

As ambitious PC vendors try to encroach on the territory of enterprise servers, they will have to address the same concerns that mainframe vendors did in the 1980s. The contest isn't about megahertz and megabytes; it's about high availability. And that will require PC vendors to radically change their priorities.

Friday, April 16, 2010

IBM Mainframe Training - Overview, Needs and Market Trends

Overview:

Mainframes are computers used mainly by organisations for processing complex applications. IBM first introduced mainframes in 1965. Its market is growing day by day around the globe. Now it has become essential to learn and be expert to make yourself a deserving candidate in the software industry. Training provides a quick and easy way to learn and mastery mainframe. Training is the only way to acquire a sound knowledge. It is very vital to be well trained as there is a very high demand for people who are skilled with IBM Mainframe. Term was used to denote large cabinet or earlier computers with processors and main memory.

It has an ability to process millions of instruction per second which can be expressed as MIPS. They have an ability to run and host multiple operation system which has become a standard nowadays.

Needs:

Integrating main frame into the mainstream of Information technology management results in a number of compelling benefits for the organisation as a whole specially for the concerned staffs.

The increasing popularity of virtual machine technology means each mainframe system can now support more than a thousand virtual machines. It can "suit" applications that might otherwise have been hosted to other server platforms, even though the applications are more suited to the mainframe.

It helps in cost management, as it serves as a single service provider to all the terminals. The mainframe environment has evolved from centralized environment to a distributed environment. Change management and release management technologies have been developed for the distributed environment to address major problems. It has been estimated that about 75 percent of all business data worldwide still resides on the mainframe and 85 percent of all business transactions are carried out on mainframes. Earlier due to centralized environment it wouldn't be easy to know the whereabouts to maintain privacy. Nowadays they are distributed and hence any user from any terminal can have direct access to the mainframes. It also helps to reduce business service disruptions.

Market Trends:

Migration projects are the current trend in the market. Latest survey shows that half of the organisation using mainframes has major applications running on mainframes. As trend is growing equally threats have been increasing. Unethical professionals are using various techniques to reach and crack the secured zone to steal major data residing from these large organisations. They are targets for attack because they contain valuable data. Different vendors are always striving to optimize the architecture in order to reduce complexity and increase the flexibility of the framework. When organisations adopt distributed Information technology management processes for mainframe management, it can manage the entire IT infrastructure using a single integrated IT management infrastructure.

This new methodology permits management, recognising the importance of the mainframe within IT infrastructure management in order to reap maximum benefits overcoming the traditional centralised architecture. They are being used and serving thousand of organisation particularly banking sector where huge amount of data needs to be processed every hour, every day. It helps to process millions of transactions. Plus they have huge data stores with a lot of data warehouse applications that are hosting a huge amount of information within them.

An organisation today believes that a single mainframe can reduce the cost of maintaining hundreds of servers worldwide. ERP software of large organization must be hosted on mainframe instead of maintaining on individual server in order to improvement transaction performance. Every organization needs security over their data hence its not always feasible to leave their vital business and customers data on the remote machine particularly third party and that too on different servers distributed over various geographical regions. The only solution to cater above need is to deploy everything on the mainframe to maintain flexibility, reliability and performance, which is being followed by the organization worldwide today.

The growing rate of organisations adopting mainframe is increasing every single day and it can be expected within few years almost every organization are going to adopt it, it'll only be possible if majority of software development outsourcers strive themselves in achieving cost effective and more flexible mainframes which can process millions of data with a speed and accuracy.

IBM mainframe training can certainly give an edge to the aspirants who are willing to accept challenging jobs in the industry.