These days, I work on testing a large and complex application suite hosted on an equally complex infrastructure that supports it. Most of the systems are small but potent applications home-built by my customer to suit their business needs and these mostly reside on large mainframe systems.While the technology itself is not very recent, it surely is amazing to see how long the mainframe systems have existed and are very relevant even in today's touch and cloud era. This is only my second exposure to a mainframe based solution/assignment in a career spanning 17 years now and both the times,have been awed by the stability and the reliability these systems have offered. Mainframes are no more defined by their single task computation speed for which they were anyway known for but more by their ever evolving internal engineering that makes them ever more reliable and secure not to mention backward compatibility and ability to support massive throughput.All, very good reasons for large secure enterprises to continue investing in them.
So, here I am, leading a large testing group mainly designing tests for applications for large infrastructure overhaul programs consisting of a galaxy of financial and banking applications that has to constantly be tested to assure high availability,work load sharing without which it would be catastrophic and hugely expensive for my customers' business. If one were to memory jog on the Reliability,Availability and Serviceability that we learnt many years ago and how these were the bare minimal needs of any computing systems. Mainframes just satisfies this even to this day alongwith newer enhancements that have seen manifold increase in the computational power of these machines. The integration with web based applications and cutting edge enterprise software like SAP and a host of other systems seems seamless. I am also fortunate to work with a bunch of folks who are main frame designers. The last I met someone was about a decade ago who did something close to what these folks do. Nowadays its mostly project managers and app developers or the smart technology geeks who i work with. No more beer bellied,handle bar mustached geeks in collarless tees who breathed bits and flops for a living.Did you also know that the National Institute of Standards and Technology vulnerabilities database, US-CERT, rates traditional mainframes such as IBM zSeries, Unisys Dorado and Unisys Libra as among the most secure with vulnerabilities in the low single digits as compared with thousands for Windows, Linux and Unix - I didn't
From an era when mainframes had no explicitly interactive interface, when they just accepted inputs of any form -punched cards,tapes to transfer data and programs. They mostly operated in batch mode to support back office functions and end-users. Today, the interactiveness is exponentially better and one can access a Web-style user interface, not to mention the ability of these systems to host different operating systems using virtual machines.
I spend the next couple of years in a small English town taking on these timeless machines hurtling myself almost a trip down memory lane planning and designing tests on these systems.My work takes me to server racks and data centers which is so nostalgic of the computer systems that one would so often see in the seventies and eighties. Relearning or unlearning - yet to decide, but, surely fun!
So, here I am, leading a large testing group mainly designing tests for applications for large infrastructure overhaul programs consisting of a galaxy of financial and banking applications that has to constantly be tested to assure high availability,work load sharing without which it would be catastrophic and hugely expensive for my customers' business. If one were to memory jog on the Reliability,Availability and Serviceability that we learnt many years ago and how these were the bare minimal needs of any computing systems. Mainframes just satisfies this even to this day alongwith newer enhancements that have seen manifold increase in the computational power of these machines. The integration with web based applications and cutting edge enterprise software like SAP and a host of other systems seems seamless. I am also fortunate to work with a bunch of folks who are main frame designers. The last I met someone was about a decade ago who did something close to what these folks do. Nowadays its mostly project managers and app developers or the smart technology geeks who i work with. No more beer bellied,handle bar mustached geeks in collarless tees who breathed bits and flops for a living.Did you also know that the National Institute of Standards and Technology vulnerabilities database, US-CERT, rates traditional mainframes such as IBM zSeries, Unisys Dorado and Unisys Libra as among the most secure with vulnerabilities in the low single digits as compared with thousands for Windows, Linux and Unix - I didn't
From an era when mainframes had no explicitly interactive interface, when they just accepted inputs of any form -punched cards,tapes to transfer data and programs. They mostly operated in batch mode to support back office functions and end-users. Today, the interactiveness is exponentially better and one can access a Web-style user interface, not to mention the ability of these systems to host different operating systems using virtual machines.
I spend the next couple of years in a small English town taking on these timeless machines hurtling myself almost a trip down memory lane planning and designing tests on these systems.My work takes me to server racks and data centers which is so nostalgic of the computer systems that one would so often see in the seventies and eighties. Relearning or unlearning - yet to decide, but, surely fun!
