[ Thanks to Matt for
this link. ]
“From the beginning, IT executives at Boscov’s department store
have had a mainframe bias. Today as they think about evolving this
family-owned retail chain’s data center into a more flexible,
business-driven computing resource, little has changed: They
consider the mainframe more important than ever…“‘The mainframe will stay but its role will be substantially
different from what it is today,’ says Joe Poole, technical
director for Boscov’s in Reading, Pa. Mainframe workloads will
transition from the traditional batch jobs into a more fluid
environment. For instance, Boscov’s is merging Linux and the
mainframe. The company deployed Linux on its IBM z900 mainframe in
2001 and began turning processes previously run on Windows NT
servers into Linux instances. It has consolidated about 40 of about
70 NT servers onto the mainframe. By using middleware such as IBM’s
MQSeries, transactions can flow from machine to machine, he
says…”