By LzLabs GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland
Zurich, 14 March 2016 – LzLabs announced today the world’s first Software Defined Mainframe, a technology solution that will enable customers to move their legacy mainframe applications and data seamlessly to open Linux server and Cloud platforms.
LzLabs’ solution solves the legacy mainframe application problem where more than 3000 of the world’s largest companies have no escape from expensive and outdated application architectures, which still power 70% of the world’s commercial transactions.
The LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® will support major legacy operating environments and languages so that customers can break free from the high, recurring cost of mainframe software and hardware while preserving their enormous investment in legacy applications, data and business processes.
“The evolution of alternative hardware platforms, particularly x86, has shown that increasingly large volumes of traditional mainframe workloads can successfully run in these environments.” Dale Vecchio, Gartner noted in How Will the Mainframe Survive? (July 2015). “Many mainframe-using organizations are also evaluating their application portfolios in an effort to find workloads that can be moved to lower-cost platforms, thereby reducing consumption, or at least the growth, of mainframe MIPS,” according to Dale Vecchio and Mike Chuba, Gartner in How to Reduce the Cost of IBM Mainframe Computing (September 2015).
“Despite an almost universal desire to liberate mainframe applications to improve interoperability, business agility and to reduce costs, the risk and complexity of rewriting or recompiling code have been assessed as too high by many mainframe customers”, states Thilo Rockmann, Chairman of LzLabs. “What was required was a seamless way to allow the customer’s application code and data to run unchanged in a modern environment. LzLabs has worked for five years to build exactly this solution – the Software Defined Mainframe.”
Announced at CeBIT 2016, the LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® will be offered to customers both for use within their own datacentres running on Red Hat Linux-based computers and for deployment via the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. (Please see separate press releases: “LzLabs Partners with Red Hat to Deliver Linux Platform for Mainframe Apps” and “LzLabs Partners with Microsoft Azure to Liberate Customer Mainframe Applications for Cloud Deployment”.)
About LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe®
LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe® enables both Linux and Cloud infrastructure to process thousands of transactions per second, while maintaining enterprise requirements for reliability, scalability, serviceability and security. This software solution includes a faithful re-creation of the primary online, batch and database environments, which enables unrivaled compatibility and exceptional performance, to dramatically reduce IT costs.
About Legacy Applications
With over 70 percent of commercial transactions occurring on mainframe-based systems, organisations have become dependent on legacy applications stuck behind outdated application programming interfaces (APIs). Historically, these organizations have been forced to abandon compatibility with the mainframe in order to move legacy applications and data to Linux or the cloud. Abandoning compatibility makes migration very difficult as critical data will need to be converted and complex applications must be rewritten or recompiled and tested in a new environment. LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe protects customers’ investment in their business processes by eliminating recompilations of COBOL and PL/I programs, data conversion and complex testing.
LzLabs has developed a managed software container that provides enterprises with a viable way to migrate applications from mainframes onto Linux computers or private, public and hybrid cloud environments. When legacy application programs are placed into the container, the customers’ programs are enhanced to run on modern computers and decades-old APIs are exchanged for newer, more contemporary ones.
LzLabs’ software solution allows the executable form of legacy customer mainframe programs to operate without changes and without compromise to performance in a contemporary and cost- effective computing environment, and enables mainframe data to be written and read in its native formats. This new environment works without forcing recompilations of COBOL or PL/1 application programs or making complex changes to the enterprise business environment.
