Carl Greiner - Keeping Pace with Mainframe Evolution

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The mainframe is not dead, but it has certainly evolved. Says Carl Greiner, senior vice president at Ovum, the mainframe environment has changed from monolithic and centralized, to distributed and tightly intertwined with other computing resources in a complex enterprise infrastructure. As a result, mainframe operations staff faces a significant challenge: how to effectively manage the mainframe in this distributed computing environment.

Traditional mainframe management practices do not scale well to the distributed environment. These practices were developed when the mainframe was viewed as a resource, separate from the distributed IT infrastructure. Consequently, IT was slow to integrate mainframe management with the management of the IT infrastructure's distributed components. IT can no longer view the mainframe as separate from the distributed environment. Instead, IT must evolve its mainframe management practices to keep pace with the evolved distributed environment of the mainframe, managing it as an integral part of the IT infrastructure and from a business perspective. That's the only way IT can align more closely with the business and improve service delivery, while holding the line on, or even decreasing, costs.

Resources

White Paper: Keeping Pace with the Mainframe Evolution: What the Mainframe Can Learn from Distributed Systems -- Where ITIL Fits In

Podcast: What Can the Mainframe Learn from Distributed?

Bio

Carl Greiner is Ovum's senior vice-president (SVP), infrastructure, for the Software and IT Services Group. Joining Ovum after 12 years at META Group, Carl held the position of SVP, directing data center (infrastructure) coverage. Prior to this, he was a SVP at Gartner Group, focusing on data centers and storage in the software cluster. His early career spans two decades with IBM, in numerous management positions. He was a dynamic influence across diverse areas, including sales, U.S. and A/FE marketing, product marketing and strategy responsibility, within the Enterprise Systems Group. Carl has a strongcustomer focus, and is committed to helping companies develop and deliver their market strategies. He covers data center infrastructure, addressing servers, storage, high availability, virtualization, consolidation, business continuity, disaster recovery, operations excellence, facility planning, and infrastructure management. He holds a Bachelor's degree and an MBA from Cornell University.

Production Credits

Ynema Mangum, Executive Producer
Dana Farver, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer
Scott Ebner, Web Developer

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