What is IBM Mainfram ? How is it from Career point of view ? How much is it used in the World and in India?

Question

I have completed my BE and CCNA ,a Cisco networking certification. My company is currently working on outdated technology i.e. Open VMS OS .My company is offering me training for IBM Mainframe. Should I join it or not.How benifitial for me as a career ?

Answer 1

Depends which mainframe series, but on the whole, large financial companies still use a lot of mainframes for batch processing and OLTP work. Especially in risk management, you'll still find datacentres full of mainframes for overnight processing (especially things like algo trading and covariance matrices). They're still relevant, since there's a lot that's quite hard/not efficient to implement in grid computing environments.

In many ways, mainframe expertise is becoming something like Sybase database expertise; as Oracle grows more prominent, sybase qualified DBAs are dying out, and thus the ones that remain can command higher salaries. Financial instititutions (my area) are not likely to migrate completely away from mainframes for quite a while (if ever). Being qualified means you'll be part of an ever decreasing number of people will real knowledge about how these systems work.

They're not going away, but they're not as mission critical as they used to be in many industries. However, more on your CV is always good, right?

Answer 2

The term, mainframe, is used most often to refer to an earlier era of computing in which a central computer did the processing and a terminal was used for input/output.

Today IBM and a variety of other companies sell small, medium, and large servers and middleware products.

From a career point of view, I'd stick with today's and tomorrow's technology, if you have a choice.

Answer 3

Career point of view.. u can go for IBM AIX sys admin if u hav adequate knowledge of Linux systems. It is operating system similar to Red Hat.. but little different..