VME (Virtual Machine Environment)

VME

VME (Virtual Machine Environment) is a mainframe operating system from Fujitsu Services. It remains one of the newest operating systems in its class. The VME mainframe runs business critical applications for the likes of HMRC and Royal London Group. VME continues to be invested in due to its reliability, high levels of performance and adaptability.

VME is a mainframe operating system that provides facilities to develop and run suites of application programs exploiting transaction processing and integrated database facilities. It has built-in features for system management and monitoring along with an operator interface that allows the workload scheduled to be adjusted.

VME is delivered through a managed service offering from Fujitsu known as VME Platform as a Service (VPaaS). This evergreen offering is delivered by support teams from the VME centre of Excellence. VPaaS demonstrates the ongoing support of the VME Platform. Focus is on modernisation, integration, and application.

VME has evolved over the years to increase its functionality and performance in line with, and exceed, its user’s demands. The HostTalk range of products allow data held on the VME ‘systems of record’ to be accessed from web browsers and mobile phone apps. After nearly 50 years, VME is still in use in the Government, Banking, Retail and Manufacturing sectors.

Modernisation

MVE

Fujitsu has invested in a strategy to support its customers running business critical applications on the mainframe. To strengthen business operations, Fujitsu created Modern VME Environment (MVE)). It provides an environment where VME applications can be run, unchanged, on an industry standard host platform with access to the files and file types traditionally available to them. This modernisation of the platform has allowed Fujitsu to tap into a wider talent base, as skills are more readily available on the market.

Heritage Modernisation

Fujitsu secured the supportability of the platform with MVE however recognises that applications managed by the customer are coming under increasing strain from years of development, lack of documentation and scarcity of skilled resource in the aging languages. Fujitsu recognizes that these applications are critical to their customers, and their strategy continues to support and strengthen business operations for these customers now and into the future. Modern technologies enable the modernisation of applications whilst retaining the mainframe at the heart of the business-critical systems.

Integration

Customers look to improve user access to existing systems or integrate their host applications with new business solutions. Fujitsu’s HostTalk™ provides new ways of accessing the information originally thought to be locked inside customer host applications. Most medium and large organisations rely on existing host-based computer systems to run their businesses. While these systems are generally solid, reliable and robust, constant business pressures to reduce costs and address new opportunities put them under strain. Moreover, the rate at which organisations change the way they do business is increasing. It is generally accepted that it is faster and more cost effective to integrate existing systems into the new application architecture, rather than replace them with new applications, provided that the existing systems continue to fulfil the business requirements. For this reason, application integration is increasingly important. Fujitsu’s HostTalk is a portfolio of products, tools and services that provide application integration capabilities across a wide range of host environments. These include services like HostTalk Developer (HTD), VME Journal Manager (VJM) and VME Java Connector (VJC).

History

Originally developed in the mid 1970’s, VME was created by International Computers Limited (ICL). At the outset VME was designed to run on proprietary hardware with a new platform released around every five years. But in 1996 the VME Millennium programme was established with the objective of running on industry standard platforms. Since 2001, the flexible NOVA platform has been capable of running combinations of VME and Windows partitions on industry standard Intel technology. The move onto commodity platforms continued with the introduction of the superNOVA which enabled VME systems to run at increased power levels to meet the needs of the most demanding large scale users in the Government, Retail, Banking and Manufacturing sectors.

References

This article "VME (Virtual Machine Environment)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:VME (Virtual Machine Environment). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---