PopUp Mainframe Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025

Harnessing IFL and Linux for Accelerated Mainframe Delivery with PopUp Mainframe

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Today’s enterprises span mission-critical industries such as financial services, logistics, retail, and government, many of which continue to rely on the IBM Mainframe for its unparalleled resilience and processing power—especially in light of advancements like the AI-enabled IBM Z17. However, software delivery on the mainframe is often slowed by environment availability, siloed team structures, and lack of flexible tooling. Gary Thornhill, Founder and CEO of PopUp Mainframe, presented at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025 to address these issues. His solution centers on PopUp Mainframe, a platform designed to provision virtual mainframe environments quickly across a range of hardware—from IFLs and LinuxONE on IBM Z systems to cloud-hosted and x86 environments—making mainframe development and testing faster, more agile, and accessible.

The PopUp Mainframe platform emulates full Z environments for non-production use and helps alleviate bottlenecks in development cycles by enabling organizations to replicate environments in under 10 minutes. It supports automated provisioning, rollback, and snapshot capabilities through its FastTrack feature, ensuring rapid, repeatable testing and development. Thornhill emphasized the platform’s flexibility to run where customers already have compute capacity—including air-gapped environments or the cloud—supported by a floating license model that allows dormant environments to be spun up only when needed. Critically, running on IFLs offers a 5-10x performance gain versus x86 platforms, leveraging the power of z/Architecture while maintaining total separation from production workloads. Licensing restricts PopUp’s use solely for dev/test purposes, addressing IBM’s compliance policies while giving developers hands-on access to real data (masking supported) and real workloads without regulatory or security compromises.

Security and compatibility are key components of the PopUp proposition. The platform is pre-integrated with IBM, BMC, and open-source tools and supports broader ecosystems including Broadcom and Rocket Software solutions. PopUp maintains full ZOS compatibility regardless of code age or complexity, from modern subsystems to legacy stacks. Mainframe teams gain the ability to serialize and isolate development pipelines and shift left without incurring infrastructure procurement overhead. Integration with tools like VS Code, Galasa, and COBOL Check helps extend modern DevOps practices to mainframe, enabling continuous integration and delivery. Users can securely push clones into any environment, even cloud, backed by persistent ZFS snapshots which achieve 90% disk compression and utilize commodity storage in place of expensive DASD. As Thornhill explained, PopUp allows organizations to quadruple delivery speed, reduce emissions, lower cost, and improve compliance by centralizing masking and maintaining data governance entirely on-Z. PopUp is not just an emulator—it’s a strategic enabler for agile mainframe modernization.

Personnel: Gary Thornhill

Accelerated Mainframe App Delivery Demonstration Using PopUp Mainframe

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PopUp Mainframe enables accelerated application delivery on the mainframe through modern DevOps practices and automation. In this demonstration, we will showcase how to quickly set up a fully functional mainframe development and test environment using PopUp Mainframe, demonstrate a CI/CD pipeline that includes code modifications, testing, and rollback capabilities, and provide insight into how this empowers development teams and simplifies operations with tools like Ansible.

In the demonstration at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025, Gary Thornhill from PopUp Mainframe showcased how their virtualized mainframe solution can dramatically streamline mainframe application development and delivery. The demo illustrated how PopUp Mainframe enables a modern CI/CD pipeline using open-source tools and IBM’s deployment technologies, exemplified through a sample application called NextGen Bank. It emphasized the speed at which development environments can be created and destroyed—minutes instead of hours—as well as the use of snapshot and rewind capabilities that allow developers to easily rollback environments to previous states. Code changes were made using both VS Code and IDZ, committed to GitHub, and deployed via automated pipelines that performed building, unit testing with Cobol Check, and integration testing with Galasa. Issues were discovered via failing tests, the environment was rolled back instantly, and fixes were redeployed in a seamless fashion.

Further, the presentation covered how PopUp Mainframe integrates with Ansible for simplified automation and self-service operations, including user provisioning and environment management. Thornhill stressed the value of using pop-up environments for early and frequent testing—reducing cost and dependence on physical mainframe MSUs—and how PopUp enables developers to work independently without interrupting central production or test environments. He addressed cultural resistance within mainframe teams, comparing it to the adoption challenges faced during the rise of server virtualization. By showing tangible benefits and empowering both younger developers and experienced professionals, he argued, PopUp Mainframe serves as a bridge to modernize legacy environments. The tool also supports sustainability goals by allowing environments to be shut down when not in use, reducing cloud costs and mainframe license impacts.

In conclusion, Thornhill emphasized that PopUp Mainframe offers a breakthrough opportunity in the mainframe paradigm by enabling faster delivery, easier access for non-traditional mainframe users, and flexible test environments that mirror real-world production. The technology not only simplifies and accelerates app delivery but also supports risk-free experimentation, training, and modernization efforts. He cited real-world client success stories with up to 400% improvement in time to market, and reiterated that this tool aligns with organizational goals for agility, cost reduction, and environmental responsibility.

Personnel: Gary Thornhill