TurboHercules™ is the first commercial entity exclusively dedicated to Hercules, the well-known open source software implementation of the IBM mainframe architecture.                                          (en français)

The Hercules open source emulator is a distinct software layer positioned between a mainframe operating system and a non-mainframe operating system (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris or MacOS).  It allows these non-mainframe operating systems to run mainframe applications on a variety of hardware platforms using AMD or Intel processors.  

Hercules is fully capable of running current versions of IBM’s modern 64-bit operating systems such as z/OS, z/VM, and z/VSE, as well as its older 31-bit and 24-bit operating systems.

Throughout its ten years of existence, Hercules has been positioned as a valuable contributor to the IBM mainframe ecosystem.  Above all, Hercules is a community of “IBM mainframers” who enthusiastically support the computing paradigm that has provided their livelihood.  Developers at TurboHercules are active participants in the open source community and are dedicated to contributing their improvements back to the Hercules project.

The TurboHercules Niche

TurboHercules is looking to carve out a commercial niche that complements—not competes with—the IBM mainframe.  

The niche we see for TurboHercules is to focus on ancillary workloads such as mainframe education, training, demonstrations, pre- and post-processing, data preparation, archiving, development and testing. However, IBM has restricted the use of its operating system software to IBM mainframes only.

But, there is an exception.  The worldwide IBM Customer Agreement clearly states that “if the designated machine is inoperable, the customer may use another machine temporarily.”  Disaster recovery / business continuity is an ideal fit for TurboHercules since the backup and related communications occur without the need to run any IBM software on the TurboHercules machine.