TurboHercules serves three customer segments: the Legacy Mainframe customer, the z/Linux customer and mainframe Disaster Recovery.

The Legacy Systems Market

You may be working for a large corporation or government agency and, for the most part, you’ve moved on to distributed systems based on Unix, Linux or Windows.  However, you still operate and maintain a legacy mainframe from the last century—one that perhaps IBM no longer supports.  It may be that it runs an old program with important data that must be maintained for archival purposes (regulatory compliance, company or agency policies, etc.) and be available for data retrieval on a periodic basis.  You face a dilemma (in fact, it’s been a dilemma for quite awhile now!).  It might be nigh onto impossible to migrate the application (the programmers are long gone) or else very costly to do so.  Yes, you could migrate to a modern, fully-supported IBM mainframe but the business scenario can’t justify the cost.

TurboHercules would like to talk to you.  We may be able to provide a relatively low-cost solution based on our supported distribution of Hercules running on modern commodity hardware, together with our on-site consulting services.

The z/Linux Market

If you are using one of the distributions of Linux for IBM System z then you are part of the modern-day IBM mainframe ecosystem.  You are not looking to run production workloads on Hercules since you could always choose to run Linux natively on commodity hardware.  However, running z/Linux on Hercules may have a definite appeal for certain pre- and post-production workloads, archiving, training and software development.  Let us know if we can help you in setting up a fully-supported Hercules environment to complement your z/Linux activities on the mainframe.

Mainframe Disaster Recovery

TurboHercules provides an alternate mainframe that you can run on in the event that your regular mainframe becomes inoperable for any reason (fire, flood, electrical outage, etc).  This alternate mainframe has all of the functionality of the mainframe it is configured to backup.  All that is needed is an up-to-date copy of the information on the regular mainframe.  Once loaded, the TurboHercules alternate can be powered up and IPL’ed within minutes to provide business continuity.  See Using TurboHercules for Disaster Recovery.

Consulting Services

We are happy to provide a free consultation via phone or email (in English or French) to discuss your potential deployment of Hercules and to explore ways in which TurboHercules can help.  If we can be of service, we will prepare a draft Statement of Work with time and cost estimates.  Please use our Contact Form and someone will get back to you promptly.

Commercially-supported Distributions

In the coming months we will be releasing fully-tested commercial distributions to match several real-world scenarios.  Our preliminary assessment is that there are several important—albeit not necessarily mission critical—ways in which Hercules can be deployed in mainframe shops.  We would like to be your professional support organization to ensure your deployment proceeds smoothly and that your problems are addressed in a timely manner.  Together, we will prepare a service level agreement that meets your needs and budget.