Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

I have joined a new company and we get in to production support every trailing week. And with so many incidents I've seen they have been using very different transfer methods like, FTP, MFTP, Fusion and C :E.. They fail with different errors, what is the use of having so many ways to transfer files. Or actually what is the difference between FTP, MFTP, Fusion and C :E?

Thanks for any input on this.

Every tool has its own purpose and that's why they have their market. The choice of which to use is site-dependent and also task-dependent. Having all of them together might sound like a short sited decision but

FTP is File Transfer Protocol and comes as part of native zOS. File Transfer Protocol is used by mainframes to transfer files to and from different computers via TCP/IP.

MFTP is Managed FTP.

Fusion is MFTP and a pay for product.

Connect :Enterprise is a pay for product as well, from IBM now. And known as IBM Sterling Connect:Direct too.

The reasons are specific to each shop to choose one tool over other. MFT offers a higher level of security than FTP by supporting secure protocols such as FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS) and SFTP (FTP over SSH). These protocols provide additional security and encryption to protect data in transit, which helps prevent data tampering.

IBM Sterling Connect:Direct provides security-hardened, point-to-point file transfers to lessen dependency on File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transfers. C :E is optimized for high-volume delivery of files within and among enterprises.