Move over Google Docs, IBM’s back in the game!

Over the years, Microsoft has controlled the Office market – with Word and Excel being used everyday by millions of people. Even schools are teaching children to copy and paste etc using the familiar Microsoft products that they most likely also use at home.

People may fondly remember WordPerfect or VisiCalc, or may have tried OpenOffice and other alternatives to Microsoft, but for most organizations, the de facto standard has been MS Office.

And then, as the world became aware of cloud computing, those freethinkers at Google gave us GoogleDocs – an online equivalent for the basic Office functions. And the big advantage was that you could access your files from whichever computer you were on (provided you had Internet connectivity). There was no excuse about bringing the wrong memory stick and not having a copy of the document. I use the GoogleDoc plug-in to Office so that my files are stored in the cloud in case I need something at a client’s site.

Of course, Microsoft also has a cloud-based version of its Office suite called Microsoft Office 365.

But now IBM has thrown its hat in the ring. It has announced the beta of IBM Docs, which is tied into its SmartCloud for Social Business Suite. So how does IBM hit the ground running with its own Office suite? Well, it got its hands on Lotus Smartsuite in 1995, when it also got Lotus Notes.

IBM Docs allows organizations to collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. The plan is that there will only be a Web-based solution – no need for any browser plug-ins. In addition, its LotusLive has been rebadged as SmartCloud for Social Business. This provides users with easy access to social networking, file sharing, meetings, e-mail, calendars, and instant messaging.

The Web site at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/lotus+greenhouse/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs says: “IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite for working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations – together – in the cloud. With IBM Docs there is no desktop software. You only need a browser and an account, and you are able to easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM Docs is simple yet powerful – letting you get started quickly, but delivering the advanced features you need. 

Once you’ve signed up, you can create and share documents, you can comment on documents, and you can assign parts of documents to teams to complete. In effect, everything you would look for in a cloud-based Office equivalent. Does it provide workflow features like Microsoft’s SharePoint? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Will it work? It will be interesting to see. The linking with social networking is something that many enterprise organisations will find beneficial. There’s certainly room for another heavyweight to enter the fray. And it should be beneficial for us users if the big players offer more-and-more facilities for us to use as a way of keeping our interest and our business.

I’m sure we’ll be getting far more information about this initiative (and it is still in beta), but I thought it was worth noting now. Personally, I’d like to see a cloud version of the Adobe suite – InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, etc.

More data stored off mainframes – user survey finding

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 is now available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook12 – and it’s FREE. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting. And this year, for the very first time, survey respondents indicated that, at their sites, more data was stored off mainframes than on.

This surprising result came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site   between 1 November and 2 December 2011. 40% were from Europe and 50% from North America, with 10% from the rest of the world.

46% of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide, while 10% of respondents had 0-200 staff, 6% had 201-1000, 28% had 1001 to 5000, and 10% had 5001-10,000 staff. In terms of MIPS, 34% of respondents had fewer than 1000 MIPS installed, 40% fell into the mid-sized category between 1000 and 10,000 MIPS, and 26% were at the high end.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. Larger, more mature businesses (above 10,000 MIPS) were almost all experiencing some growth, but predominantly in 0 to 10% per year category. Sites in the 1000-10,000 MIPS range were showing a range of results with some sites suggesting a decline while others predicted growth of up to 50%. Sites below 1000 MIPS were experiencing a more complex future, with most expecting a small growth, but almost as many expecting no growth or negative growth (a business-speak euphemism for decline). The mainframe market does appear to be quite fragmented with competitive pressures at the lower end of the mainframe market, and some respondents commented about lack of understanding amongst management about the value of mainframe computing.

It was interesting to see that 6% of respondents had the zEnterprise z114s, with 19% having the z196s models installed. I expect that future surveys we’ll ask how sites are making use of the extra features on these models. Previous surveys have shown that there is a willingness amongst mainframes (especially larger ones) to purchase new models as they become available. In order to benefit from the new features

The big talking point during 2011 was cloud computing and whether mainframers really have been doing it since the 1960s and the impact of offering software (and anything else) as a service. The survey asked whether respondents currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Just 12% (up from last year’s 2%) of respondents said they did. 34% said they didn’t, and the rest weren’t sure. It’s still early days for a cloud computing initiative to move off the PowerPoint slides and into the business environment, so the survey asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 40% said they weren’t at present. Just 18% thought some mainframe applications would be cloud-enabled in the future. It will be interesting to follow these figures in future surveys.

The survey asked respondents which specialty processors (IFL, zIIP, and zAAP) they had. 16% of sites had all three (up from last year’s value of 6%) and a further 20% of sites had two of the three specialty processors (down from last year’s 28%). More sites had zIIP processors (48%) than any other. 36% had IFL processors, and 30% had zAAP specialty processors. 28% of sites don’t have a specialty processor installed.

The survey inquired about what proportion of enterprise data resides on the mainframe and what on other platforms. This produced, for the first year ever, the surprising result that more than half of the respondents use other platforms to manage the lion’s share of their corporate data. 44 percent of sites surveyed have more data on their mainframes, whereas 56 percent of the sites surveyed have more data stored on other platforms. Unfortunately, the survey was unable to drill down to find out why, but we can speculate that it may simply be the growth of data associated with the non-mainframe side of the business. It could be a result of the quantity of e-mails that organizations store for their staff. It could be that non-mainframe data is less well managed and ‘spreads’ into larger data sizes. Perhaps non-mainframe databases are less space efficient. Or maybe, people just create and save Excel spreadsheets and Word documents on Windows servers, where they wouldn’t keep equivalent files on mainframes. Or perhaps sites move their mainframe archive data off the mainframe, but still have it available online on, for example, a Linux distributed system. I’d be interested to hear yiour views on this.

The comments in the survey identified management ignorance of the power and benefits of using a mainframe. This is now a perennial reason given for the decline in mainframe computing within organizations. But cost was also highlighted as a factor mitigating against the successful growth of mainframe computing. One respondent suggested, “software costs are sinking the mainframe”.

Anyway, full details of the responses to many other questions can be found in the user survey section of the Yearbook. It’s well worth a read.

The Yearbook can only be free to mainframers because of the support given by sponsors. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 has been published

Every year, about this time, mainframe users are excited to get their hands on the latest edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. What makes the Yearbook stand out is that it’s an excellent reference work for all IBM mainframe professionals – no matter how many years of experience they have.

What makes this annual publication so important? The answer is that it provides a one-stop shop for everything a mainframer needs to know. For example, the technical specification section includes model numbers, MIPS, and MSUs for zEnterprise processors (z196s and z114s). There’s also a hardware timeline, and a display of mainframe operating system evolution.

In addition, there’s the glossary of terminology section explaining simply what all those acronyms stand for, but in a way that means you can understand them.

One section provides a media guide for IBM mainframers. This includes information on newsletters, magazines, user groups, blogs, and social networking information resources for the z/OS environment. Amongst the things it highlights are zJournal, INSIGHT-SPECTRA, IBM Listservs, SHARE’s Five Minute Briefing on the Data Center, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn discussions. As well as user groups such as SHARE and IDUG.

The vendor directory section contains an up-to-date list of vendors, consultants, and service providers working in the z/OS environment. There’s a summary of the products they supply and contact information. There are a number of new organizations in the list this year, and, sadly, a few familiar names have ceased trading.

The mainframe strategy section contains articles by industry gurus and vendors on topics such as: Why incremental process-driven IT modernization is relevant for your business; Network management for the modern data centre; Next-generation mainframe management; Best practices for application release management; Peeling the onion of SFTP: options for securing file transfer to and from z/OS.

For many people the highlight each year is the mainframe user survey. This illustrates just what’s been happening at users’ sites. It’s a good way for mainframers to compare what they are planning to do with what other sites have done. I will be looking at some of the survey highlights in my next blog.

The other great thing about the Yearbook – as far as many of the 15,000 people who download it are concerned – is that it is completely FREE.

It can only be free because some organizations have been prepared to sponsor it or advertise in it. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

To see this year's Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, click on www.arcati.com/newyearbook12. If you don't want to download a large PDF, again this year, each section is available as a separate PDF file.

Don't miss out on this excellent publication.

SharePoint 2007 site collection auditing

We start the year with another in our series of SharePoint hints and tips from our expert Darren Pritchard. This time he’s looking at how to sucessfully audit SharePoint site collections.

To enable/disable SharePoint auditing:

1. Open the site that you wish to audit
2. Click ‘Site Actions’
3. Select ‘Site Settings’
4. Click ‘Modify All Site Settings’
5. Under ‘Site Collection Administration’ you have ‘Site collection audit settings’
6. You would see Figure 1.
7. Here you can select what you wish to audit
8. Be very careful, SharePoint will not automatically purge these audit logs. They will continue to grow as long as they are enabled. I have seen content databases with 80GB of audit files!

Figure 1: Configure Audit settings page

To trim audit files:

1. Create the batch file shown in Figure 2. Note: CONTENTDATABASE is the name of the database within SQL.
2. Save it as ‘Purge Audit Logs.bat’
3. This will need to be run on your SharePoint Web frontend server as an Administrator. Do not be alarmed if it takes a little while to run. The time it takes depends on the amount of audit logs you are trying to trim.

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"

%stsadm% -o trimauditlog -date -databasename

Pause

Figure 2: Purge Audit Logs.bat

I would suggest running this on a system without users because it may have an impact on performance.

If you have large amounts of audit log files, I would recommend running the trim command on a month’s worth of audit logs at a time. The SQL transaction log file will grow very large during the trim process.

Once you have trimmed the audit logs you will need to run a shrink database task within SQL to reclaim the space used during the trim process.

I'd like to thank Darren for his continuing contributions, and a happy New Year to everyone.

2011 at iTech-Ed Ltd

Well, as another year comes partying to an end, and everyone stops checking their e-mails on their smartphones or tablets and finally starts to let their hair down and enjoy a glass of something alcoholic, I thought I’d review the year through the lens of my company – iTech-Ed Ltd (www.itech-ed.com).

January started the year, as most Januaries do, with the publication of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. The 2011 edition is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. The 2012 edition will be available in a couple of weeks. As always the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook  includes its annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. And each year, it gets downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals.

February saw the launch of the new series of Virtual IMS user group meetings. The user group is now sponsored by Fundi Software and hosted at www.fundi.com/virtualims. The first speaker was Jim Martin from Fundi Software, whose presentation was called, “Solving the problem when IMS isn't the cause”.

In March, everyone seemed to be talking about cloud computing.

April’s meeting of the Virtual IMS user group included a presentation from Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software. His talk was called, “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”.

In May, Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd and I took part in a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’ section of CA’s May Mainframe Madness month. May also witnessed the launch of the new Virtual CICS user group – again sponsored by Fundi – with its Web site at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. Our opening presentation was from Fundi’s Jim Martin talking about, “Solving the problem when CICS isn't the cause”.

In June, I was asked by ITToolbox to lead a discussion in the Data Center Infrastructure section of their Web site. At the Virtual IMS user group meeting, Gary Weinhold a Systems Engineer and Verna Bartlett Head of Marketing with Data Kinetics talked about, “MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications”.

In July, I was selected for the Destination z (www.destinationz.org/) member spotlight. The Virtual CICS user group saw a presentation from Jeff Geminder, Principal Consultant with CA, called, “Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack”. I was also a guest blogger on the Destination z Web site.

In August, my article CICS Top Performance and Tuning Issues was published in z/Journal. I had a guest blog published on Destination z. The Virtual IMS user group had a presentation from Scott Quillicy, CEO and Founder of SQData. His talk was called, “IMS replication for high-availability”.

For the September meeting, Charles Jones, from the Product Management group at Rocket Software, gave a talk to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. I wrote a guest blog for the Destination z Web site.

October saw a presentation from Rosemary Galvan, Principal Software Consultant – IMS, with BMC. Her talk to the Virtual IMS user group was called, “Database Performance – Could Have, Should Have, Would Have”. I had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

In November, my Mainframe Update blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com was a finalist in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011. Also in November the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey was launched. And Eugene S Hudders, president of C\TREK Corp, gave a presentation to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS Performance – Tuning LSR Pools”. I also had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

And finally, in December, I had an article entitled, Ways to Save Money and Improve IT Services published in z/Journal. The final speaker for the year at the Virtual IMS user group was Suzie Wendler, a Consulting IT Specialist in the IBM IMS Advanced Technical Skills organization, who talked about, “IMS V12”. I chaired a webinar for SQData entitled, “How Important is Continous Availability of Critical Applications to Your Company?”And there was a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

What else, well apart from a full year of writing and consultancy work,  I was made an IBM Champion for the third year running.

Looking forward to 2012, we have the launch of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook in January, and a presentation from Andrew Smithson of IBM Hursley on CICS Transaction Gateway V8.1 for the Virtual CICS user group.

If you do celebrate it, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll be back blogging in January.
Trevor Eddolls

Sunk without trace

There was a time when using the trace facility was really the final strategy. You’d perhaps have tried everything else to find what was going wrong first. And when nothing seemed to have worked, you’d equip yourself with all the necessary manuals – and that could be quite a few – and run the trace and start the hard job of interpreting the results. And then try to fix the problem. Those days are long gone thanks to more modern software tools, but, to many people, the memories linger on!

I recently bumped into William Data Systems’ Tony Amies, who took the time to show me some of the things he was working on. And one of those things was making trace much, much, more user friendly.

Tony showed me WDS’s ZEN product, which, as you may know, allows lots of network monitoring information to be collated and viewed from anywhere using a browser. Information can appear as coloured boxes, which once you clicked on them display more-and-more information in a clever drill-down manner. Fairly quickly, you can identify the component that has exceeded some predetermined threshold.

WDS has a number of products in the ZEN family and you can use buttons on the browser to switch between them – giving you information about different aspects of performance. ZIM the ZEN IP MONITOR can detect error conditions, then ZEN TRACE and SOLVE (ZTS – which used to be called EXIGENCE) can be used to start, stop, and view traces. Now that has got to be so much easier than in the Old Days!

Tony showed how a TCP trace could be carried out in seconds, explaining that there were lots of commands embedded in it. Tony explained how network tracing can be so difficult. For example, using Enterprise Extender, which allows SNA applications to run over TCP networks, results in encapsulated messages. Tony demonstrated software that was able to look inside the message to see what was there – in terms of different types of header. He then explained how this works with FMH5, UDP, IP, APPN, HPR, and more. He explained that sites using the Cisco load balancing GRE tunnelling protocol can also be opened to see the true header for the message. All very clever stuff – and no manuals in sight.

In fact, on a number of occasions a right mouse click on some information in the display would produce a pop-up box explaining exactly what some term or other actually meant. So there was no need for any manuals. The display could show delays, highlight response time problems, and the TCP window size.

Tony also showed me a piece of software that drew a diagram of a Sysplex Distributor – which shows the IP addresses and links on a mainframe system. The software also highlighted where there were issues. And, like the rest of the software we looked at, you could drill down to find exactly where any problem were. In fact, Tony was sure that this would allow customers to identify potential issues before their users did. Behind the scenes, information from netstat and other commands were being used to drive the display.

We talked about customers being able to build business service views of what was going on their system and how useful that would be for each of their customers. That kind of bespoke requirement wasn’t something that Tony could necessarily build into the software, but all it requires is a knowledge of REXX to make it happen. And most z/OS sites have at least one person who code in REXX.

Lastly, we talked about problem resolution when you have two or more systems that don’t seem to be talking to each other. Currently, you need to log into each system and run traces to find out which of the systems has the problem. Tony plans to implement a ‘grouptrace’ feature that allows the user to tell the software to run a trace on these two (or more) systems. The results will come back from both systems and be visible from the browser. The results will be displayed in timestamp order and it will be possible to see on which of the systems the problem is. As easy that.

Too often we’d be sunk without a trace facility. Now we have an example of a way to be able to use trace across multiple systems and simply click to drill down to identify the problem.

The future - gamification and augmented reality

I remember many years ago saying to my children that one day, when they walked around London or any capital city, they’d be able to hold up their phone in front of a statue or building and information would appear on screen explaining what the statue commemorated, etc.
 
But how about if you could hold up your phone in front of the mainframe or some x86 server, and on screen would appear statistics about usage and performance? You could then take appropriate action to resolve hot spots and capacity issues. All just a dream? Apparently not.
 
Beverley Head’s blog at IT Wire (www.itwire.com/cloud-computing/51364-bmc-sniffs-out-next-generation-tools) from last week suggests that BMC is exploring how it can harness gamification and augmented reality techniques in the next generation of its systems management tools. Beverley reports Suhas Kelkar, a chief technology officer for BMC, describing the server example I gave above. Suhas adds: “If someone comes across an intelligent solution they should add it to the knowledge base. But hardly anyone does it. But what if you gamify the system and reward people for doing that?”
 
So there we have it... Augmented reality is the appearance on your phone of information about server capacity. And it could be about anything else. Wouldn’t it be great to hold your phone over a cable and read off the upstream and downstream broadband speeds?
 
Gamification – a new word, so try to drop into conversations, if you want to sound up-to-date – then is the fun part of using software. The part that is all too often missing!
 
Interestingly, I found an article about gamification from back in May this year at www.dnitza.com/2011/05/21/gamifcation-making-fun-of-the-web/. Daniel Nitsikopoulos talks about “Gamification: Making fun of the web”. He asserts that: “Gamification is one of the newest and I believe one of the biggest movements in the creative world today. It is the concept that you can apply game mechanics (elements that make games fun, engaging, and in some cases competitive) to things that aren’t typically considered a game, or even fun! From work, to health, to socialising, to cooking, to just about anything!”
 
So if BMC is looking at gamification and augmented reality, you can bet CA Technologies is as well. And that other big software supplier, IBM! But I would bet that the really exciting stuff is going to come from smaller companies. And I would also predict that these smaller companies will one-by-one be swallowed up by the existing software giants.
 
It definitely gets my vote as a direction I’d like technology to move in. Some equivalent to Google Goggles that not only identifies what you’re looking at (the Web server, or the z/Linux LPAR, or whatever) and provides current performance information. And then makes it fun to resolve any problems that might have been identified. Maybe when you look at the x86 server, it appears in red if there are issues. Then the length of time you take to resolve the problem is entered onto a leader board. And at the end of the week you can see who is the fastest techie in your team! Or perhaps the only green screen you’ll see will mean ‘game over’!