The Titans, in Greek mythology, were originally twelve powerful gods. They were later overthrown by Zeus and the Olympian gods. I'm not talking about them. Nor am I talking about the fictional characters created by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson in their Legends of Dune novels. Today I want to talk about an interesting announcement from NEON Enterprise Software (www.neonesoft.com) called TITAN Archive.
So what makes TITAN Archive more interesting than anything else announced in September? Well, basically, its simplicity and usefulness. It is described as a "database archiving solution", which means that an organization can use it to store structured data for long periods of time. And why should anyone want to do that? Well the answer is compliance.
Regulations are getting stricter in so many countries, and companies are now compelled for legal reasons to store large amounts of data for long periods of time. In fact, data retention could now be between 6 and 25 years. Many organizations are defining their own retention policies and are looking for ways to action those policies that are economic and allow data to be recalled quickly and easily (now called e-discovery if it's needed for a court case), and, at the same time, doesn't affect the performance of their current computing needs. They are looking for a solution that meets all compliance and legal requirements and can be used in the event litigation.
At the moment, TITAN Archive works with DB2, but plans are in place for a version for Oracle and one for IMS. Both data and metadata are stored in what's called an Encapsulated Archive Data Object (EADO). The EADO format is independent of the source DBMS (which may very well change at a company in the course of 25 years!) and can be accessed or queried using standard SQL queries or reports – which makes accessing it very easy. The data can be stored for as long as necessary. TITAN Archive can also have a discard policy, which makes sure that data is deleted when it is no longer required for legal or commercial purposes.
TITAN Archive connects to a storage area network and is managed from a Java interface that could be deployed across the enterprise or secured to a single location. The heart of TITAN Archive is the archive appliance. This is a Linux server that performs all the TITAN Archive processing.
Moving archive data off the mainframe and being able to access it easily, while retaining it for the longer periods of time now required, is a problem many companies face. TITAN Archive seems like a very useful and economic solution to this problem.
Sunday, 30 September 2007
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
How Green Was My Valley – and how green are my computers?
How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn and a 1941 film directed by John Ford. It was written and filmed in the days when green was just a colour and not an aspirational life style. I blogged about IBM’s green data centre plans a few months ago, but I wanted to revisit this whole issue.
There does seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what’s green and what isn’t, and it does seem to depend on how you look at an issue.
For example, I have heard it said that because flat screens use less energy than cathode ray tubes, we should all (if we haven’t done so already) get rid of those old screen and replace them with new flat ones. Apparently wrong! Because of the huge amount of energy and resources it takes to create a CRT and a flat screen, it is, in fact, more energy efficient to use that CRT right up to the moment it fails, and then change to a flat screen. This is because, although per hour of usage the flat screen is greener, the total amount of energy it took to extract all the raw materials and then construct the screen far outweigh the energy used by that screen. So we should be using that old device until it no longer works and then change over.
Interestingly, thinking about the raw resources, it has been suggested that a standard PC uses 1.8 tonnes of raw materials.
Another common comment is that recycling computers is a good thing. The idea is that computers contain lots of expensive metals (like gold) so old ones should be stripped down and the expensive metals extracted and reused. Unfortunately, the energy audit for this is quite high. So is there a better alternative? Well yes, or else I wouldn’t have mentioned it! There are a variety of companies and charities that will refurbish computers and peripherals. This refurbished PC could be re-sold or it could be shipped to the developing world – both better choices than trying to regain the metal from the old PC and then using it in a new one. It’s the difference between re-use and recycling.
Storage vendor ONStor recently found that 58% of the companies they surveyed were either still talking about creating a green IT environment, or still have no plans to do anything. But with conflicting and confusing messages that isn't completely surprising.
Things like consolidation and virtualization could help reduce power, cooling, and other operational expenses – and these would therefore help reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, etc.
Of course, we could all do more. Many sites (and many of my friends’ houses) have old machines sitting in cupboards and under unused desks. These could be given to charities and sent on to developing countries. They’re certainly not doing anyone any good gathering dust. And even if the computer doesn’t work, given two or three machines, enough spare components could be put together to get one that does work – and which would the be put to good use.
Even if we’re not concerned with being green, with saving the planet, or helping third-world countries, we are paying the electricity bill. So in terms of simple economics, powering off unused printers and computers and anything else we leave in stand-by mode will save us money and is a way of being green too. I know you can’t power off your mainframe, but there’s often a lot of laptops left on in offices. Think, how green can your offices be – not just your data centre?!
Office of the future?
It had to happen – I was bound to be sent a DOCX file. This is the new file type associated with Microsoft Office 2007. It’s all to do with the Office Open XML format Microsoft is keen on, and, of course, my copy of Office 2000 can’t open it. To be fair, Microsoft does have download that allows Office 2000 to open DOCX files, but it comes with health warnings and caveats, so I haven’t tried it.
I have wondered in the past about keeping the faith with Microsoft or whether I should go the Open Source route and install OpenOffice etc. Indeed I wrestled for a long time with getting Linux installed permanently on my PC (and not just booting up a distro from a CD every now and again).
So, I read with interest that IBM has decided to join the OpenOffice.org development community and is even donating some code that it developed for Lotus Notes. (Interestingly, Ray Ozzie, who developed Notes now works for Microsoft). OpenOffice.org was founded by Sun and works to the Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard – not Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML or Open XML) format.
Apparently, the code that was developed for Notes was derived in part from what was originally Microsoft-developed technology! It seems that IBM’s iAccessible2 specification, which makes accessibility features available to visually-impaired users interacting with ODF-compliant applications, was developed from Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA). IBM has already donated the iAccessible2 specification to the Linux Foundation. iAccessible2 can run on Windows or Linux and is a set of APIs to make it easy for visuals in applications based on ODF and other Web technologies to be interpreted by screen readers that then reproduce the information verbally for the blind.
Luckily, I’m not visually impaired and have no use for this technology, but I have a friend who works a lot with Web site design so that they can be used by visually-impaired people, and I have listened with interest while he talks about things I previously took for granted. It is important.
Anyway, even if IBM’s motives are not pure and they secretly hope that OOXML never becomes an ISO standard, making this kind of technology freely available has got to be a good thing.
Maybe we should all take another look at OpenOffice.
I have wondered in the past about keeping the faith with Microsoft or whether I should go the Open Source route and install OpenOffice etc. Indeed I wrestled for a long time with getting Linux installed permanently on my PC (and not just booting up a distro from a CD every now and again).
So, I read with interest that IBM has decided to join the OpenOffice.org development community and is even donating some code that it developed for Lotus Notes. (Interestingly, Ray Ozzie, who developed Notes now works for Microsoft). OpenOffice.org was founded by Sun and works to the Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard – not Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML or Open XML) format.
Apparently, the code that was developed for Notes was derived in part from what was originally Microsoft-developed technology! It seems that IBM’s iAccessible2 specification, which makes accessibility features available to visually-impaired users interacting with ODF-compliant applications, was developed from Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA). IBM has already donated the iAccessible2 specification to the Linux Foundation. iAccessible2 can run on Windows or Linux and is a set of APIs to make it easy for visuals in applications based on ODF and other Web technologies to be interpreted by screen readers that then reproduce the information verbally for the blind.
Luckily, I’m not visually impaired and have no use for this technology, but I have a friend who works a lot with Web site design so that they can be used by visually-impaired people, and I have listened with interest while he talks about things I previously took for granted. It is important.
Anyway, even if IBM’s motives are not pure and they secretly hope that OOXML never becomes an ISO standard, making this kind of technology freely available has got to be a good thing.
Maybe we should all take another look at OpenOffice.
Facebook – cocaine for the Internet generation?
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was blogging about social networks on the Internet and how I thought that Facebook was being colonized by older people not just students and other youngsters. And now I find that Facebook is being treated by some companies as the most evil thing since the last virus or worm infection!
What’s happened is that Facebook has caught on, and a large number of ordinary working people have uploaded photos to it and linked with other “friends”. That all sounds rather good – where’s the harm in that? Well it seems that these same working people have been seduced by the many “applications” available with Facebook – and I particularly like Pandora (but that’s because I listen to www.pandora.com anyway), Where I’ve been, and My aquarium. But the truth is, there are lots of these applications, such as: FunWall, Horoscopes, Fortune cookie, My solar system, The sorting hat, Moods, Superpoke, Likenesses, Harry Potter magic spells, etc, etc.
The problem is two-fold for employers. Firstly, too many employees are spending too much time interacting with their friends, uploading photos and videos, and messing about with the applications. The “lost” hours of work are mounting up, and so companies are banning access to Facebook. Some are allowing access at lunch times and after the defined working day, but other companies, apparently, have gone for a blanket ban.
The second problem is that large amounts of a company’s broadband bandwidth is being used by Facebookers rather than people doing productive work.
The third problem is that these applications seem to get round corporate firewalls and anti-virus software, with the result that they create a backdoor through which anything nasty could enter. No-one wants a security risk left undealt with.
This must be good publicity for Facebook, making it seem especially attractive – nothing boosts sales of a product like a ban! However, many wiser heads have been here before. I remember the first computer game – the one that was text only, and where a small dwarf threw an axe at you and killed you. Lots of hours were lost with that until the mood passed. More recently MSN has been banned at some sites because people spent all day talking to each other on that rather than getting on with work. These things come in phases, work time is lost, then the mood changes, work is caught up with and that old hot item is ignored. I would expect to see, this time next year, that Facebook is still popular, but not so compulsive as it is now. People won’t need to be banned from Facebook because they will not feel compelled to access it. But, I would bet, there’ll be some other must-visit Website, and we’ll be off again!
These things have been compared to crack cocaine and other “recreational” drugs. In truth they can be very compulsive for a while, but, unlike narcotics, eventually you want less-and-less of them not more-and-more.
What’s happened is that Facebook has caught on, and a large number of ordinary working people have uploaded photos to it and linked with other “friends”. That all sounds rather good – where’s the harm in that? Well it seems that these same working people have been seduced by the many “applications” available with Facebook – and I particularly like Pandora (but that’s because I listen to www.pandora.com anyway), Where I’ve been, and My aquarium. But the truth is, there are lots of these applications, such as: FunWall, Horoscopes, Fortune cookie, My solar system, The sorting hat, Moods, Superpoke, Likenesses, Harry Potter magic spells, etc, etc.
The problem is two-fold for employers. Firstly, too many employees are spending too much time interacting with their friends, uploading photos and videos, and messing about with the applications. The “lost” hours of work are mounting up, and so companies are banning access to Facebook. Some are allowing access at lunch times and after the defined working day, but other companies, apparently, have gone for a blanket ban.
The second problem is that large amounts of a company’s broadband bandwidth is being used by Facebookers rather than people doing productive work.
The third problem is that these applications seem to get round corporate firewalls and anti-virus software, with the result that they create a backdoor through which anything nasty could enter. No-one wants a security risk left undealt with.
This must be good publicity for Facebook, making it seem especially attractive – nothing boosts sales of a product like a ban! However, many wiser heads have been here before. I remember the first computer game – the one that was text only, and where a small dwarf threw an axe at you and killed you. Lots of hours were lost with that until the mood passed. More recently MSN has been banned at some sites because people spent all day talking to each other on that rather than getting on with work. These things come in phases, work time is lost, then the mood changes, work is caught up with and that old hot item is ignored. I would expect to see, this time next year, that Facebook is still popular, but not so compulsive as it is now. People won’t need to be banned from Facebook because they will not feel compelled to access it. But, I would bet, there’ll be some other must-visit Website, and we’ll be off again!
These things have been compared to crack cocaine and other “recreational” drugs. In truth they can be very compulsive for a while, but, unlike narcotics, eventually you want less-and-less of them not more-and-more.
The “dinosaur” lives on
I can still remember those distant days of the 1990s when everyone you spoke to “knew” that mainframes were doomed to extinction, and dates were confidently predicted when the last one would be turned off. These sit alongside, in terms of accuracy, predictions about how many computers a country would need in the future – I think two was the best guess, just one fewer than in my office at the moment!
Not only have the “dinosaurs” lived on, they are continuing to evolve and flourish – as witnessed by this “summer of love” for all things mainframe from IBM. They started with the latest version of CICS (V3.2), then we had the latest DB2 (9.1), and now we have the operating system itself, z/OS V1.9.
In summary, the new Release has been enhanced so that typical Unix applications, such as ERP or CRM (which are usually found on mid-range machines at the moment), can be ported to z/OS more easily.
Also there have been upgrades in terms of security and scalability. With improved network security management tools, it’s now easier to set consistent network security policies across distributed systems that communicate with the mainframe, as well as multiple instances of the operating system. Other security improvements come from enhanced PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) Services and RACF to help improve the creation, authentication, renewal, and management of digital certificates for user and device authentication directly through the mainframe. This now provides centralized management for Web-based applications. z/OS’s PKI could be used to secure a wireless network infrastructure or the end nodes of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that might be hosting point of sale or ATM communications traffic. Lastly, the z/OS Integrated Cryptographic Service Facility (ICSF) will be enhanced to include the PKCS#11 standard, which specifies an Application-Programming Interface (API) for devices that hold cryptographic information and perform cryptographic functions.
One of the biggest improvements is the ability for logical partitions to span up to 54 processors – previously they were limited (if limited is the right word here) to 32 processors.
The upgrade becomes available on the 28 September 2007.
So are mainframes going extinct and this is little more than a dead-cat-bounce? Definitely not. IBM is saying that its revenue grew by 12% in the first quarter of the year over the previous quarter and up 25% over the previous year. Remember that dinosaurs ruled the earth for 186 million years!
Not only have the “dinosaurs” lived on, they are continuing to evolve and flourish – as witnessed by this “summer of love” for all things mainframe from IBM. They started with the latest version of CICS (V3.2), then we had the latest DB2 (9.1), and now we have the operating system itself, z/OS V1.9.
In summary, the new Release has been enhanced so that typical Unix applications, such as ERP or CRM (which are usually found on mid-range machines at the moment), can be ported to z/OS more easily.
Also there have been upgrades in terms of security and scalability. With improved network security management tools, it’s now easier to set consistent network security policies across distributed systems that communicate with the mainframe, as well as multiple instances of the operating system. Other security improvements come from enhanced PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) Services and RACF to help improve the creation, authentication, renewal, and management of digital certificates for user and device authentication directly through the mainframe. This now provides centralized management for Web-based applications. z/OS’s PKI could be used to secure a wireless network infrastructure or the end nodes of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that might be hosting point of sale or ATM communications traffic. Lastly, the z/OS Integrated Cryptographic Service Facility (ICSF) will be enhanced to include the PKCS#11 standard, which specifies an Application-Programming Interface (API) for devices that hold cryptographic information and perform cryptographic functions.
One of the biggest improvements is the ability for logical partitions to span up to 54 processors – previously they were limited (if limited is the right word here) to 32 processors.
The upgrade becomes available on the 28 September 2007.
So are mainframes going extinct and this is little more than a dead-cat-bounce? Definitely not. IBM is saying that its revenue grew by 12% in the first quarter of the year over the previous quarter and up 25% over the previous year. Remember that dinosaurs ruled the earth for 186 million years!
Where am I?
I am just back from China and suffering from the usual affects of jet lag – so just a short blog (you’ll be pleased to hear).
I thought I’d pass on lots of Chinese wisdom, but you’ve probably heard them all before. Anyway, as I think they say, the longest blog begins with a single word!
So, I was thinking about my IP address now that I’m back – I was wondering what it was. So I downloaded a widget called what.ip.i.have by Vlad Sasu. I’m a big fan of widgets, which is now a Yahoo product (widgets.yahoo.com). I use widgets for the weather and the rainfall, and I have a BBC newsfeed and one showing my blogs (although it could be set for any other RSS feed). The new widget installed and told me my IP address.
The next stage, I thought, would be to look up that IP address on one of those sites that tell you where in the world each IP address comes from. I live in the beautiful west country near Bath and Bristol in the UK. My broadband connection is a slightly dear, but usually reliable, connection through BT.
So, my next stage was to go to Google and search for sites that would tell me where my IP address came from. I thought it would be an interesting test. In no particular order, I first tried www.ip-adress.com. Like many of the others, it “knew” my IP address already and showed that I was located in Silvertown in Newham, which is east London near the River Thames. I thought that perhaps BT’s cables joined the rest of the world at that point.
Next I tried http://whatismyipaddress.com, and that came up with Silvertown as well. So I thought that definitely must be where I am (Internetwise that is).
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/iplocation.asp, however, thought I was in Basingstoke, in England. And so did http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm, which even gave Basingstoke’s longitude and latitude. http://www.ip2location.com/ also had me in Basingstoke.
http://www.analysespider.com/ip2country/lookup.php knew I was in the UK, but had my IP address as coming from Suffolk – which is about as far east of me as you can go without falling into the English Channel.
http://www.blueforge.org/map/ had me miles from anywhere on the Yorkshire Dales – very picturesque, of course, but miles away. And that’s when I stopped.
I just wondered whether other people had tried these IP locators with any degree of success. Ah well, as they said in China, we do live in interesting times!
I thought I’d pass on lots of Chinese wisdom, but you’ve probably heard them all before. Anyway, as I think they say, the longest blog begins with a single word!
So, I was thinking about my IP address now that I’m back – I was wondering what it was. So I downloaded a widget called what.ip.i.have by Vlad Sasu. I’m a big fan of widgets, which is now a Yahoo product (widgets.yahoo.com). I use widgets for the weather and the rainfall, and I have a BBC newsfeed and one showing my blogs (although it could be set for any other RSS feed). The new widget installed and told me my IP address.
The next stage, I thought, would be to look up that IP address on one of those sites that tell you where in the world each IP address comes from. I live in the beautiful west country near Bath and Bristol in the UK. My broadband connection is a slightly dear, but usually reliable, connection through BT.
So, my next stage was to go to Google and search for sites that would tell me where my IP address came from. I thought it would be an interesting test. In no particular order, I first tried www.ip-adress.com. Like many of the others, it “knew” my IP address already and showed that I was located in Silvertown in Newham, which is east London near the River Thames. I thought that perhaps BT’s cables joined the rest of the world at that point.
Next I tried http://whatismyipaddress.com, and that came up with Silvertown as well. So I thought that definitely must be where I am (Internetwise that is).
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/iplocation.asp, however, thought I was in Basingstoke, in England. And so did http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm, which even gave Basingstoke’s longitude and latitude. http://www.ip2location.com/ also had me in Basingstoke.
http://www.analysespider.com/ip2country/lookup.php knew I was in the UK, but had my IP address as coming from Suffolk – which is about as far east of me as you can go without falling into the English Channel.
http://www.blueforge.org/map/ had me miles from anywhere on the Yorkshire Dales – very picturesque, of course, but miles away. And that’s when I stopped.
I just wondered whether other people had tried these IP locators with any degree of success. Ah well, as they said in China, we do live in interesting times!
Social networking
Someone was telling me that some top IT people who write blogs regularly and have a presence on Facebook and Myspace, etc are now so busy with these Web-based interactions that they don’t have time to do their real jobs properly. So, they employ people to live their Web life for them while they get on with their proper work!
This is to confirm that I am really writing this blog and I don’t have an employee doing it for me!!
Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Myspace (www.myspace.com) are two really interesting examples of how the Web has developed. Both started out as the domain of youngsters and are now being colonized by older people – parents and grandparents of the original users. It appears that we are all keen on social networking.
Recently-announced figures suggest that Facebook has grown by 270 percent and Myspace by 72 percent in a year. Although Myspace has more users logging in each day (28.8 million) than Facebook (which has 15 million).
The good thing about these sites, according to marketeers, is that they identify new trends very early in their life-cycle. So marketing people know exactly what products they should be selling this season.
The downside, I suppose, is that this cult of newness means that after a time the excitement goes from these sites and they gradually shrink in terms of usage. At one time, everyone was talking about friendsreunited (www.friendsreunited.co.uk) and catching up with old school friends. Once you’ve caught up, the point of such a site diminishes. Similarly, Friendster (www.friendster.com) was very popular, but is perhaps less so now.
Youtube (www.youtube.com) is also very popular with youngest because of the humorous and other short videos you can see there. I’m not sure that much interaction occurs between users on this site except someone uploads a video and other people can watch it, but lots of people have joined.
A question many people ask is, are they dangerous? Facebook allows you to collect friends – in fact a colleague and I were having a competition earlier this year to see who could get the most friends on Facebook! When we stopped, we were still not even slightly close to the totals my children and their friends have. But is it dangerous? Does it encourage sexual predators, and are our youngsters at risk? The answer is probably not because the more real friends you have on these networks the less likely you are to talk to strangers.
Wikipedia (itself often maligned) lists 100 social networking sites at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites. You can see how many you belong to.
Like lots of other people, I have an entry on LinkedIn (www.linkedincom), Zoominfo (www.zoominfo.com), Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), and Naymz (www.naymz.com), and I have links to other people. However, if I really want to talk to any of these people, I e-mail them, which is exactly what I would have done if I didn’t belong to the networking site.
I think the plethora of social networking sites will eventually shrink to a few that everyone can use and a few that are specialized. I think some will grab people’s attention and become somewhere that you must have a presence, and others will wither and die as they forget to update or update with facilities that no-one really cares about. I think they could be useful as business tools if you could get people to join your group. For example, all the subscribers to Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) CICS Update could form a group on Facebook and share information about CICS. However, I’m not sure that most people belonging to these networks take them that seriously and would spend enough time talking to their group for there to be a business case, at the moment.
Anyway, the real Trevor Eddolls will not be blogging next week because I am going to be a tourist in China. Any burglars reading this post, please note that someone will be feeding our large and fierce dogs twice a day.
This is to confirm that I am really writing this blog and I don’t have an employee doing it for me!!
Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Myspace (www.myspace.com) are two really interesting examples of how the Web has developed. Both started out as the domain of youngsters and are now being colonized by older people – parents and grandparents of the original users. It appears that we are all keen on social networking.
Recently-announced figures suggest that Facebook has grown by 270 percent and Myspace by 72 percent in a year. Although Myspace has more users logging in each day (28.8 million) than Facebook (which has 15 million).
The good thing about these sites, according to marketeers, is that they identify new trends very early in their life-cycle. So marketing people know exactly what products they should be selling this season.
The downside, I suppose, is that this cult of newness means that after a time the excitement goes from these sites and they gradually shrink in terms of usage. At one time, everyone was talking about friendsreunited (www.friendsreunited.co.uk) and catching up with old school friends. Once you’ve caught up, the point of such a site diminishes. Similarly, Friendster (www.friendster.com) was very popular, but is perhaps less so now.
Youtube (www.youtube.com) is also very popular with youngest because of the humorous and other short videos you can see there. I’m not sure that much interaction occurs between users on this site except someone uploads a video and other people can watch it, but lots of people have joined.
A question many people ask is, are they dangerous? Facebook allows you to collect friends – in fact a colleague and I were having a competition earlier this year to see who could get the most friends on Facebook! When we stopped, we were still not even slightly close to the totals my children and their friends have. But is it dangerous? Does it encourage sexual predators, and are our youngsters at risk? The answer is probably not because the more real friends you have on these networks the less likely you are to talk to strangers.
Wikipedia (itself often maligned) lists 100 social networking sites at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites. You can see how many you belong to.
Like lots of other people, I have an entry on LinkedIn (www.linkedincom), Zoominfo (www.zoominfo.com), Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), and Naymz (www.naymz.com), and I have links to other people. However, if I really want to talk to any of these people, I e-mail them, which is exactly what I would have done if I didn’t belong to the networking site.
I think the plethora of social networking sites will eventually shrink to a few that everyone can use and a few that are specialized. I think some will grab people’s attention and become somewhere that you must have a presence, and others will wither and die as they forget to update or update with facilities that no-one really cares about. I think they could be useful as business tools if you could get people to join your group. For example, all the subscribers to Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) CICS Update could form a group on Facebook and share information about CICS. However, I’m not sure that most people belonging to these networks take them that seriously and would spend enough time talking to their group for there to be a business case, at the moment.
Anyway, the real Trevor Eddolls will not be blogging next week because I am going to be a tourist in China. Any burglars reading this post, please note that someone will be feeding our large and fierce dogs twice a day.
Viper 2
Last week I was talking about AIX 6, which IBM is making available as an open beta – which means anyone can test it out so long as they report their findings to IBM. This week I want to talk about Viper 2, the latest version of DB2 9, which is also available as a download for beta testers. You can register for the Viper 2 open beta program at www.ibm.com/db2/xml. The commercial version is slated to ship later this year.
DB2 9 (the original Viper) was released in July 2006. What made it so special was the way it could handle both relational and XML data easily, which was made possible by the use of pureXML. Users were able to simultaneously manage structured data plus documents and other types of content. This, IBM claims, made it superior to products from other database vendors – you know who they mean! Oracle 11g, which will have probably been announced when you read this, will have full native XML support. Sybase already has this facility.
According to recent figures from Gartner, IBM’s database software sales increased 8.8 percent in 2006 to just over $3.2 billion. However, Oracle’s had 14.9 percent growth and Microsoft had a 28 percent growth in databases. As a consequence, IBM’s share of the $15.2 billion relational database market decreased to 21.1 percent in 2006 from 22.1 percent in 2005.
Viper 2 offers enhanced workload management and security. The workload management tools will give better query performance from data warehouses, and better handling of XML data within the database – they say. There is also automated hands-off failover for high availability.
In addition, there’s simplified memory management and increased customization control. DB2 9 can perform transactional and analytical tasks at the same time, Viper 2 offers improved management tools for setting priorities between those tasks
And, it apparently has greater flexibility and granularity in security, auditing, and access control. It’s now easier to manage the process of granting access to specific information in the database. Viper 2 makes it simpler to manage and administer role-based privileges, for example label-based access control, which allows customers to set access privileges for individual columns of data. It is also easier to add performance and management enhancements to the system's audit facilities.
It is well worth a look.
DB2 9 (the original Viper) was released in July 2006. What made it so special was the way it could handle both relational and XML data easily, which was made possible by the use of pureXML. Users were able to simultaneously manage structured data plus documents and other types of content. This, IBM claims, made it superior to products from other database vendors – you know who they mean! Oracle 11g, which will have probably been announced when you read this, will have full native XML support. Sybase already has this facility.
According to recent figures from Gartner, IBM’s database software sales increased 8.8 percent in 2006 to just over $3.2 billion. However, Oracle’s had 14.9 percent growth and Microsoft had a 28 percent growth in databases. As a consequence, IBM’s share of the $15.2 billion relational database market decreased to 21.1 percent in 2006 from 22.1 percent in 2005.
Viper 2 offers enhanced workload management and security. The workload management tools will give better query performance from data warehouses, and better handling of XML data within the database – they say. There is also automated hands-off failover for high availability.
In addition, there’s simplified memory management and increased customization control. DB2 9 can perform transactional and analytical tasks at the same time, Viper 2 offers improved management tools for setting priorities between those tasks
And, it apparently has greater flexibility and granularity in security, auditing, and access control. It’s now easier to manage the process of granting access to specific information in the database. Viper 2 makes it simpler to manage and administer role-based privileges, for example label-based access control, which allows customers to set access privileges for individual columns of data. It is also easier to add performance and management enhancements to the system's audit facilities.
It is well worth a look.
Good news for AIX users?
IBM has announced that it is making available an open beta of AIX Version 6.1 – an upgrade to the currently available version of AIX. Now, the questions that immediately spring to mind are: is this a good thing? and why is IBM doing it?
Before I try to answer my own questions – or at least share my thoughts about those questions – let’s have a look at what AIX 6.1 has to offer. The big news is virtualization enhancements, with improved security also included. The IBM Web site tells us that workload partitions (WPARs) offer software-based virtualization that is designed to reduce the number of operating system images needing to be managed when consolidating workloads. The live application mobility feature allows users to move a workload partition from one server to another while the workload is running, which provides mainframe-like continuous availability. For security there is now role-based access control, which give administrators greater flexibility when granting user authorization and access control by role. There is also a new tool called the system director console, which provides access to the system management interface via a browser. The bad news for venturous adopters is that IBM is not providing any support – there’s just a Web forum for other users to share problems and possible solutions.
So, is it a good thing? The answer is (of course) a definite maybe! If lots of people pick up on the beta, and do thoroughly test it for IBM, then the final product, when it is released, will be very stable and not have any irritating teething problems. There could be thousands of beta testers rather than the usual small group of dedicated testers. Plus it could be tested on a whole range of hardware with almost every conceivable peripheral attached and third-party product run on it. And beta testers will get the benefit of the new virtualization features and security features.
Why is IBM doing it? Apart from getting their software beta tested for free, they also make it look like their version of Unix is part of the open source world. The reason I say that is because it is called an “open beta” – hence the verbal link with open source, which is perceived as being a good thing – rather than being called a public beta. To be clear, while some components of AIX are open source, the actual operating system isn’t open source.
AIX Version 6 is a completely new version – the current one is 5.3. The final version will probably be out in November. Announcing an open beta programme means that IBM can steal some limelight back from Unix rivals HP and Sun. All in all, it is good news for AIX users.
Before I try to answer my own questions – or at least share my thoughts about those questions – let’s have a look at what AIX 6.1 has to offer. The big news is virtualization enhancements, with improved security also included. The IBM Web site tells us that workload partitions (WPARs) offer software-based virtualization that is designed to reduce the number of operating system images needing to be managed when consolidating workloads. The live application mobility feature allows users to move a workload partition from one server to another while the workload is running, which provides mainframe-like continuous availability. For security there is now role-based access control, which give administrators greater flexibility when granting user authorization and access control by role. There is also a new tool called the system director console, which provides access to the system management interface via a browser. The bad news for venturous adopters is that IBM is not providing any support – there’s just a Web forum for other users to share problems and possible solutions.
So, is it a good thing? The answer is (of course) a definite maybe! If lots of people pick up on the beta, and do thoroughly test it for IBM, then the final product, when it is released, will be very stable and not have any irritating teething problems. There could be thousands of beta testers rather than the usual small group of dedicated testers. Plus it could be tested on a whole range of hardware with almost every conceivable peripheral attached and third-party product run on it. And beta testers will get the benefit of the new virtualization features and security features.
Why is IBM doing it? Apart from getting their software beta tested for free, they also make it look like their version of Unix is part of the open source world. The reason I say that is because it is called an “open beta” – hence the verbal link with open source, which is perceived as being a good thing – rather than being called a public beta. To be clear, while some components of AIX are open source, the actual operating system isn’t open source.
AIX Version 6 is a completely new version – the current one is 5.3. The final version will probably be out in November. Announcing an open beta programme means that IBM can steal some limelight back from Unix rivals HP and Sun. All in all, it is good news for AIX users.
A year in blogs
Without wishing to get all mushy about it, this is my blog’s birthday! It’s one-year old today. This is blog 52 and blog 1 was published on the 19th July 2006.
I’ve tried to comment on mainframe-related events that have caught my eye, and at times I have blogged about other computer-related things. I discussed stand-alone IP phones, problems with my new Vista laptop, wireless networks. I also talked about “green” data centre strategies and virtualization, although a lot of the time I was focused on CICS and z/OS and DB2.
Perhaps one measure of how successful a blog has become is by seeing whether anyone else on the Internet mentions it. Here are some of the places that have picked up on this blog.
The blog was referred to by Craig Mullins in his excellent blog at http://www.db2portal.com/2006/08/mainframe-weekly-new-mainframe-focused.html. It was also talked about at the Mainframe Watch Belgium blog http://mainframe-watch-belgium.blogspot.com/2007/04/fellow-bloggers.html. At least one blog has been republished at Blue Mainframe (http://bluemainframe.com/).
James Governor mentioned Mainframe Weekly in his Mainframe blog at http://mainframe.typepad.com/blog/.
The blog about William Data Systems’ use of AJAX in its Ferret product is also linked to from Williams Data Web site at http://www.willdata.com. There’s a reference to the “When is a mainframe not a mainframe?” blog at the Hercules-390 site at http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.hercules390.general/25845/.
My first blog on virtualization ("Virtualization – it's really clever") was also published on the DABCC Web site at http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=3553. The second one ("On Demand versus virtualization") can also be found on the DABCC Web site at http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=4346.
There is a reference to the same blog on the V-Magazine site at http://v-magazine.info/node/5189 and this links to Virtualization Technology news and information's VM blog page at http://vmblog.com/archive/2007/05/07/on-demand-versus-virtualization.aspx, where the full blog is republished.
That particular blog is also republished in full on the Virtual Strategy Magazine site at http://www.virtual-strategy.com/article/articleview/1999/1/7/. There's also a pointer to it at the IT BusinessEdge site at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=28159. Arthur Cole refers to this blog in his blog at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/dcc/?p=127. It was also quoted from at the PC Blade Daily site at http://www.pcbladecomputing.com/virtualization-plays-well-with-others.
It’s good to know that people are reading the blog and referring to it in their own blogs and on their Web sites. Looking to the future, in the next year, I plan to continue highlighting trends and interesting new products in the mainframe environment, while occasionally discussing other computing developments that catch my attention.
And finally, a big thank you to everyone who has read my blog during the past year.
I’ve tried to comment on mainframe-related events that have caught my eye, and at times I have blogged about other computer-related things. I discussed stand-alone IP phones, problems with my new Vista laptop, wireless networks. I also talked about “green” data centre strategies and virtualization, although a lot of the time I was focused on CICS and z/OS and DB2.
Perhaps one measure of how successful a blog has become is by seeing whether anyone else on the Internet mentions it. Here are some of the places that have picked up on this blog.
The blog was referred to by Craig Mullins in his excellent blog at http://www.db2portal.com/2006/08/mainframe-weekly-new-mainframe-focused.html. It was also talked about at the Mainframe Watch Belgium blog http://mainframe-watch-belgium.blogspot.com/2007/04/fellow-bloggers.html. At least one blog has been republished at Blue Mainframe (http://bluemainframe.com/).
James Governor mentioned Mainframe Weekly in his Mainframe blog at http://mainframe.typepad.com/blog/.
The blog about William Data Systems’ use of AJAX in its Ferret product is also linked to from Williams Data Web site at http://www.willdata.com. There’s a reference to the “When is a mainframe not a mainframe?” blog at the Hercules-390 site at http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.hercules390.general/25845/.
My first blog on virtualization ("Virtualization – it's really clever") was also published on the DABCC Web site at http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=3553. The second one ("On Demand versus virtualization") can also be found on the DABCC Web site at http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=4346.
There is a reference to the same blog on the V-Magazine site at http://v-magazine.info/node/5189 and this links to Virtualization Technology news and information's VM blog page at http://vmblog.com/archive/2007/05/07/on-demand-versus-virtualization.aspx, where the full blog is republished.
That particular blog is also republished in full on the Virtual Strategy Magazine site at http://www.virtual-strategy.com/article/articleview/1999/1/7/. There's also a pointer to it at the IT BusinessEdge site at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=28159. Arthur Cole refers to this blog in his blog at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/dcc/?p=127. It was also quoted from at the PC Blade Daily site at http://www.pcbladecomputing.com/virtualization-plays-well-with-others.
It’s good to know that people are reading the blog and referring to it in their own blogs and on their Web sites. Looking to the future, in the next year, I plan to continue highlighting trends and interesting new products in the mainframe environment, while occasionally discussing other computing developments that catch my attention.
And finally, a big thank you to everyone who has read my blog during the past year.
The times they are a-changin’
Today (Monday 16 July 2007) is my youngest daughter’s 21st birthday – so happy birthday to Jennifer. I started to think how things were different 21 years ago from how they are today – and hence I stole the title from Bob Dylan’s third album (released 1964) for the title of this blog.
21 years ago I’d just started working for Xephon (which I still do). I had a small laptop at home that I used for all my computing – although it was a Sinclair Spectrum and needed to be plugged in to a TV to see anything! IBM was the top mainframe computer company and you could use VM, VSE, or MVS as your operating systems. CICS and IMS were very popular transaction processing systems. But no-one had heard of OS/390 or z/OS. SNA was still king of communication with TCP/IP hardly being mentioned.
At work we shared Apple II computers – a luggable Mac each was still in the future. And we had so many pieces of paper!! We needed manuals and cuttings from the papers – you forget how the arrival of the Internet has made research so much easier. So, that’s another thing that’s changed – the Internet has revolutionized our lives. I can remember giving a course at that time where I would explain to people how many ways they interacted with a computer without them realising it. It sounds laughable today – you’d never do anything else on the course if you stuck to listing each person’s computer interactions!
The other thing that was missing 21 years ago that is such a necessary part of our lives is the mobile (cell) phone. You could be out of contact for a whole day and this was considered normal. Nowadays people expect an immediate answer. If you’re not getting calls on the phone then it’s text messages. There’s never been a generation of humans with such strong thumb muscles before! Teenagers can’t spell, but they can text amazingly fast.
21 years ago computer games were very simple. There was just no thought that a game would be able to respond to movements of your body like the Wii does. But, perhaps, back in those halcyon days, we went outside and played tennis or went swimming – sport that didn’t involve a TV screen.
Was it really a better simpler time? Were politicians less corrupt and the world a safer place? This is probably the wrong blog to answer those kinds of question. Would a CICS user from 1986 recognize a CICS screen from 2007? The answer is probably no. Gone are those green screen to be replaced by browsers. They wouldn’t recognize SOA, Web services, and all the other current buzzwords.
And yet despite all these changes listed above (and many others), a typical CICS or IMS user would still understand the concept of entering data and getting a suitable response.
So perhaps when you look at things from a personal perspective, although Dylan was right the times they are a-changin’ (laptops, phones, Internet, etc), the man-in-the-street still goes to work, it’s just what happens behind the scenes that has changed. For him, the French expression plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same – might have been a more accurate title for this review of 21 years.
What do you think?
21 years ago I’d just started working for Xephon (which I still do). I had a small laptop at home that I used for all my computing – although it was a Sinclair Spectrum and needed to be plugged in to a TV to see anything! IBM was the top mainframe computer company and you could use VM, VSE, or MVS as your operating systems. CICS and IMS were very popular transaction processing systems. But no-one had heard of OS/390 or z/OS. SNA was still king of communication with TCP/IP hardly being mentioned.
At work we shared Apple II computers – a luggable Mac each was still in the future. And we had so many pieces of paper!! We needed manuals and cuttings from the papers – you forget how the arrival of the Internet has made research so much easier. So, that’s another thing that’s changed – the Internet has revolutionized our lives. I can remember giving a course at that time where I would explain to people how many ways they interacted with a computer without them realising it. It sounds laughable today – you’d never do anything else on the course if you stuck to listing each person’s computer interactions!
The other thing that was missing 21 years ago that is such a necessary part of our lives is the mobile (cell) phone. You could be out of contact for a whole day and this was considered normal. Nowadays people expect an immediate answer. If you’re not getting calls on the phone then it’s text messages. There’s never been a generation of humans with such strong thumb muscles before! Teenagers can’t spell, but they can text amazingly fast.
21 years ago computer games were very simple. There was just no thought that a game would be able to respond to movements of your body like the Wii does. But, perhaps, back in those halcyon days, we went outside and played tennis or went swimming – sport that didn’t involve a TV screen.
Was it really a better simpler time? Were politicians less corrupt and the world a safer place? This is probably the wrong blog to answer those kinds of question. Would a CICS user from 1986 recognize a CICS screen from 2007? The answer is probably no. Gone are those green screen to be replaced by browsers. They wouldn’t recognize SOA, Web services, and all the other current buzzwords.
And yet despite all these changes listed above (and many others), a typical CICS or IMS user would still understand the concept of entering data and getting a suitable response.
So perhaps when you look at things from a personal perspective, although Dylan was right the times they are a-changin’ (laptops, phones, Internet, etc), the man-in-the-street still goes to work, it’s just what happens behind the scenes that has changed. For him, the French expression plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same – might have been a more accurate title for this review of 21 years.
What do you think?
Where can you go for help?
You’re an IBM mainframe user, where can you go for help with your mainframe problems? (If you were thinking of more personal problems, you’re reading the wrong blog!!) Well, my obvious answer would be Xephon’s Update publications (see www.xephonusa.com) or, perhaps, a search on Google (www.google.com), but IBM has recently introduced Destination z (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/destinationz/index.html).
IBM’s new Web-based portal is designed to allow its customers, system integrators, and software developers to talk about mainframe usage, share ideas, and ask for technical help from other users. And just in case you might find you need to buy something, Destination z has links to IBM sales. To be fair, though, it is meant to contain technical resources such as case histories and mainframe migration tools. Part of the thinking behind this development is to provide the expertise to help potential customers migrate workloads from other platforms to mainframes.
In marketing speak, the IBM announcement said that it will also provide space for business partners to drive business developments and provide a broad spectrum of technical resources.
Going back to Xephon, for a moment, the June issue of TCP/SNA Update shared some interesting ideas from mainframe networking specialists. There were two articles that included code that could be used in order to monitor and measure exactly what was going on. The first looked at VTAM storage utilization and the second looked at VTAM subpool storage utilization. A third article looked at the need to apply a PTF if you utilize the VTAM Configuration Services Exit. There are also two interesting articles. The first talks about SNA modernization, and the second discusses Enterprise Extenders.
If you have some mainframe networking information you would like to share you can send your article to me at trevore@xephon.com.
IBM’s new Web-based portal is designed to allow its customers, system integrators, and software developers to talk about mainframe usage, share ideas, and ask for technical help from other users. And just in case you might find you need to buy something, Destination z has links to IBM sales. To be fair, though, it is meant to contain technical resources such as case histories and mainframe migration tools. Part of the thinking behind this development is to provide the expertise to help potential customers migrate workloads from other platforms to mainframes.
In marketing speak, the IBM announcement said that it will also provide space for business partners to drive business developments and provide a broad spectrum of technical resources.
Going back to Xephon, for a moment, the June issue of TCP/SNA Update shared some interesting ideas from mainframe networking specialists. There were two articles that included code that could be used in order to monitor and measure exactly what was going on. The first looked at VTAM storage utilization and the second looked at VTAM subpool storage utilization. A third article looked at the need to apply a PTF if you utilize the VTAM Configuration Services Exit. There are also two interesting articles. The first talks about SNA modernization, and the second discusses Enterprise Extenders.
If you have some mainframe networking information you would like to share you can send your article to me at trevore@xephon.com.
Let’s hear it for Power6
A while ago I mentioned in this blog about IBM’s ECLipz project – their unannounced and mainly rumoured plan to create a single chip for System i, System p, and System z (hence the last three letters of the acronym). The big leap forward in this plan (according to rumour mills on the Web and elsewhere) was the much-touted Power6 chip, which IBM finally unveiled at the end of May.
Before we look at whether it fulfils any of the ECLipz hype, let’s see what was actually in the announcement. Running at a top speed of 4.7GHz, the microprocessor offers double the speed of a Power5 chip, yet still uses about the same amount of electricity to run and cool it (all part of the “green machine room”). This means customers can either double their performance or cut their power consumption in half by running at half the clock speed.
And while we’re talking “green”, the processor includes techniques to conserve power and reduce heat. In fact, the processor can be dynamically turned off when there is no useful work to be done and turned back on when there are instructions to be executed. Also, if extreme temperatures are detected, the Power6 chip can reduce its rate of execution to remain within an acceptable, user-defined, temperature range.
In terms of that other hot topic, virtualization, Power6 supports up to 1024 LPARs (Logical PARtitions). It also offers “live partition mobility”, which allows the resources in a specified LPAR to be increased or decreased, but, more interestingly, the applications in a virtual machine can be quiesced, the virtual machine can be moved from one physical server to another, and then everything restarts as though nothing had happened.
The new Systems Director Virtualization Manager eases virtualization management by including a Web-based interface and provides a single set of interfaces for managing all Power-based hardware and virtual partitions; and for discovering virtualized resources of the Virtual I/O server. Virtualization Manager 1.2 supports Power6 chips. It also supports Xen hypervisors included in Red Hat and Novell Linux distributions, as well as VMware, XenSource, and Microsoft Virtual Server.
As far as Project ECLipz goes, the Power6 chip does have redundancy features and support for mainframe instructions (including 50 new floating-point instructions designed to handle decimal maths and binary and decimal conversions). It’s the first Unix processor able to calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware – previously calculations involving decimal numbers with floating decimal points were done using software. There’s also an AltiVec unit (a floating-point and integer processing engine), compliance with IBM’s Power ISA V2.03 specification, and support for Virtual Vector Architecture-2 (ViVA-2), allowing a combination of Power6 nodes to function as a single Vector processor.
And in case you were wondering, IBM listed benchmark tests showing the Power6 chip was faster than Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 car, and perhaps hinted that H-P’s Itanium-based machines may as well just give up now!
Before we look at whether it fulfils any of the ECLipz hype, let’s see what was actually in the announcement. Running at a top speed of 4.7GHz, the microprocessor offers double the speed of a Power5 chip, yet still uses about the same amount of electricity to run and cool it (all part of the “green machine room”). This means customers can either double their performance or cut their power consumption in half by running at half the clock speed.
And while we’re talking “green”, the processor includes techniques to conserve power and reduce heat. In fact, the processor can be dynamically turned off when there is no useful work to be done and turned back on when there are instructions to be executed. Also, if extreme temperatures are detected, the Power6 chip can reduce its rate of execution to remain within an acceptable, user-defined, temperature range.
In terms of that other hot topic, virtualization, Power6 supports up to 1024 LPARs (Logical PARtitions). It also offers “live partition mobility”, which allows the resources in a specified LPAR to be increased or decreased, but, more interestingly, the applications in a virtual machine can be quiesced, the virtual machine can be moved from one physical server to another, and then everything restarts as though nothing had happened.
The new Systems Director Virtualization Manager eases virtualization management by including a Web-based interface and provides a single set of interfaces for managing all Power-based hardware and virtual partitions; and for discovering virtualized resources of the Virtual I/O server. Virtualization Manager 1.2 supports Power6 chips. It also supports Xen hypervisors included in Red Hat and Novell Linux distributions, as well as VMware, XenSource, and Microsoft Virtual Server.
As far as Project ECLipz goes, the Power6 chip does have redundancy features and support for mainframe instructions (including 50 new floating-point instructions designed to handle decimal maths and binary and decimal conversions). It’s the first Unix processor able to calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware – previously calculations involving decimal numbers with floating decimal points were done using software. There’s also an AltiVec unit (a floating-point and integer processing engine), compliance with IBM’s Power ISA V2.03 specification, and support for Virtual Vector Architecture-2 (ViVA-2), allowing a combination of Power6 nodes to function as a single Vector processor.
And in case you were wondering, IBM listed benchmark tests showing the Power6 chip was faster than Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 car, and perhaps hinted that H-P’s Itanium-based machines may as well just give up now!
IBM acquisitive and dynamic
It looks like IBM has a plan. A number of recent events seem to indicate that IBM has decided how it wants things to look this time next year, and has started to set about making it happen. What am I talking about? Well I have in mind the recent acquisition of Watchfire, a Web application security company, and the “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative.
Watchfire has a product called AppScan, which has been around for a few years now, in fact Watchfire got it by acquiring a company called Sanctum in 2004. IBM needed a good Web security product to go with RACF, it’s well-known mainframe security software, and, of course, its ISS purchase. Internet Security Systems cost IBM $1.3bn. The company sold intrusion detection and vulnerability assessment tools and services to secure corporate networks. Once it’s happy the Internet is secure, IBM can move forward with its new Web initiative.
Before I go on to talk about that, you might be interested to know that HP has bought SPI Dynamics, another Web security company. Whether HP bought the company to stop IBM getting it, or whether they have plans to integrate WebInspect (one of SPI’s products) with their own products, I just don’t know.
Anyway, the “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative, announced 20 June, is IBM’s way of bringing the value of Web 2.0 into the enterprise. By the value of Web 2.0, they are thinking about things like easy access to information-rich browser-based applications, as well as social networking and collaboration software. No IBM announcement is complete these days without the letters S, O, and A appearing somewhere. IBM said that SOA helps build a flexible computing infrastructure and Web 2.0 provides users with the software required to create rich, lightweight, and easily-deployable software solutions.
Cutting through the hype, IBM has actually announced Lotus Connections, comprising social bookmarking and tagging, rich directories including skills and projects, activity dashboards, collaboration among like-minded communities, and weblogs or blogging. Lotus Quickr is a collaboration tool offering blogs, wikis, and templates. Thirdly, WebSphere Commerce now makes online shopping easier. Full details of the announcement can be found at www.ibm.com/web20.
IBM is clearly thinking ahead and definitely doesn’t want to be seen as the company selling “dinosaur” mainframes. A strong move into the Web 2.0 arena is clearly sensible – and making sure security is locked down tightly means IBM can retain its reputation for reliability.
Watchfire has a product called AppScan, which has been around for a few years now, in fact Watchfire got it by acquiring a company called Sanctum in 2004. IBM needed a good Web security product to go with RACF, it’s well-known mainframe security software, and, of course, its ISS purchase. Internet Security Systems cost IBM $1.3bn. The company sold intrusion detection and vulnerability assessment tools and services to secure corporate networks. Once it’s happy the Internet is secure, IBM can move forward with its new Web initiative.
Before I go on to talk about that, you might be interested to know that HP has bought SPI Dynamics, another Web security company. Whether HP bought the company to stop IBM getting it, or whether they have plans to integrate WebInspect (one of SPI’s products) with their own products, I just don’t know.
Anyway, the “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative, announced 20 June, is IBM’s way of bringing the value of Web 2.0 into the enterprise. By the value of Web 2.0, they are thinking about things like easy access to information-rich browser-based applications, as well as social networking and collaboration software. No IBM announcement is complete these days without the letters S, O, and A appearing somewhere. IBM said that SOA helps build a flexible computing infrastructure and Web 2.0 provides users with the software required to create rich, lightweight, and easily-deployable software solutions.
Cutting through the hype, IBM has actually announced Lotus Connections, comprising social bookmarking and tagging, rich directories including skills and projects, activity dashboards, collaboration among like-minded communities, and weblogs or blogging. Lotus Quickr is a collaboration tool offering blogs, wikis, and templates. Thirdly, WebSphere Commerce now makes online shopping easier. Full details of the announcement can be found at www.ibm.com/web20.
IBM is clearly thinking ahead and definitely doesn’t want to be seen as the company selling “dinosaur” mainframes. A strong move into the Web 2.0 arena is clearly sensible – and making sure security is locked down tightly means IBM can retain its reputation for reliability.
SOA still making an impact
IBM’s SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) conference, IMPACT 2007, attracted nearly 4,000 attendees to Orlando, Florida. IBM used the occasion to make some software and services announcements.
IBM introduced a new mainframe version of WebSphere Process Server, which, they claim, automates people and information-centric business processes, and also consolidates mission-critical elements of a business onto a single system. IBM suggests that a combination of DB2 9, WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and WebSphere Process Server will deliver process and data services for SOA on a mainframe.
IBM also announced DB2 Dynamic Warehouse, which integrates Information on Demand and SOA strategies to implement Dynamic Warehousing solutions – they said. It also integrates with Rational Asset Manager (a registry of design, development, and deployment related assets such as services) to improve SOA governance and life-cycle management. At the same time, IBM announced a new WAS feature pack to simplify Web services deployment.
The trouble with SOA is that there are a lot of people talking about it, but not enough people who really understand how to implement SOA in an organization. IBM has thought about that issue and announced at IMPACT 2007 218 self-paced and instructor-led courses conducted online and in the classroom. IBM also claimed that it has good relationships with colleges and universities round the world and is working on the development of SOA-related curricula with them.
If you want to visualize how an SOA affects different parts of an organization, IBM had an interactive 3D educational game simulator. Called Innov8, this BPM simulator is designed to increase the understanding between IT departments and business executives.
At the same time, IBM announced an online portal containing Webcasts, podcasts, demos, White Papers, etc for people looking to get more SOA-related information.
Lastly, IBM announced its SOA portfolio, which contained integrated technology from DataPower SOA appliances, FileNet content manager, and Business Process Management (BPM). Included in the announcement was the WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, which can now support direct database connectivity. Also, IBM has integrated the capabilities of WebSphere with the FileNet BPM.
So, not surprisingly, SOA and WebSphere are definitely THE hot topics for IBM at the moment.
IBM introduced a new mainframe version of WebSphere Process Server, which, they claim, automates people and information-centric business processes, and also consolidates mission-critical elements of a business onto a single system. IBM suggests that a combination of DB2 9, WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and WebSphere Process Server will deliver process and data services for SOA on a mainframe.
IBM also announced DB2 Dynamic Warehouse, which integrates Information on Demand and SOA strategies to implement Dynamic Warehousing solutions – they said. It also integrates with Rational Asset Manager (a registry of design, development, and deployment related assets such as services) to improve SOA governance and life-cycle management. At the same time, IBM announced a new WAS feature pack to simplify Web services deployment.
The trouble with SOA is that there are a lot of people talking about it, but not enough people who really understand how to implement SOA in an organization. IBM has thought about that issue and announced at IMPACT 2007 218 self-paced and instructor-led courses conducted online and in the classroom. IBM also claimed that it has good relationships with colleges and universities round the world and is working on the development of SOA-related curricula with them.
If you want to visualize how an SOA affects different parts of an organization, IBM had an interactive 3D educational game simulator. Called Innov8, this BPM simulator is designed to increase the understanding between IT departments and business executives.
At the same time, IBM announced an online portal containing Webcasts, podcasts, demos, White Papers, etc for people looking to get more SOA-related information.
Lastly, IBM announced its SOA portfolio, which contained integrated technology from DataPower SOA appliances, FileNet content manager, and Business Process Management (BPM). Included in the announcement was the WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, which can now support direct database connectivity. Also, IBM has integrated the capabilities of WebSphere with the FileNet BPM.
So, not surprisingly, SOA and WebSphere are definitely THE hot topics for IBM at the moment.
Virtualization – a beginner’s guide to products
Let’s start with a caveat: I’m calling this a beginner’s guide not a complete guide – so, if you know of a product that I haven’t mentioned, sorry, I just ran out of space.
Now the thing is, on a mainframe, we’ve got z/VM, which is really the grandfather of all these fashionable virtualization products. In fact, if I can use a science fiction metaphor, VM is a bit like Dr Who, every few years it regenerates as a re-invigorated up-to-date youthful product, ready to set to with those pesky Daleks and Cybermen, etc.
And, of course, mainframers are all familiar with LPARs (Logical PARtitions), which are ways of dividing up the hardware so it can run multiple operating systems.
The real problem for mainframers is when they are asked to bring their wealth of experience with virtualized hardware and software to the x86 server arena. Where do you start? What products are available? Well, this is what I want to summarize here (for beginners).
I suppose the first product I should mention is IBM’s Virtualization Manager, which is an extension to IBM Director. The product provides a single console from which users can discover and manage real and virtual systems. Now, the virtual systems would themselves be running virtualization software – and I’ll talk about that layer in a moment.
If you don’t choose IBM, an alternative would be the VMware’s product suite, which comprises eight components: Consolidated Backup (for backing up virtual machines), DRS (for resource allocation and balancing), ESX Server, High Availability (an HA engine), Virtual SMP (offering multiprocessor support for virtual machines), VirtualCenter (where management, automation, and optimization occur), VMFS (a FileSystem for storage virtualization), and VMotion (for migration).
Also, quite well-known is HP’s ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack, which more-or-less explains what it does in the title.
Lastly, for this list of management software are CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence (now at Version 4.2) and Marathon Technologies’ everRun. Marathon also has its v-Available initiative.
In terms of software that actually carries out the virtualization on an x86 platform perhaps the two best-known vendors would be VMware and XenSource. VMware has its ESX Server (mentioned above) and XenSource has XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress.
VMware’s ESX Server reckons to have around 50% of the x86 virtualization marketplace. It installs straight on to the hardware and then runs multiple operating systems underneath. The Xen products use the Xen Open Source hypervisor running straight on the hardware and allow Windows and Linux operating systems to run under them. Virtual Iron also uses the Xen hypervisor and is similar to the Xen products. It’s currently at Version 3.7. Also worth a quick mention is SWsoft, who produce Virtuozzo.
One other company that has a small presence in the world of virtualization is Microsoft – you may have heard of them! Microsoft has Virtual Server 2005 R2, which, as yet, hasn’t made a big impact on the world of virtualization.
So, any virtualization beginners out there – I hope that helped.
Now the thing is, on a mainframe, we’ve got z/VM, which is really the grandfather of all these fashionable virtualization products. In fact, if I can use a science fiction metaphor, VM is a bit like Dr Who, every few years it regenerates as a re-invigorated up-to-date youthful product, ready to set to with those pesky Daleks and Cybermen, etc.
And, of course, mainframers are all familiar with LPARs (Logical PARtitions), which are ways of dividing up the hardware so it can run multiple operating systems.
The real problem for mainframers is when they are asked to bring their wealth of experience with virtualized hardware and software to the x86 server arena. Where do you start? What products are available? Well, this is what I want to summarize here (for beginners).
I suppose the first product I should mention is IBM’s Virtualization Manager, which is an extension to IBM Director. The product provides a single console from which users can discover and manage real and virtual systems. Now, the virtual systems would themselves be running virtualization software – and I’ll talk about that layer in a moment.
If you don’t choose IBM, an alternative would be the VMware’s product suite, which comprises eight components: Consolidated Backup (for backing up virtual machines), DRS (for resource allocation and balancing), ESX Server, High Availability (an HA engine), Virtual SMP (offering multiprocessor support for virtual machines), VirtualCenter (where management, automation, and optimization occur), VMFS (a FileSystem for storage virtualization), and VMotion (for migration).
Also, quite well-known is HP’s ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack, which more-or-less explains what it does in the title.
Lastly, for this list of management software are CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence (now at Version 4.2) and Marathon Technologies’ everRun. Marathon also has its v-Available initiative.
In terms of software that actually carries out the virtualization on an x86 platform perhaps the two best-known vendors would be VMware and XenSource. VMware has its ESX Server (mentioned above) and XenSource has XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress.
VMware’s ESX Server reckons to have around 50% of the x86 virtualization marketplace. It installs straight on to the hardware and then runs multiple operating systems underneath. The Xen products use the Xen Open Source hypervisor running straight on the hardware and allow Windows and Linux operating systems to run under them. Virtual Iron also uses the Xen hypervisor and is similar to the Xen products. It’s currently at Version 3.7. Also worth a quick mention is SWsoft, who produce Virtuozzo.
One other company that has a small presence in the world of virtualization is Microsoft – you may have heard of them! Microsoft has Virtual Server 2005 R2, which, as yet, hasn’t made a big impact on the world of virtualization.
So, any virtualization beginners out there – I hope that helped.
When is a mainframe not a mainframe?
The April/May 2007 issue of z/Journal (http://zjournal.tcipubs.com/issues/zJ.Apr-May07.pdf) has an interesting article by Philip H Smith III entitled, “The state of IBM mainframe emulation”. Emulation is a way of letting hardware run software that shouldn’t be able to run on that hardware! It’s an extra layer of code between the operating system and the hardware. The operating system sends an instruction and the emulation software converts that instruction to one that the existing hardware can understand. The hardware then carries out the instruction. Any response is then converted by the emulator into something that the operating system would expect, and the originating program carries on processing unaware of the clever stuff that’s been going on. Often there is a native operating system involved between the emulation software and the hardware, but not always.
Philip talks about FLEX-ES from Fundamental Software. Its business partners offer integrated FLEX-ES solutions on Intel-based laptops and servers. It means that developers can test mainframe software on a laptop. It works by running as a task under Linux, and FLEX emulates a range of devices including terminals and tape drives. FLEX also sell hardware to allow real mainframe peripherals to connect to the laptop, and PC peripherals that can emulate their mainframe counterparts. There is currently a legal dispute between IBM and Fundamental Software.
There was also UMX technologies, which offered a technology that was apparently developed in Russia. This company arrived in 2003 and disappeared in 2004.
Hercules is an Open Source mainframe emulator that was originally developed by Roger Bowler. Hercules runs under Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X. IBM, however, won’t license its operating systems for Hercules systems, so users have to either run older public domain versions of IBM operating systems (eg VM/370 or OS/360) or illegally run newer operating systems.
Platform Solutions has a product called the Open Mainframe, which provides a firmware-based mainframe environment on Intel-based hardware. It is built on intellectual property from the time that Amdahl offered a Plug-Comptible Mainframe (PCM). It’s not a complete solution because it doesn’t support the SIE instruction, with the result that z/VM won’t run. However, z/OS and z/Linux work OK. Open Mainframe runs straight on the hardware, it doesn’t need an operating system. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, IBM’s and PSI’s legal teams are now involved.
I also found Sim390, which is an application that runs under Windows and emulates a subset of the ESA/390 mainframe architecture. Its URL is http://www.geocities.com/sim390/index.htm.
I hope Philip H Smith III won’t mind me borrowing from his article, but there are two very interesting points leading on from this. One, and Phillip makes this in his article, is that if mainframe emulation is available on laptop, it is easier to use and more likely that younger people (remember that awful bell-shaped curve showing the average age of experienced mainframers and COBOL programmers) will want to have a go.
The second point is that emulation is only a short step away from virtualization, which I’ve talked about before. Wouldn’t it make sense (from a user’s point of view) if they had one box of processors (Intel quad processors, P6s, whatever), and they could then run all their operating systems on it? The virtualization software would also be the emulation software. It could run Windows, Linux, z/VM, z/OS, etc on it. If a user’s needs were simple, it would be a small box with few chips and not too many peripherals. If a user’s needs were complex, it would be a big box with lots of everything. Virtualization is appearing everywhere, I can quite easily see it absorbing the concept of mainframe emulation (IBM’s legal team permitting, of course!).
Philip talks about FLEX-ES from Fundamental Software. Its business partners offer integrated FLEX-ES solutions on Intel-based laptops and servers. It means that developers can test mainframe software on a laptop. It works by running as a task under Linux, and FLEX emulates a range of devices including terminals and tape drives. FLEX also sell hardware to allow real mainframe peripherals to connect to the laptop, and PC peripherals that can emulate their mainframe counterparts. There is currently a legal dispute between IBM and Fundamental Software.
There was also UMX technologies, which offered a technology that was apparently developed in Russia. This company arrived in 2003 and disappeared in 2004.
Hercules is an Open Source mainframe emulator that was originally developed by Roger Bowler. Hercules runs under Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X. IBM, however, won’t license its operating systems for Hercules systems, so users have to either run older public domain versions of IBM operating systems (eg VM/370 or OS/360) or illegally run newer operating systems.
Platform Solutions has a product called the Open Mainframe, which provides a firmware-based mainframe environment on Intel-based hardware. It is built on intellectual property from the time that Amdahl offered a Plug-Comptible Mainframe (PCM). It’s not a complete solution because it doesn’t support the SIE instruction, with the result that z/VM won’t run. However, z/OS and z/Linux work OK. Open Mainframe runs straight on the hardware, it doesn’t need an operating system. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, IBM’s and PSI’s legal teams are now involved.
I also found Sim390, which is an application that runs under Windows and emulates a subset of the ESA/390 mainframe architecture. Its URL is http://www.geocities.com/sim390/index.htm.
I hope Philip H Smith III won’t mind me borrowing from his article, but there are two very interesting points leading on from this. One, and Phillip makes this in his article, is that if mainframe emulation is available on laptop, it is easier to use and more likely that younger people (remember that awful bell-shaped curve showing the average age of experienced mainframers and COBOL programmers) will want to have a go.
The second point is that emulation is only a short step away from virtualization, which I’ve talked about before. Wouldn’t it make sense (from a user’s point of view) if they had one box of processors (Intel quad processors, P6s, whatever), and they could then run all their operating systems on it? The virtualization software would also be the emulation software. It could run Windows, Linux, z/VM, z/OS, etc on it. If a user’s needs were simple, it would be a small box with few chips and not too many peripherals. If a user’s needs were complex, it would be a big box with lots of everything. Virtualization is appearing everywhere, I can quite easily see it absorbing the concept of mainframe emulation (IBM’s legal team permitting, of course!).
The Color Purple
OK, I’ve stolen the title from Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film – or from the title of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel. And this blog has nothing to do with racism, but it is to do with colours – the colours you see on your computer screen.
I have recently been using a little device called a Huey (from Pantone/GretagMacbeth – http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=79&ca=2), which is a computer monitor calibration tool. It checks what colours your monitor produces and corrects them so you see more accurate colours. Mine came from a company called Colour Confidence (www.colourconfidence.com).
The device is about the size of a slightly thick and slightly short pen, and spends most of its life in a cradle connected to your computer through a USB port, where it monitors the ambient light. But let’s start at the beginning…
When you purchase the device (which costs about $90 in the USA and around £60 in the UK) you get the Huey device, a cradle, an extension USB cable, and a CD. The CD I had contained Version 1.0 of the software, which is OK if you have XP installed (or a Mac), but I have Vista. This meant I had to go to the Pantone Web site, register, and then download the Vista-capable version – which is 1.0.5. The software installed quickly and then needed to reboot my laptop.
The next stage was to wipe and dry the screen with the supplied wipes and cloth, and then connect the Huey device. Once Vista recognized it, I started the Huey software. Next I stuck the Huey to the screen using the very small suckers attached to it. The software then quickly ran through a number of colours and shades of grey. Lastly I was given a chance to compare the original settings with the new suggested settings. They weren’t enormously different, but they were definitely different. The colours are now “warmer”. In fact, you can select what type of use your computer is put to and select the appropriate colour scheme for that. There’s options such as Web browsing and photo editing, graphic design and video editing, and warm low contrast. Each week, the Huey recalibrates, which is a good idea.
Some reports on the Web suggest that the Huey is much cheaper and less accurate than other products. But I think that’s the point. If you need 100% accurate colour management for work you would buy one of these more expensive devices. For the rest of us, the Huey can make a useful additional tool at an affordable price. If you spend all day sitting in front of a computer screen, you want it to display more-or-less the right colours. I think it’s a handy little gadget.
And finally, and for the last time (I promise)... Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) WebSphere Update is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you'd known before you started, or you've implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
I have recently been using a little device called a Huey (from Pantone/GretagMacbeth – http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=79&ca=2), which is a computer monitor calibration tool. It checks what colours your monitor produces and corrects them so you see more accurate colours. Mine came from a company called Colour Confidence (www.colourconfidence.com).
The device is about the size of a slightly thick and slightly short pen, and spends most of its life in a cradle connected to your computer through a USB port, where it monitors the ambient light. But let’s start at the beginning…
When you purchase the device (which costs about $90 in the USA and around £60 in the UK) you get the Huey device, a cradle, an extension USB cable, and a CD. The CD I had contained Version 1.0 of the software, which is OK if you have XP installed (or a Mac), but I have Vista. This meant I had to go to the Pantone Web site, register, and then download the Vista-capable version – which is 1.0.5. The software installed quickly and then needed to reboot my laptop.
The next stage was to wipe and dry the screen with the supplied wipes and cloth, and then connect the Huey device. Once Vista recognized it, I started the Huey software. Next I stuck the Huey to the screen using the very small suckers attached to it. The software then quickly ran through a number of colours and shades of grey. Lastly I was given a chance to compare the original settings with the new suggested settings. They weren’t enormously different, but they were definitely different. The colours are now “warmer”. In fact, you can select what type of use your computer is put to and select the appropriate colour scheme for that. There’s options such as Web browsing and photo editing, graphic design and video editing, and warm low contrast. Each week, the Huey recalibrates, which is a good idea.
Some reports on the Web suggest that the Huey is much cheaper and less accurate than other products. But I think that’s the point. If you need 100% accurate colour management for work you would buy one of these more expensive devices. For the rest of us, the Huey can make a useful additional tool at an affordable price. If you spend all day sitting in front of a computer screen, you want it to display more-or-less the right colours. I think it’s a handy little gadget.
And finally, and for the last time (I promise)... Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) WebSphere Update is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you'd known before you started, or you've implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
We hate Microsoft – or is it Microsoft hates everybody else!!
Let’s make it clear, this isn’t a personal rant – although I am finding the lack of Vista drivers for devices that happily attached to my XP laptop a bit frustrating – it’s a look at recent news stories and their significance.
Firstly then, there’s Adobe, who have announced that Vista-compatible drivers for Postscript-enabled printers will be available in July. Hang on, didn’t Vista appear in the shops in February! Why has Adobe waited six months? Well, of course, the answer is that Adobe hates Microsoft. (For legal reasons I need to point out the use of hyperbole is solely to make this blog more interesting and is not taken from opinions stated by representatives of any company mention herein – phew!) Users of Adobe’s DreamWeaver, InDesign, and Photoshop products will be aware that there isn’t (or last time I looked anyway) a Vista version of the products. Also, in Europe, Adobe and Microsoft have taken up the cudgels. Adobe claims that Microsoft has violated EU trade laws by bundling Vista and the XML Paper Specification – you know, the thing that’s more than a bit like Acrobat. Plus, of course, not only is Microsoft trying to eat Adobe’s PDF lunch, it’s also set its sights on Flash. Microsoft now has the Silverlight multimedia authoring tool. But Microsoft is also a little vexed by the fact that Adobe will soon have an equivalent to Media Player. The beta of Adobe Media Player should be out later this year.
Then there’s the Open Source community. Microsoft really hates them. Microsoft is now claiming that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents. And that’s not all – other Open Source programs (and I’ve heard Open Office is included in the list) apparently infringe 193 patents.
Who else? Well, let’s not forget that Microsoft hates Google. Google is king of the Internet and is offering all those Office-like applications over the Web. They have a PowerPoint equivalent coming soon. Plus Google has its own desktop gadgets much like the ones found in Vista – only more of them. Plus, Google has outbid Microsoft for advertising company DoubleClick. And talking of Office-like applications, have you looked at www.zoho.com yet? They’re definitely going to appear on Microsoft’s hate list!
And now Dell has been added to the hate list. Dell has been supplying computers for years with Windows as the operating system. Now, it is saying that customers are asking for XP rather than Vista as the operating system and it is supplying them with it. But that isn’t its cardinal sin – no Dell is now supplying new computers with Ubuntu installed. Another victory for Linux.
Microsoft is apparently going to upset the phone and network companies with its unified communications device (to be announced).
Does Microsoft like anyone? Well yes, they are good friends with flash card manufacturer SanDisk. Together they plan to put application programs on memory cards. As a user, you plug your memory card into any computer and you can access personalised e-mail programs, Web browsers, productivity tools, multimedia applications, and, so they say, more. What a stupid idea! What happens when you forget your memory stick or you are trying to use two computers? Haven’t they heard of the Internet?
In addition to its unified communications announcement, Microsoft is also showing off its online storage facility. So it has a lot going for it at the moment. It just seems that in order to stay at the top it is upsetting other companies rather than trying to work with them. We don’t all hate you Microsoft, you just seem to have a habit of putting people in a difficult position.
As I mentioned last week... Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) WebSphere Update is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you'd known before you started, or you've implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
Firstly then, there’s Adobe, who have announced that Vista-compatible drivers for Postscript-enabled printers will be available in July. Hang on, didn’t Vista appear in the shops in February! Why has Adobe waited six months? Well, of course, the answer is that Adobe hates Microsoft. (For legal reasons I need to point out the use of hyperbole is solely to make this blog more interesting and is not taken from opinions stated by representatives of any company mention herein – phew!) Users of Adobe’s DreamWeaver, InDesign, and Photoshop products will be aware that there isn’t (or last time I looked anyway) a Vista version of the products. Also, in Europe, Adobe and Microsoft have taken up the cudgels. Adobe claims that Microsoft has violated EU trade laws by bundling Vista and the XML Paper Specification – you know, the thing that’s more than a bit like Acrobat. Plus, of course, not only is Microsoft trying to eat Adobe’s PDF lunch, it’s also set its sights on Flash. Microsoft now has the Silverlight multimedia authoring tool. But Microsoft is also a little vexed by the fact that Adobe will soon have an equivalent to Media Player. The beta of Adobe Media Player should be out later this year.
Then there’s the Open Source community. Microsoft really hates them. Microsoft is now claiming that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents. And that’s not all – other Open Source programs (and I’ve heard Open Office is included in the list) apparently infringe 193 patents.
Who else? Well, let’s not forget that Microsoft hates Google. Google is king of the Internet and is offering all those Office-like applications over the Web. They have a PowerPoint equivalent coming soon. Plus Google has its own desktop gadgets much like the ones found in Vista – only more of them. Plus, Google has outbid Microsoft for advertising company DoubleClick. And talking of Office-like applications, have you looked at www.zoho.com yet? They’re definitely going to appear on Microsoft’s hate list!
And now Dell has been added to the hate list. Dell has been supplying computers for years with Windows as the operating system. Now, it is saying that customers are asking for XP rather than Vista as the operating system and it is supplying them with it. But that isn’t its cardinal sin – no Dell is now supplying new computers with Ubuntu installed. Another victory for Linux.
Microsoft is apparently going to upset the phone and network companies with its unified communications device (to be announced).
Does Microsoft like anyone? Well yes, they are good friends with flash card manufacturer SanDisk. Together they plan to put application programs on memory cards. As a user, you plug your memory card into any computer and you can access personalised e-mail programs, Web browsers, productivity tools, multimedia applications, and, so they say, more. What a stupid idea! What happens when you forget your memory stick or you are trying to use two computers? Haven’t they heard of the Internet?
In addition to its unified communications announcement, Microsoft is also showing off its online storage facility. So it has a lot going for it at the moment. It just seems that in order to stay at the top it is upsetting other companies rather than trying to work with them. We don’t all hate you Microsoft, you just seem to have a habit of putting people in a difficult position.
As I mentioned last week... Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) WebSphere Update is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you'd known before you started, or you've implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
Aglets – a new way for mobile computing
I must have been messing around at the back of the class recently, because I have only just heard of aglets – a portmanteau word created from agent and applet – that run with distributed DB2 databases.
A mobile agent is an exceptionally clever piece of software that can migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. Once it arrives on a new machine, the agent then interacts with service agents (that are permanently located on that machine) and other resources to perform its mission. So why would you want to use this kind of technology? Well the answer, as so often, is improved performance. Because the agent moves to the remote machine and performs a search (or whatever) and sends across the network the results, there is a huge reduction in the amount of data that uses the network and therefore every other network-related application isn’t slowed down – hence the improved performance. Any other method would involve large amounts of data from one computer being copied to another, and then searched (or whatever) there. Using aglets moves the processing to the computer on which the data resides – so, therefore, much less network traffic is necessary.
So how do you get hold of aglets? IBM’s Tokyo Research laboratory has created the Aglet Workbench, and the package can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/aglets/.
The mobile agents are 100% pure Java. The Java Aglet API (J-APPI) is the interface used to build aglets and their environments. The API is platform agnostic, but it does require JDK 1.1 or higher to be installed for it to run. There is an agent server, which is called Tahiti, and this (by default) uses port 4434. Transferring agents between computers is achieved using ATP (Aglet Transfer Protocol).
It is definitely an interesting and useful development.
And for people who enjoy quiz nights – an aglet is also the little piece of plastic (or, perhaps, metal) at the end of a shoelace (usually) that stops the lace from unravelling.
My thanks to Nikola Lazovic, a regular contributor to Xephon's (www.xephonusa.com) DB2 Update journal, for drawing aglets to my attention.
And on a different, but related note… WebSphere Update, also from Xephon, is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you’d known before you started, or you’ve implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
A mobile agent is an exceptionally clever piece of software that can migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. Once it arrives on a new machine, the agent then interacts with service agents (that are permanently located on that machine) and other resources to perform its mission. So why would you want to use this kind of technology? Well the answer, as so often, is improved performance. Because the agent moves to the remote machine and performs a search (or whatever) and sends across the network the results, there is a huge reduction in the amount of data that uses the network and therefore every other network-related application isn’t slowed down – hence the improved performance. Any other method would involve large amounts of data from one computer being copied to another, and then searched (or whatever) there. Using aglets moves the processing to the computer on which the data resides – so, therefore, much less network traffic is necessary.
So how do you get hold of aglets? IBM’s Tokyo Research laboratory has created the Aglet Workbench, and the package can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/aglets/.
The mobile agents are 100% pure Java. The Java Aglet API (J-APPI) is the interface used to build aglets and their environments. The API is platform agnostic, but it does require JDK 1.1 or higher to be installed for it to run. There is an agent server, which is called Tahiti, and this (by default) uses port 4434. Transferring agents between computers is achieved using ATP (Aglet Transfer Protocol).
It is definitely an interesting and useful development.
And for people who enjoy quiz nights – an aglet is also the little piece of plastic (or, perhaps, metal) at the end of a shoelace (usually) that stops the lace from unravelling.
My thanks to Nikola Lazovic, a regular contributor to Xephon's (www.xephonusa.com) DB2 Update journal, for drawing aglets to my attention.
And on a different, but related note… WebSphere Update, also from Xephon, is looking for new authors to broaden its base of contributors. If you work with WebSphere and you have discovered something you wished you’d known before you started, or you’ve implemented something useful that others could benefit from, please contact me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
On Demand versus virtualization
You might very well think this is a strange title for a blog – after all, they seem like two completely different things. It’s like saying apples versus mountain bikes!
However, think about it a little deeper. Both of them are trends in computing and both would take IT departments in totally different directions. At some stage, managers are going to have sit down and decide which route they are going to take.
Let me explain my thinking in more detail.
On Demand computing describes a method of making computing resources available to users at the time those resources are needed. Basically what happens is this: users have lots of computer capacity available at their site, but pay only for the capacity they use. That way they are not paying to support peak capacity during quieter periods. They use as much capacity as they require at any one time and that’s all they pay for. They don’t pay for the extra capacity on the occasions when it isn’t needed, only when it is needed and used. On Demand computing has been tipped by many to be the next big trend in computing. After all, it makes sense for a company to have all the capacity it will ever need, but only pay for the capacity it is actually using.
Virtualization, on the other hand, is a technique that allows users to maximize the use they get from their existing hardware. You don’t need more, you just utilize what you already have better. Virtualization techniques allow hardware to “appear” to be available to users. It can even make non-existent devices appear to be available. It then takes the call to that device and routes it somewhere else – all completely seamlessly to the user. However, the important point in this debate is that it maximizes the usage of the hardware that is installed. Mainframers are familiar with VM, PR/SM and all the other virtualization techniques that have been around for many years. AIX users are now able to benefit from virtualization and so are System i users and even sites with x86 servers.
The advantages of choosing the virtualization route are that virtualization will reduce the amount of hardware that needs to be switched on, and so will reduce electricity bills. On Demand requires that data centres have the hardware delivered and installed. Not having it delivered will save petrol and will be a component of a company’s “green” strategy. Companies will also need less air conditioning (and again less electricity) because they won’t have to cool these extra boxes.
The one big thing in favour of On Demand computing is that it is an easier strategy. The extra boxes are used when needed and money is paid out at the end of the month (or whatever the charging period is). With virtualization you need to buy the software and have someone who knows what they’re doing to install it. You then need expertise to set up and run the virtual machines.
What I am suggesting is that when IT departments sit down to decide where they want to be in five years time and how they can achieve those goals. they will prefer to develop their own expertise in virtualization and be able to take all the advantages this will offer both now and in the future rather than install extra just-in-case capacity.
What do you think?
However, think about it a little deeper. Both of them are trends in computing and both would take IT departments in totally different directions. At some stage, managers are going to have sit down and decide which route they are going to take.
Let me explain my thinking in more detail.
On Demand computing describes a method of making computing resources available to users at the time those resources are needed. Basically what happens is this: users have lots of computer capacity available at their site, but pay only for the capacity they use. That way they are not paying to support peak capacity during quieter periods. They use as much capacity as they require at any one time and that’s all they pay for. They don’t pay for the extra capacity on the occasions when it isn’t needed, only when it is needed and used. On Demand computing has been tipped by many to be the next big trend in computing. After all, it makes sense for a company to have all the capacity it will ever need, but only pay for the capacity it is actually using.
Virtualization, on the other hand, is a technique that allows users to maximize the use they get from their existing hardware. You don’t need more, you just utilize what you already have better. Virtualization techniques allow hardware to “appear” to be available to users. It can even make non-existent devices appear to be available. It then takes the call to that device and routes it somewhere else – all completely seamlessly to the user. However, the important point in this debate is that it maximizes the usage of the hardware that is installed. Mainframers are familiar with VM, PR/SM and all the other virtualization techniques that have been around for many years. AIX users are now able to benefit from virtualization and so are System i users and even sites with x86 servers.
The advantages of choosing the virtualization route are that virtualization will reduce the amount of hardware that needs to be switched on, and so will reduce electricity bills. On Demand requires that data centres have the hardware delivered and installed. Not having it delivered will save petrol and will be a component of a company’s “green” strategy. Companies will also need less air conditioning (and again less electricity) because they won’t have to cool these extra boxes.
The one big thing in favour of On Demand computing is that it is an easier strategy. The extra boxes are used when needed and money is paid out at the end of the month (or whatever the charging period is). With virtualization you need to buy the software and have someone who knows what they’re doing to install it. You then need expertise to set up and run the virtual machines.
What I am suggesting is that when IT departments sit down to decide where they want to be in five years time and how they can achieve those goals. they will prefer to develop their own expertise in virtualization and be able to take all the advantages this will offer both now and in the future rather than install extra just-in-case capacity.
What do you think?
Sign of the Zodiac
I mentioned in last week’s blog that I’d been to Mainz in Germany with IBM. The focus of the meeting was on SMB customers rather than mainframe users, although I would guess plenty of mainframe sites have a host of other boxes around the place.
One thing that surprised me was the number of horror stories they could quote of sites that had a number of x86 servers around the company, but weren’t sure quite how many there were or what the boxes they knew about actually did – ie what applications were running on it.
Before these sites could even think about virtualizing, they needed to discover what they had installed. They needed some way of discovering what boxes they owned and what applications were running on them, and they needed to do this without having to install an agent on each box to do the job – because, if you don’t know what boxes you’ve got, you can’t put an agent on them!
This is where a very clever piece of software called Zodiac comes in. This complex software can link in to other software where necessary and help a company build up an accurate picture of what’s going on where on its servers. The software will sit on the network and pick up message traffic – eg it will find a query going to a database, and find a response coming from that database.
Once a site knows where it is at the moment (in terms of hardware and software), it becomes possible to plan for a more idealized working environment and how to get to there from here – because currently there seems to be a lot of sites that don’t know where “here” actually is! Obviously, a business case needs to be built and Zodiac works with Cobra, a component that can help build a business case. This is perhaps harder for many sites than it might at first appear because as well as consolidating and reorganizing the hardware and software at a site (sites will be looking to virtualize their servers in order to use fewer of them and reduce overall costs), it also involves reorganizing people. There is strong likelihood that after the reorganization, the jobs needed to run the data centre will be different from those needed before the reorganization. Some new skills will be required and some old ones may not be needed, or two or more jobs might be consolidated because the amount of work needing to be done is reduced. These HR effects are important, and will need dealing with by companies making the change.
Steve Weeks, who heads the Zodiac project at IBM, said that they were now visiting sites that had used Zodiac for the initial inventory report and to create the business case for the migration, and who were now ready to move forward again and wanted to use Zodiac facilities a second time.
Zodiac doesn’t depend on IBM boxes being on site, it is completely vendor neutral, and will identify whatever it finds from whichever manufacturer. It seemed like a very useful product and one that I was completely unaware of before this meeting.
One thing that surprised me was the number of horror stories they could quote of sites that had a number of x86 servers around the company, but weren’t sure quite how many there were or what the boxes they knew about actually did – ie what applications were running on it.
Before these sites could even think about virtualizing, they needed to discover what they had installed. They needed some way of discovering what boxes they owned and what applications were running on them, and they needed to do this without having to install an agent on each box to do the job – because, if you don’t know what boxes you’ve got, you can’t put an agent on them!
This is where a very clever piece of software called Zodiac comes in. This complex software can link in to other software where necessary and help a company build up an accurate picture of what’s going on where on its servers. The software will sit on the network and pick up message traffic – eg it will find a query going to a database, and find a response coming from that database.
Once a site knows where it is at the moment (in terms of hardware and software), it becomes possible to plan for a more idealized working environment and how to get to there from here – because currently there seems to be a lot of sites that don’t know where “here” actually is! Obviously, a business case needs to be built and Zodiac works with Cobra, a component that can help build a business case. This is perhaps harder for many sites than it might at first appear because as well as consolidating and reorganizing the hardware and software at a site (sites will be looking to virtualize their servers in order to use fewer of them and reduce overall costs), it also involves reorganizing people. There is strong likelihood that after the reorganization, the jobs needed to run the data centre will be different from those needed before the reorganization. Some new skills will be required and some old ones may not be needed, or two or more jobs might be consolidated because the amount of work needing to be done is reduced. These HR effects are important, and will need dealing with by companies making the change.
Steve Weeks, who heads the Zodiac project at IBM, said that they were now visiting sites that had used Zodiac for the initial inventory report and to create the business case for the migration, and who were now ready to move forward again and wanted to use Zodiac facilities a second time.
Zodiac doesn’t depend on IBM boxes being on site, it is completely vendor neutral, and will identify whatever it finds from whichever manufacturer. It seemed like a very useful product and one that I was completely unaware of before this meeting.
Big Blue goes green?
I was recently with IBM in Mainz discussing data centre challenges for the 21st century. Interestingly, one of the issues under discussion was about having a green data centre.
Now, environmental friendliness is very much on every politician’s agenda, with everyone trying to outdo the opposing candidate on how green they are – in terms of recycling waste, cutting energy use, and creating fewer carbon emissions by not using cars and planes etc whenever possible. And if people are recycling at home, turning down the thermostat on the heating, and cycling to work, it makes sense for them to look at being green in the work environment too.
Now this is where the problems start. Hands up anyone who can define what is meant by a green data centre. We all know what we think it means, but it is quite hard to come up with a definition that is worth including in a dictionary. And in many ways, it is impossible to have a green data centre because of the amount of energy needed to create the processors and data storage devices in the first place, the amount of energy necessary to run them so that we’re getting decent processing speeds, and the energy required to do something environmentally friendly when the hardware is passed its best and being shipped out.
At the meeting in Mainz, IBM was suggesting ways that the data centre could become greener – by which they meant more energy efficient. They were specifically talking about blade servers rather than mainframes, but I guess most sites have a mixture of technologies and this will apply to them.
IBM made a statement that I found quite startling, but everyone else in the room nodded sagely, so I guess it’s true. I suppose it’s my mainframe background that made the idea seem so strange – you’ll probably be saying, “of course, everyone knows that”. They suggested that the average usage of an x86 server was around the 20% mark and that people were likely to go out and buy another server when they hit 25% usage. This shopping expedition wasn’t necessarily caused by the increased server utilization, it was just the sort of pattern that they had observed. That means these companies would end up with rooms full of servers with around a quarter utilization. The first way to become more green is obviously to get rid of half the servers and double the utilization figures. But how can you do that? Well IBM is very keen on virtualization (and why wouldn’t they be, having been using VM for forty years?). Obviously, virtualization does use slightly more power on a single server than not virtualizing, but significantly less than running two servers.
Their other greening strategy was in the way the blades are cooled. Apparently air conditioning warm air works better than air conditioning cooler air! They told horror stories of servers that were drawing lots of power and were then running hotter, so the fans would spin faster to cool them down, which meant that the fans were drawing more power (and creating more heat, which meant…). Their solution simply involved keeping the hot and cold air separate, which results in the air conditioning working more efficiently and less energy being used.
They did also have ways of water cooling the doors of blade servers to keep down the temperature and some of the components were now more energy efficient, which meant they were greener – although this was a consequence of a desire to make them more efficient rather than anyone specifically following a green agenda.
So, to answer my question in the title of this blog, Big Blue is moving towards greenness. It’s doing it because it makes sense for them to do so. And that’s because energy efficiency means customers can save money – always a strong selling point. And also because customers are asking for greener solutions at affordable prices, which IBM is able to provide. However, I doubt we’ll be seeing a data centre that an environmentalist would consider to be green for a long time yet.
Now, environmental friendliness is very much on every politician’s agenda, with everyone trying to outdo the opposing candidate on how green they are – in terms of recycling waste, cutting energy use, and creating fewer carbon emissions by not using cars and planes etc whenever possible. And if people are recycling at home, turning down the thermostat on the heating, and cycling to work, it makes sense for them to look at being green in the work environment too.
Now this is where the problems start. Hands up anyone who can define what is meant by a green data centre. We all know what we think it means, but it is quite hard to come up with a definition that is worth including in a dictionary. And in many ways, it is impossible to have a green data centre because of the amount of energy needed to create the processors and data storage devices in the first place, the amount of energy necessary to run them so that we’re getting decent processing speeds, and the energy required to do something environmentally friendly when the hardware is passed its best and being shipped out.
At the meeting in Mainz, IBM was suggesting ways that the data centre could become greener – by which they meant more energy efficient. They were specifically talking about blade servers rather than mainframes, but I guess most sites have a mixture of technologies and this will apply to them.
IBM made a statement that I found quite startling, but everyone else in the room nodded sagely, so I guess it’s true. I suppose it’s my mainframe background that made the idea seem so strange – you’ll probably be saying, “of course, everyone knows that”. They suggested that the average usage of an x86 server was around the 20% mark and that people were likely to go out and buy another server when they hit 25% usage. This shopping expedition wasn’t necessarily caused by the increased server utilization, it was just the sort of pattern that they had observed. That means these companies would end up with rooms full of servers with around a quarter utilization. The first way to become more green is obviously to get rid of half the servers and double the utilization figures. But how can you do that? Well IBM is very keen on virtualization (and why wouldn’t they be, having been using VM for forty years?). Obviously, virtualization does use slightly more power on a single server than not virtualizing, but significantly less than running two servers.
Their other greening strategy was in the way the blades are cooled. Apparently air conditioning warm air works better than air conditioning cooler air! They told horror stories of servers that were drawing lots of power and were then running hotter, so the fans would spin faster to cool them down, which meant that the fans were drawing more power (and creating more heat, which meant…). Their solution simply involved keeping the hot and cold air separate, which results in the air conditioning working more efficiently and less energy being used.
They did also have ways of water cooling the doors of blade servers to keep down the temperature and some of the components were now more energy efficient, which meant they were greener – although this was a consequence of a desire to make them more efficient rather than anyone specifically following a green agenda.
So, to answer my question in the title of this blog, Big Blue is moving towards greenness. It’s doing it because it makes sense for them to do so. And that’s because energy efficiency means customers can save money – always a strong selling point. And also because customers are asking for greener solutions at affordable prices, which IBM is able to provide. However, I doubt we’ll be seeing a data centre that an environmentalist would consider to be green for a long time yet.
CICS V3.2 – do I need it?
IBM has been excitedly telling everyone recently about the latest release of CICS. But the real question is whether sites should be looking to upgrade from 3.1 to 3.2. Is there really any point?
IBM reckons that the upgrade rates to CICS 3.1 were the fastest that it had ever experienced and there was probably a good reason for that – SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture was available for the first time with CICS V3.0, but it was V3.1 that provided the first full production implementation. With so much pressure on sites to save money and provide better business value, you can see that a migration to V3.1 was going to be on the agenda for everyone in order to maximize the benefits that SOA can offer a company. And I would list them here, but you see them in every PowerPoint presentation you sit through these days, so I won’t bother. You know what they are!
So having migrated to V3.1 for all these benefits, do I need to take the next step to the newly-announced V3.2? The answer from IBM is obviously yes, so let’s see what 3.2 has to offer.
V3.1 of CICS in a Web services environment is a heavy user of resources. IBM has tried to do better by optimising the HTTP client and server in the new version. There’s also better management including a way to trace the progress of an end-to-end transaction. This makes use of WSRR – an acronym you’re going to become more familiar with over the next few months. The WebSphere Registery and Repository is a single location for all the available Web services.
Some people found the old message size restrictive – a transaction couldn’t handle all the data they wanted to send. IBM now has MTOM (Message Transaction Optimization Mechanism), which overcomes the problem. V 3.2 has increased transaction granularity and, by exploiting 64-bit architecture, it can handle larger payloads. CICS 3.2 has also seen improvements to the user interface making it easier to install and define regions, and problem location has been enhanced.
So do you need CICS Version 3.2? With the important improvements to SOA and Web services and the other improvements including problem identification, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
IBM reckons that the upgrade rates to CICS 3.1 were the fastest that it had ever experienced and there was probably a good reason for that – SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture was available for the first time with CICS V3.0, but it was V3.1 that provided the first full production implementation. With so much pressure on sites to save money and provide better business value, you can see that a migration to V3.1 was going to be on the agenda for everyone in order to maximize the benefits that SOA can offer a company. And I would list them here, but you see them in every PowerPoint presentation you sit through these days, so I won’t bother. You know what they are!
So having migrated to V3.1 for all these benefits, do I need to take the next step to the newly-announced V3.2? The answer from IBM is obviously yes, so let’s see what 3.2 has to offer.
V3.1 of CICS in a Web services environment is a heavy user of resources. IBM has tried to do better by optimising the HTTP client and server in the new version. There’s also better management including a way to trace the progress of an end-to-end transaction. This makes use of WSRR – an acronym you’re going to become more familiar with over the next few months. The WebSphere Registery and Repository is a single location for all the available Web services.
Some people found the old message size restrictive – a transaction couldn’t handle all the data they wanted to send. IBM now has MTOM (Message Transaction Optimization Mechanism), which overcomes the problem. V 3.2 has increased transaction granularity and, by exploiting 64-bit architecture, it can handle larger payloads. CICS 3.2 has also seen improvements to the user interface making it easier to install and define regions, and problem location has been enhanced.
So do you need CICS Version 3.2? With the important improvements to SOA and Web services and the other improvements including problem identification, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
SOA – Same Old Architecture
Last week I blogged about a session at a legacy application modernization session I attended. This week I’d like to tell you about another presentation I saw later that same day. This second one was by Gary Barnett, Research Director at Ovum Consulting.
His approach was less one of telling us what to do, but rather raising our consciousness to stop us making the same mistakes that other people have made in the past. He is responsible for defining SOA as Same Old Architecture – which, although intended as a joke, made the point that this isn’t all new. He reminded us that Web services weren’t the first type of services that we’d come across. He suggested that we’d looked at work in terms of services before, with things like CORBA services and Tuxedo services (from BEA).
Gary also confidently predicted that 80% of SOA projects would fail. He based this prediction on the fact that they relied on ASCII and XML and that 80% was probably the number of projects that failed anyway.
He also had some important thoughts on re-use. He suggested that it wasn’t enough simply to have nice interface. He insisted that if re-use was to occur it had to have been planned since the design phase. There is no way to retro-fit re-use! He also insisted that “best practice” only worked when it really was “practised”!
Gary likened many IT projects to building a bridge. IT people know how to build metaphorical bridges, so when someone says let’s have a bridge the IT people start building. The reason so many projects fail is because it is not until they are half way across the river that anyone from IT stops to ask the questions, “just how wide is this river?” or, “do you really want the bridge here?”.
Gary said that most presentations show large coloured squares joined by thin lines and warned that the reason the lines were so thin was that people didn’t want anyone to notice them and ask questions. However, he stressed, it is often the links between applications or services that are the most difficult to modernize.
On a serious note, Gary insisted that the focus for change should be on business processes. He said that in any successful company there would be no such thing as a legacy system modernization project, there would only ever be business modernization projects.
Definitely a “make you think” session, and well worth seeing for anyone contemplating modernization (ie all of us!).
His approach was less one of telling us what to do, but rather raising our consciousness to stop us making the same mistakes that other people have made in the past. He is responsible for defining SOA as Same Old Architecture – which, although intended as a joke, made the point that this isn’t all new. He reminded us that Web services weren’t the first type of services that we’d come across. He suggested that we’d looked at work in terms of services before, with things like CORBA services and Tuxedo services (from BEA).
Gary also confidently predicted that 80% of SOA projects would fail. He based this prediction on the fact that they relied on ASCII and XML and that 80% was probably the number of projects that failed anyway.
He also had some important thoughts on re-use. He suggested that it wasn’t enough simply to have nice interface. He insisted that if re-use was to occur it had to have been planned since the design phase. There is no way to retro-fit re-use! He also insisted that “best practice” only worked when it really was “practised”!
Gary likened many IT projects to building a bridge. IT people know how to build metaphorical bridges, so when someone says let’s have a bridge the IT people start building. The reason so many projects fail is because it is not until they are half way across the river that anyone from IT stops to ask the questions, “just how wide is this river?” or, “do you really want the bridge here?”.
Gary said that most presentations show large coloured squares joined by thin lines and warned that the reason the lines were so thin was that people didn’t want anyone to notice them and ask questions. However, he stressed, it is often the links between applications or services that are the most difficult to modernize.
On a serious note, Gary insisted that the focus for change should be on business processes. He said that in any successful company there would be no such thing as a legacy system modernization project, there would only ever be business modernization projects.
Definitely a “make you think” session, and well worth seeing for anyone contemplating modernization (ie all of us!).
Legacy application modernization
Last Monday I was lucky enough to attend a one-day seminar near Heathrow in London organized by Arcati. It had a number of speakers, and gave a very interesting positioning of where many companies are today and where they’d like to be – and the all important guidelines describing how to get there.
It highlighted two very important points – that getting there is going to take time and effort; and, by the time you have arrived there, you’ll want to be somewhere else and the whole process will start all over again!
Dr Mike Gilbert, principal of Legacy Directions, suggested that there were three immediate problems organizations face in terms of modernization strategies. His first was the COBOL skills problem – he suggested that the average age of a COBOL programmer was 45, and few youngsters wanted to learn COBOL (or can even find places that teach it!). In ten years time, most COBOL experts will be looking to retire rather than take on a modernization challenge.
His second problem he likened to an octopus. The core legacy application was the body of the octopus and the tentacles were the peripheral systems that the application touched. While it is easy (a relative term, obviously) to do something with the tentacles, it is much harder to carry out work moving or integrating the octopus’s body.
The third problem was simply cost. What happens if the modernization project goes wrong? The cost can be enormous, and Mike gave an example of one company at which all the senior officers resigned following a project failure because of the expense suffered by the company.
Mike Gilbert then explained that we should be looking at the big picture when thinking of legacy systems. Firstly, there are people involved – not just IT, but the users who are familiar with using the applications. We should think about the processes – there are the old (original) processes and the new ones. Then we get to the applications themselves, which could be locked into particular databases etc. And finally there is the infrastructure that must be considered.
Before a modernization project can be undertaken, it’s important that the business leaders understand the need for the project in business terms and can see the benefits the business will get from the change. The business leaders must support the modernization project. The project must use the best methodologies (and in some cases the methodologies may be in their infancy). Lastly, companies must have appropriate tools for the project – again these might not exist for all modernization projects.
Mike suggested that in any modernization project, it was important to go through five stages. Stage 1 was to define the challenge. Stage 2 was to define success – that way you knew when you’d finished. Stage 3 was to plan the project. Stage 4 was to carry out the project. And Step 5 was to return to Step 1.
He suggested always starting with processes, because these were used by people. Then look at people, because they use the actual applications. Then look at the applications, which run on the infrastructure. And lastly look at infrastructure. He suggested that by scoring assets, it was possible to produce a decision table and show what changes were possible in terms of cost and risk. The final decisions should always be taken by the business leaders so they are supportive of the project.
This is just a flavour of one session at the seminar. All in all, it was a very useful day with lots of valuable information.
It highlighted two very important points – that getting there is going to take time and effort; and, by the time you have arrived there, you’ll want to be somewhere else and the whole process will start all over again!
Dr Mike Gilbert, principal of Legacy Directions, suggested that there were three immediate problems organizations face in terms of modernization strategies. His first was the COBOL skills problem – he suggested that the average age of a COBOL programmer was 45, and few youngsters wanted to learn COBOL (or can even find places that teach it!). In ten years time, most COBOL experts will be looking to retire rather than take on a modernization challenge.
His second problem he likened to an octopus. The core legacy application was the body of the octopus and the tentacles were the peripheral systems that the application touched. While it is easy (a relative term, obviously) to do something with the tentacles, it is much harder to carry out work moving or integrating the octopus’s body.
The third problem was simply cost. What happens if the modernization project goes wrong? The cost can be enormous, and Mike gave an example of one company at which all the senior officers resigned following a project failure because of the expense suffered by the company.
Mike Gilbert then explained that we should be looking at the big picture when thinking of legacy systems. Firstly, there are people involved – not just IT, but the users who are familiar with using the applications. We should think about the processes – there are the old (original) processes and the new ones. Then we get to the applications themselves, which could be locked into particular databases etc. And finally there is the infrastructure that must be considered.
Before a modernization project can be undertaken, it’s important that the business leaders understand the need for the project in business terms and can see the benefits the business will get from the change. The business leaders must support the modernization project. The project must use the best methodologies (and in some cases the methodologies may be in their infancy). Lastly, companies must have appropriate tools for the project – again these might not exist for all modernization projects.
Mike suggested that in any modernization project, it was important to go through five stages. Stage 1 was to define the challenge. Stage 2 was to define success – that way you knew when you’d finished. Stage 3 was to plan the project. Stage 4 was to carry out the project. And Step 5 was to return to Step 1.
He suggested always starting with processes, because these were used by people. Then look at people, because they use the actual applications. Then look at the applications, which run on the infrastructure. And lastly look at infrastructure. He suggested that by scoring assets, it was possible to produce a decision table and show what changes were possible in terms of cost and risk. The final decisions should always be taken by the business leaders so they are supportive of the project.
This is just a flavour of one session at the seminar. All in all, it was a very useful day with lots of valuable information.
Vista – final connections
A couple of weeks ago I described the pain of setting up a Vista machine – and to be honest most of that pain was simply because we are so familiar with XP machines and anything Vista did differently came as an unpleasant surprise. This blog brings you right up-to-date with events. Readers may be interested to know that I am now working on my Vista machine each day and this blog was written using it. I am gradually getting to find my way round it.
Anyway, story so far, we bought a new Vista laptop for the office and we assigned it to our office workgroup. We used the “Network and Sharing Center” to make sharing possible and we turned off Norton so that the XP machines in our workgroup could access the new machine. We used Laplink to transfer everything from my old XP machine to this new Vista machine. All the applications seemed OK except Word, which wouldn’t run so we hacked it to make it work. Now Word documents won’t open except from inside Word.
Historically, Xephon (www.xephonusa.com) used Macintoshes to produce its Update publications and my XP machine used PC MacLAN to connect to the Macs. The last copy of MacLAN we bought came from a company called Miramar. It allowed the PC to access a Mac as a guest and copy files backwards and forwards. MacLAN is now owned by CA (ca.com), who acquired it in March 2004. CA, well actually their very nice PR people, told us that PC MacLAN is not compatible with Vista and there are currently no plans to update the product. Oh dear. For reasons that are long and historical the Macs are running V9 and not OS X (tiger). Does anyone know of a product that will connect Vista with an old-style Mac? As a consequence of this, I am left having to access my old XP machine in order to access my Mac.
My old computer had a parallel port on the back, which could be used to connect to a printer. In fact mine connected to an Iomega ZIP drive and then to a printer. We used old 100MB ZIP drives because that’s what were connected to the Macs. They were used for a lot of our back-ups. Now the first very obvious problem was that my new HP laptop does not have a parallel port on it! But even if it did, the Iomega Web site (www.iomega.com) lists all the operating systems that it has drivers for – DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc – but none for Vista. Yet again I have an older product for which there is no Vista support. So my old XP machine also has the ZIP drive still attached to it. My Vista machine is using an external hard drive for back-ups. We keep talking about network storage – it looks like we’ll really have to start using it.
So two failures with Vista, but the next thing was to connect the printer. Again, historically, we have had a printer attached to each computer so there is no waiting for output. I have a three-year old HP Business Inkjet 1100 that prints on both sides and has separate colour cartridges. I was told it was a top-of-the-range machine when I bought it. But you’ll never guess what happened next! I went to Hewlett Packard’s Web site (www.hp.com) to download the Vista drivers for this business class printer only to find that HP doesn’t have any!! It says, “HP Product Is Not Supported in Microsoft Windows Vista”. I expect HP hadn’t heard about Microsoft’s new operating system until it was launched and they’re busy catching up now!!!
So now my printer is left attached to my old XP machine along with the ZIP drive and my connection the Mac network. These three problems are not the fault of Microsoft, they are three other companies that do not want to support older products. I’m just glad I didn’t have the scanner attached to my computer, who knows whether there would be drivers for that!
I remember when legacy was used as a derogatory term for mainframe hardware and software. It now seems that three years is a very long time for PCs. If you are planning to buy a Vista machine, I’d wait until all these other third-party suppliers have caught up. I’d also wait until there is more expertise out there so the migration process can be done in an afternoon and not over two weeks.
And do I like using Vista? For ordinary work it is no different, but I do like the size of my new laptop’s screen. The Windows + alt key combination looks impressive when I’m showing Vista to new people. The Search facility is just bizarre. It’s quicker for me to look where I think the file is than to wait for the Search facility not to find it!
Anyway, story so far, we bought a new Vista laptop for the office and we assigned it to our office workgroup. We used the “Network and Sharing Center” to make sharing possible and we turned off Norton so that the XP machines in our workgroup could access the new machine. We used Laplink to transfer everything from my old XP machine to this new Vista machine. All the applications seemed OK except Word, which wouldn’t run so we hacked it to make it work. Now Word documents won’t open except from inside Word.
Historically, Xephon (www.xephonusa.com) used Macintoshes to produce its Update publications and my XP machine used PC MacLAN to connect to the Macs. The last copy of MacLAN we bought came from a company called Miramar. It allowed the PC to access a Mac as a guest and copy files backwards and forwards. MacLAN is now owned by CA (ca.com), who acquired it in March 2004. CA, well actually their very nice PR people, told us that PC MacLAN is not compatible with Vista and there are currently no plans to update the product. Oh dear. For reasons that are long and historical the Macs are running V9 and not OS X (tiger). Does anyone know of a product that will connect Vista with an old-style Mac? As a consequence of this, I am left having to access my old XP machine in order to access my Mac.
My old computer had a parallel port on the back, which could be used to connect to a printer. In fact mine connected to an Iomega ZIP drive and then to a printer. We used old 100MB ZIP drives because that’s what were connected to the Macs. They were used for a lot of our back-ups. Now the first very obvious problem was that my new HP laptop does not have a parallel port on it! But even if it did, the Iomega Web site (www.iomega.com) lists all the operating systems that it has drivers for – DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc – but none for Vista. Yet again I have an older product for which there is no Vista support. So my old XP machine also has the ZIP drive still attached to it. My Vista machine is using an external hard drive for back-ups. We keep talking about network storage – it looks like we’ll really have to start using it.
So two failures with Vista, but the next thing was to connect the printer. Again, historically, we have had a printer attached to each computer so there is no waiting for output. I have a three-year old HP Business Inkjet 1100 that prints on both sides and has separate colour cartridges. I was told it was a top-of-the-range machine when I bought it. But you’ll never guess what happened next! I went to Hewlett Packard’s Web site (www.hp.com) to download the Vista drivers for this business class printer only to find that HP doesn’t have any!! It says, “HP Product Is Not Supported in Microsoft Windows Vista”. I expect HP hadn’t heard about Microsoft’s new operating system until it was launched and they’re busy catching up now!!!
So now my printer is left attached to my old XP machine along with the ZIP drive and my connection the Mac network. These three problems are not the fault of Microsoft, they are three other companies that do not want to support older products. I’m just glad I didn’t have the scanner attached to my computer, who knows whether there would be drivers for that!
I remember when legacy was used as a derogatory term for mainframe hardware and software. It now seems that three years is a very long time for PCs. If you are planning to buy a Vista machine, I’d wait until all these other third-party suppliers have caught up. I’d also wait until there is more expertise out there so the migration process can be done in an afternoon and not over two weeks.
And do I like using Vista? For ordinary work it is no different, but I do like the size of my new laptop’s screen. The Windows + alt key combination looks impressive when I’m showing Vista to new people. The Search facility is just bizarre. It’s quicker for me to look where I think the file is than to wait for the Search facility not to find it!
DB2 9.1 for z/OS
Finally (ie as of 16 March 2007) mainframers can get their hands on DB2 9.1 and start to use the promised XML facilities that it has to offer.
IBM has been talking about Viper – the codename for DB2 9 – on Windows, Unix, and Linux servers for a while now (July 2006), but now it is available on mainframes (although, of course, the Windows, Unix, and Linux version would run in a mainframe Linux partition).
The new big thing in this version is PureXML, which is IBM’s name for its XML facility allowing XML documents to be stored in such a way that the hierarchical information is retained and the XML document itself can be queried. Previously IBM had two less-than-efficient approaches available. Users could either store the whole XML document in a single database field, which made it impossible for SQL queries to work. The alternative was an approach called shredding in which the XML document is broken up into chunks and these chunks are then stored in different columns in the same row of the database. This approach made queries possible, but it has stopped being an hierarchical XML document that can be used elsewhere. Of course it could be recombined, but that uses more resources and puts the database under pressure.
So, PureXML allows the XML data to be stored, the data to be indexed, and SQL queries to scan the document – a huge improvement for users. It is particularly beneficial for sites who are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) because so much information is stored as XML to allow all the different applications and even different systems to work together successfully. It allows the formation of composite applications using the services made available from these applications and systems.
Sales of DB2 9.1 for mainframes should also help IBM sell those zIIP co-processors. The System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) is a specialty engine directed toward data serving workloads. zIIP is designed to boost the performance of DB2 because it processes only DB2 routines.
Also enhanced is the DB2 QMF (Query Management Facility), which has a new Web interface. And various DB2 tools have minor changes so they support DB2 V9.1 for z/OS. These include the DB2 Utilities Suite.
It looks like IBM is onto a winner with this.
IBM has been talking about Viper – the codename for DB2 9 – on Windows, Unix, and Linux servers for a while now (July 2006), but now it is available on mainframes (although, of course, the Windows, Unix, and Linux version would run in a mainframe Linux partition).
The new big thing in this version is PureXML, which is IBM’s name for its XML facility allowing XML documents to be stored in such a way that the hierarchical information is retained and the XML document itself can be queried. Previously IBM had two less-than-efficient approaches available. Users could either store the whole XML document in a single database field, which made it impossible for SQL queries to work. The alternative was an approach called shredding in which the XML document is broken up into chunks and these chunks are then stored in different columns in the same row of the database. This approach made queries possible, but it has stopped being an hierarchical XML document that can be used elsewhere. Of course it could be recombined, but that uses more resources and puts the database under pressure.
So, PureXML allows the XML data to be stored, the data to be indexed, and SQL queries to scan the document – a huge improvement for users. It is particularly beneficial for sites who are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) because so much information is stored as XML to allow all the different applications and even different systems to work together successfully. It allows the formation of composite applications using the services made available from these applications and systems.
Sales of DB2 9.1 for mainframes should also help IBM sell those zIIP co-processors. The System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) is a specialty engine directed toward data serving workloads. zIIP is designed to boost the performance of DB2 because it processes only DB2 routines.
Also enhanced is the DB2 QMF (Query Management Facility), which has a new Web interface. And various DB2 tools have minor changes so they support DB2 V9.1 for z/OS. These include the DB2 Utilities Suite.
It looks like IBM is onto a winner with this.
Vista – first reports
I blogged the other week about whether I really did want a new Vista laptop, and if I did whether I needed Microsoft products running on it. Well, I visited another PC superstore and they had about two Mac laptops and absolutely none at all with Linux pre-installed. In the end I was swayed by the hardware and took the software that came with it. So yes, I was turned to the dark side and now have a Vista machine.
I bought an HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop – it has a 17” wide TFT screen (1440 by 900) and is sleek and black. The processor is a 1.66GHz core duo T5500 centrino duo chip. It has 2GB of RAM and twin hard drives providing 120GB of storage. The operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium. As well as being wireless enabled (802.11a, b, g) it has an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 video card, DVD writer, and even a digital TV tuner. So it should be able to do everything except make pot noodle (as they say!).
I turned it on, and after a long time it allowed me to set it up – pretty normal stuff here. It found our wireless network and I was soon on the Internet – all good so far. It came with a 60-day version of Norton, which I started and then let it update from the Symantec Web site.
Next, I thought I’d connect to the other computers in our office network. That’s when I met the first problem. The default workgroup name is WORKGROUP, with XP it is MSHOME (I think), anyway, I had to change the workgroup name so it was the same as on the other computers.
The next problem was that although the XP machines could see the new Vista laptop, they could not access it. That problem was solved by turning off the Norton firewall (gulp!). Once we’d done that, the Vista machine could see all the other workgroup machines and they could see the Vista one. From the Vista machine we could see the folders “shared” and “shareddocs” on the XP machines, but from the XP machine we couldn’t see any directories at all on the XP one.
That problem was solved by selecting the Network and Sharing Center and, under Sharing and Discovery, turning on Public Folder Sharing and turning off Password protected sharing. We now have a shared directory on the Vista box and it can be accessed from all the other networked PCs without needing a password or anything else. It also told us to modify Norton to allow network access but nothing else. We haven’t quite managed to find where to do that yet!
The next stage was to use Laplink (www.laplink.com) to transfer the contents of the old computer to the new one wirelessly over our network. This worked brilliantly (I think) although it did have to run overnight (it said it would take 12 hours). Once it finished, my new Vista machine looked just like my old XP machine. Laplink ran a start-up program showing which applications were launching automatically. Obviously I didn’t need my XP anti-virus or anti-malware (I’ve got Norton). I did ask it to start PC MACLAN and Iomega software (yes, I still back-up to a ZIP drive).
I tested that my applications were running OK. All were except Word! Word would launch and then disappear. We spent ages trying all sorts of things – re-installing etc. Someone suggested a hack they knew which did the trick. We right-clicked on winword.exe and selected properties from the pop-up box. We then clicked the Compatibility tab and ticked the box saying, “Run this program as an administrator”. It seems to have done the trick.
The next stage was to connect up the printer, ZIP drive, and Macintosh laptop. But I’ll tell you what happened there next time!!
Our main problem was finding the time to work on the new laptop because we kept expecting each step to take much longer than we’d normally anticipate. And that’s because we didn’t know what new differences Vista would throw at us. Any additional help and advice gratefully received! (Anyone writing “told you so” or “only a complete idiot would buy Vista” would only be repeating what we’ve been saying in the office this week!!) You can contact me at trevore@xephon.com.
I bought an HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop – it has a 17” wide TFT screen (1440 by 900) and is sleek and black. The processor is a 1.66GHz core duo T5500 centrino duo chip. It has 2GB of RAM and twin hard drives providing 120GB of storage. The operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium. As well as being wireless enabled (802.11a, b, g) it has an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 video card, DVD writer, and even a digital TV tuner. So it should be able to do everything except make pot noodle (as they say!).
I turned it on, and after a long time it allowed me to set it up – pretty normal stuff here. It found our wireless network and I was soon on the Internet – all good so far. It came with a 60-day version of Norton, which I started and then let it update from the Symantec Web site.
Next, I thought I’d connect to the other computers in our office network. That’s when I met the first problem. The default workgroup name is WORKGROUP, with XP it is MSHOME (I think), anyway, I had to change the workgroup name so it was the same as on the other computers.
The next problem was that although the XP machines could see the new Vista laptop, they could not access it. That problem was solved by turning off the Norton firewall (gulp!). Once we’d done that, the Vista machine could see all the other workgroup machines and they could see the Vista one. From the Vista machine we could see the folders “shared” and “shareddocs” on the XP machines, but from the XP machine we couldn’t see any directories at all on the XP one.
That problem was solved by selecting the Network and Sharing Center and, under Sharing and Discovery, turning on Public Folder Sharing and turning off Password protected sharing. We now have a shared directory on the Vista box and it can be accessed from all the other networked PCs without needing a password or anything else. It also told us to modify Norton to allow network access but nothing else. We haven’t quite managed to find where to do that yet!
The next stage was to use Laplink (www.laplink.com) to transfer the contents of the old computer to the new one wirelessly over our network. This worked brilliantly (I think) although it did have to run overnight (it said it would take 12 hours). Once it finished, my new Vista machine looked just like my old XP machine. Laplink ran a start-up program showing which applications were launching automatically. Obviously I didn’t need my XP anti-virus or anti-malware (I’ve got Norton). I did ask it to start PC MACLAN and Iomega software (yes, I still back-up to a ZIP drive).
I tested that my applications were running OK. All were except Word! Word would launch and then disappear. We spent ages trying all sorts of things – re-installing etc. Someone suggested a hack they knew which did the trick. We right-clicked on winword.exe and selected properties from the pop-up box. We then clicked the Compatibility tab and ticked the box saying, “Run this program as an administrator”. It seems to have done the trick.
The next stage was to connect up the printer, ZIP drive, and Macintosh laptop. But I’ll tell you what happened there next time!!
Our main problem was finding the time to work on the new laptop because we kept expecting each step to take much longer than we’d normally anticipate. And that’s because we didn’t know what new differences Vista would throw at us. Any additional help and advice gratefully received! (Anyone writing “told you so” or “only a complete idiot would buy Vista” would only be repeating what we’ve been saying in the office this week!!) You can contact me at trevore@xephon.com.
Arcati Yearbook 2007
Back in September I was talking about the 2006 version of the Arcati Yearbook – saying what a great source of information it was for mainframers. Well, the good news is that the 2007 version is now available for download. It’s free and you can get it from www.arcati.com/newyearbook07.
It’s a 2763KB download, and the PDF file describes itself as “the independent annual guide for users of IBM mainframe systems”. The Yearbook contains 147 fact-filled pages (with a few adverts – that’s why it’s free to download I guess!) – up from 124 last year.
As in previous years, the Yearbook contains pages of information and in-depth mainframe-related articles. It also contains the results of this year’s survey of mainframers.
The Vendor Directory lists vendors, consultants, and service providers in the z/OS and OS/390 environment. There is a media guide for IBM mainframers, which contains information resources, publications, and user groups for the z/OS environment. Next is a glossary of terminology, which provides definitions for some mainframe-related terms. The final part of this long and detailed section is the technical information, which is subtitled, “Hardware tales – z9, z990, z890; mainframe hardware timeline”.
The articles in the Yearbook have all been written by mainframe experts. These include: “Mainframe management: where ITIL fits in” by Ralph Crosby of BMC Software and Carl Greiner of Ovum; “Problems with worldwide pricing variations” by Barry Graham and taken from a recent Mainframe Market Bulletin; “What has IBM been doing in 2006? Spending, spending, spending!” by Mark Wilson, a mainframe consultant; “Transforming the economics of data center operations” by Steve Revell of ASG; “Securing automated file transfers to and from z/OS” by Kalle Jaaskelainen from SSH Communications Security; “Harnessing the power of legacy systems” by DataDirect Technologies’ Andy Gutteridge; “The buffer pool: change control for DB2 access paths” by database guru Craig S Mullins; “A new alternative for modernizing security” by Barry Schrager of JME (and original designer and primary author of ACF2); “Firefighting versus fire prevention” by Osman Aykut of TRILOGexpert; and “Modernize your systems with XML – quickly and easily!” by Peter Prager of Canam Software Labs.
It’s worth downloading a copy of the Yearbook simply for the survey results. It’s always useful to know what other mainframe sites are up to, and the Yearbook provides a snapshot of System z users’ current hardware and software configuration and their plans and concerns for the months ahead. The 86 users included in the survey were taken from a variety of locations with a range of hardware installed.
Interestingly, the majority of respondents believe that their Unix and Windows acquisition and support costs are growing faster than those on the System z, and they continue to use the mainframe as their principal repository for corporate data. I’ll leave you to read the full conclusions at your leisure.
Anyway, well worth a look and, as I mentioned above, it is completely free.
It’s a 2763KB download, and the PDF file describes itself as “the independent annual guide for users of IBM mainframe systems”. The Yearbook contains 147 fact-filled pages (with a few adverts – that’s why it’s free to download I guess!) – up from 124 last year.
As in previous years, the Yearbook contains pages of information and in-depth mainframe-related articles. It also contains the results of this year’s survey of mainframers.
The Vendor Directory lists vendors, consultants, and service providers in the z/OS and OS/390 environment. There is a media guide for IBM mainframers, which contains information resources, publications, and user groups for the z/OS environment. Next is a glossary of terminology, which provides definitions for some mainframe-related terms. The final part of this long and detailed section is the technical information, which is subtitled, “Hardware tales – z9, z990, z890; mainframe hardware timeline”.
The articles in the Yearbook have all been written by mainframe experts. These include: “Mainframe management: where ITIL fits in” by Ralph Crosby of BMC Software and Carl Greiner of Ovum; “Problems with worldwide pricing variations” by Barry Graham and taken from a recent Mainframe Market Bulletin; “What has IBM been doing in 2006? Spending, spending, spending!” by Mark Wilson, a mainframe consultant; “Transforming the economics of data center operations” by Steve Revell of ASG; “Securing automated file transfers to and from z/OS” by Kalle Jaaskelainen from SSH Communications Security; “Harnessing the power of legacy systems” by DataDirect Technologies’ Andy Gutteridge; “The buffer pool: change control for DB2 access paths” by database guru Craig S Mullins; “A new alternative for modernizing security” by Barry Schrager of JME (and original designer and primary author of ACF2); “Firefighting versus fire prevention” by Osman Aykut of TRILOGexpert; and “Modernize your systems with XML – quickly and easily!” by Peter Prager of Canam Software Labs.
It’s worth downloading a copy of the Yearbook simply for the survey results. It’s always useful to know what other mainframe sites are up to, and the Yearbook provides a snapshot of System z users’ current hardware and software configuration and their plans and concerns for the months ahead. The 86 users included in the survey were taken from a variety of locations with a range of hardware installed.
Interestingly, the majority of respondents believe that their Unix and Windows acquisition and support costs are growing faster than those on the System z, and they continue to use the mainframe as their principal repository for corporate data. I’ll leave you to read the full conclusions at your leisure.
Anyway, well worth a look and, as I mentioned above, it is completely free.
User interface façade
What does user interface façade mean, and is it a good thing?
Like all good philosophy essays, let’s start with some definitions so that we know what we’re talking about. A user interface is simply what a user sees when they are trying to make use of a piece of technology. The interfaces are usually completely inflexible. A user interface façade is very similar to a user interface in that it represents the presentation layer seen by the user. It is a way of giving the user an easy way of interacting with more complicated technology – or more usually software applications. What can make a façade more than a simple interface is the ability for the user to combine other interfaces and to have some control over the appearance of the interface.
So why would you want a user interface façade? Well, you can mask almost any technology with almost any design façade you want. Typically they are used to isolate a user working from a browser from the underlying CICS or other mainframe SOA application. The business units of work that are available on the mainframe can be easily used by an end user with little or no understanding of the technology that is being invoked on the mainframe. So in many ways a façade is a good thing.
Strangely though, the definition of façade is often negative. For example, http://dict.die.net/facade/ defines façade as, “a false appearance that hides the reality”; www.thefreedictionary.com/façade gives us, “an artificial or deceptive front”; and www.m-w.com/dictionary/façade defines it as, “a false, superficial, or artificial appearance or effect”. The printed Chambers dictionary even goes so far as to suggest, “the appearance presented to the world, esp. if showy and with little behind it”.
These all seem to be rather negative uses for façade, the last implying that all those years of mainframe effort count for nothing! I guess it’s similar to the term “legacy”, which in computing terms tends to mean something old and unwanted, whereas in more general usage a legacy is something you benefit from. Rich Aunt Agatha leaves you all her money – that’s a legacy you’re pleased to receive.
I guess that the big problem with user interface façades is that the original user interface on the mainframe has grown over time to suit the users (both new and experienced), and now a completely new one is designed that starts again. All that has been learned over the years with regard to how people feel most comfortable when interacting with the application is lost – and will have to be relearned for Version 2.0 of the interface. This seems like a waste of time.
Anyway, these thoughts about mainframe applications and user interface façades were stimulated by an e-mail from Anthony Rudd.
Like all good philosophy essays, let’s start with some definitions so that we know what we’re talking about. A user interface is simply what a user sees when they are trying to make use of a piece of technology. The interfaces are usually completely inflexible. A user interface façade is very similar to a user interface in that it represents the presentation layer seen by the user. It is a way of giving the user an easy way of interacting with more complicated technology – or more usually software applications. What can make a façade more than a simple interface is the ability for the user to combine other interfaces and to have some control over the appearance of the interface.
So why would you want a user interface façade? Well, you can mask almost any technology with almost any design façade you want. Typically they are used to isolate a user working from a browser from the underlying CICS or other mainframe SOA application. The business units of work that are available on the mainframe can be easily used by an end user with little or no understanding of the technology that is being invoked on the mainframe. So in many ways a façade is a good thing.
Strangely though, the definition of façade is often negative. For example, http://dict.die.net/facade/ defines façade as, “a false appearance that hides the reality”; www.thefreedictionary.com/façade gives us, “an artificial or deceptive front”; and www.m-w.com/dictionary/façade defines it as, “a false, superficial, or artificial appearance or effect”. The printed Chambers dictionary even goes so far as to suggest, “the appearance presented to the world, esp. if showy and with little behind it”.
These all seem to be rather negative uses for façade, the last implying that all those years of mainframe effort count for nothing! I guess it’s similar to the term “legacy”, which in computing terms tends to mean something old and unwanted, whereas in more general usage a legacy is something you benefit from. Rich Aunt Agatha leaves you all her money – that’s a legacy you’re pleased to receive.
I guess that the big problem with user interface façades is that the original user interface on the mainframe has grown over time to suit the users (both new and experienced), and now a completely new one is designed that starts again. All that has been learned over the years with regard to how people feel most comfortable when interacting with the application is lost – and will have to be relearned for Version 2.0 of the interface. This seems like a waste of time.
Anyway, these thoughts about mainframe applications and user interface façades were stimulated by an e-mail from Anthony Rudd.
Alternatives to Microsoft
I’m just buying a new laptop – I need it for work. I want one with a letter box-shaped screen and I think I’d like that screen to be 17 inches rather than 15.4 (or any other size). I definitely don’t want a sub-notebook. I don’t want to record TV programs (because I don’t want a TV card), but I do want to burn DVDs and have lots of windows open at the same time. Doesn’t seem too difficult a specification does it? But because of the date, I am unable to touch a machine like that running Vista at my local PC superstore – although I can touch a machine running XP media edition, or smaller machines running Vista.
Do you want Vista? That was the question the man in the shop asked me and I immediately thought yes. I thought of all the times in the past when new versions of software packages needed features in the latest version of the operating system to work optimally. But driving home (empty handed) afterwards I thought about the question and whether I wanted a Microsoft operating system at all.
If I don’t have Windows on my computer, what are my choices? Well, you know the answers as well as me – Mac OS X or Linux. Mac OS X is really a Unix-based operating system that is designed to be the iPod of PCs. It does everything very easily. I’ve seen it find wireless networks, and it’s good with audio and video files. It’s definitely a contender – especially as I have Mac software because I use a Mac OS 9 laptop some of the time at the moment. I know widgets work on Macs because that’s where they were first created.
Linux is a harder choice. Ubuntu seems to be the favourite at the moment, but very small distros like Puppy Linux are very popular with enthusiasts as well. Every one I speak to has their own Linux favourite for different reasons.
Going with Linux also involves finding alternatives to the well-known packages that Microsoft supplies. Again, this isn’t a problem – and it’s also not a problem on Windows PCs. I use Microsoft Office on my PC and Mac, but I don’t have to. OpenOffice is an Open Source alternative to Office that runs on PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. It comes, as you’d expect, with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, and a drawing program. It also has a database program. It’s not totally compatible with MS Office, but in each version it gets closer and for all the standard stuff it does seem very compatible.
Of course, everyone who talks about Web 2.0 and AJAX is suggesting that these kinds of application don’t need to be installed, they can be used from a browser. The choices in that case are Writely and Freeform (www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo). Freeform allows you to work on word processing files, spreadsheets, or presentations. Writely, which is now owned by Google allows you to use word processing files and spreadsheets. You just need a Google account.
I never use Outlook – although I know many people do – so not having an alternative is not really a problem. I never used it because it was vulnerable at one time (every one in your address book suddenly starts receiving viruses), and I had an alternative address book and to-do software. So I just never started. For e-mail, I did use Eudora for a while, but I prefer not to download e-mails. They sit on various accounts –like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – where I can view them and delete all the unwanted ones that get through the spam filters. I can then access my mail from any Internet enabled computer – whether it’s running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Yahoo mail offers a diary facility and I am sure that a search would find hundreds of freeware PIM software packages for every platform. I could use Google Calendar, which allows you to see other people’s calendars.
There are plenty of alternatives to Explorer as a browser. To be honest I find it quite OK. I use IE 7 with its tabs etc, and I also use Firefox, which I prefer because I have been able to customize it so it does exactly what I want!
There are also plenty of alternative to Media Player. Version 11 seems to think all I want to do is rip or burn or waste time creating playlists. It took me ages to find a way to find some music files tucked away inside a directory inside a directory. Once you’ve found your files it looks very elegant. iTunes, which obviously works on Macs, seems far more intuitive to use – but that is really the big difference between Apple and Microsoft! And there are plenty of other players like WinAmp and Real Player (which I have installed anyway to listen to some BBC radio programmes).
So, do I want to move away from Windows completely and never know the joys (/anguish) of using Vista? Do I buy a Vista machine and try using non-Microsoft applications until I’m brave enough to move off the Windows platform? I’ll let you know when I finally make up my mind. In the meantime, any helpful hints will be much appreciated – you can e-mail me at TrevorE@xephon.com.
Do you want Vista? That was the question the man in the shop asked me and I immediately thought yes. I thought of all the times in the past when new versions of software packages needed features in the latest version of the operating system to work optimally. But driving home (empty handed) afterwards I thought about the question and whether I wanted a Microsoft operating system at all.
If I don’t have Windows on my computer, what are my choices? Well, you know the answers as well as me – Mac OS X or Linux. Mac OS X is really a Unix-based operating system that is designed to be the iPod of PCs. It does everything very easily. I’ve seen it find wireless networks, and it’s good with audio and video files. It’s definitely a contender – especially as I have Mac software because I use a Mac OS 9 laptop some of the time at the moment. I know widgets work on Macs because that’s where they were first created.
Linux is a harder choice. Ubuntu seems to be the favourite at the moment, but very small distros like Puppy Linux are very popular with enthusiasts as well. Every one I speak to has their own Linux favourite for different reasons.
Going with Linux also involves finding alternatives to the well-known packages that Microsoft supplies. Again, this isn’t a problem – and it’s also not a problem on Windows PCs. I use Microsoft Office on my PC and Mac, but I don’t have to. OpenOffice is an Open Source alternative to Office that runs on PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. It comes, as you’d expect, with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, and a drawing program. It also has a database program. It’s not totally compatible with MS Office, but in each version it gets closer and for all the standard stuff it does seem very compatible.
Of course, everyone who talks about Web 2.0 and AJAX is suggesting that these kinds of application don’t need to be installed, they can be used from a browser. The choices in that case are Writely and Freeform (www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo). Freeform allows you to work on word processing files, spreadsheets, or presentations. Writely, which is now owned by Google allows you to use word processing files and spreadsheets. You just need a Google account.
I never use Outlook – although I know many people do – so not having an alternative is not really a problem. I never used it because it was vulnerable at one time (every one in your address book suddenly starts receiving viruses), and I had an alternative address book and to-do software. So I just never started. For e-mail, I did use Eudora for a while, but I prefer not to download e-mails. They sit on various accounts –like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – where I can view them and delete all the unwanted ones that get through the spam filters. I can then access my mail from any Internet enabled computer – whether it’s running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Yahoo mail offers a diary facility and I am sure that a search would find hundreds of freeware PIM software packages for every platform. I could use Google Calendar, which allows you to see other people’s calendars.
There are plenty of alternatives to Explorer as a browser. To be honest I find it quite OK. I use IE 7 with its tabs etc, and I also use Firefox, which I prefer because I have been able to customize it so it does exactly what I want!
There are also plenty of alternative to Media Player. Version 11 seems to think all I want to do is rip or burn or waste time creating playlists. It took me ages to find a way to find some music files tucked away inside a directory inside a directory. Once you’ve found your files it looks very elegant. iTunes, which obviously works on Macs, seems far more intuitive to use – but that is really the big difference between Apple and Microsoft! And there are plenty of other players like WinAmp and Real Player (which I have installed anyway to listen to some BBC radio programmes).
So, do I want to move away from Windows completely and never know the joys (/anguish) of using Vista? Do I buy a Vista machine and try using non-Microsoft applications until I’m brave enough to move off the Windows platform? I’ll let you know when I finally make up my mind. In the meantime, any helpful hints will be much appreciated – you can e-mail me at TrevorE@xephon.com.
z/VM virtualization
I blogged about virualization a couple of weeks ago (see Virtualization – it’s really clever, 22 January), well a couple of days ago (6 February 2007) IBM came out with an interesting announcement about virtualization.
IBM said that with z/VM Version 5.3 they were able to set all sorts of new records for the number of virtualized machines. For those of you who tuned in late, virtualization is a way of allowing one set of physical hardware appear to be many sets of hardware. And just how many “sets” does the new version run to? IBM is claiming more than 1000 virtual images can be hosted on a single copy of z/VM V5.3 – which they claim (and who can doubt them?) is a record.
In addition, the new version of VM can support a larger number of processor units (that’s real hardware). It now supports 32, whereas previously the maximum was 24 – so that’s quite a big jump.
VM has had quite a chequered history because IBM has seemed to never know quite what to do with it. However, a strong and vocal user base has been responsible for getting it through the bad times in the 80s and again in the 90s. It has fought off the introduction of LPARs on processors and many other developments that seem to signify its death.
Currently, with z/VM, it’s possible to run z/OS images under it (which is how it has always worked) or as a very big Linux-only server. For people running Linux on other platforms, this gives you a single footprint, savings on just about everything like heating, cooling, lighting, electricity, staff. Plus, you should be able to run larger workloads, and it gives you better monitoring and management.
An interesting announcement – and one pointing the way forward. z/VM will be available on 29 June 2007.
IBM said that with z/VM Version 5.3 they were able to set all sorts of new records for the number of virtualized machines. For those of you who tuned in late, virtualization is a way of allowing one set of physical hardware appear to be many sets of hardware. And just how many “sets” does the new version run to? IBM is claiming more than 1000 virtual images can be hosted on a single copy of z/VM V5.3 – which they claim (and who can doubt them?) is a record.
In addition, the new version of VM can support a larger number of processor units (that’s real hardware). It now supports 32, whereas previously the maximum was 24 – so that’s quite a big jump.
VM has had quite a chequered history because IBM has seemed to never know quite what to do with it. However, a strong and vocal user base has been responsible for getting it through the bad times in the 80s and again in the 90s. It has fought off the introduction of LPARs on processors and many other developments that seem to signify its death.
Currently, with z/VM, it’s possible to run z/OS images under it (which is how it has always worked) or as a very big Linux-only server. For people running Linux on other platforms, this gives you a single footprint, savings on just about everything like heating, cooling, lighting, electricity, staff. Plus, you should be able to run larger workloads, and it gives you better monitoring and management.
An interesting announcement – and one pointing the way forward. z/VM will be available on 29 June 2007.
Mainframe futures… (part 2)
Last week I was considering issues that CIOs and others might be concerned with for 2007. I talked about having to do more with less (less space, money, and fewer people), High Availability, licensing issues, and Open Source software. This week I will extend that list with some more things worth thinking about.
SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) has definitely been the acronym of choice for most vendor presentations during 2006 and it is likely to continue throughout 2007. The simple idea behind it makes perfect sense in all management presentations. If I can summarize: mainframes contain all the best applications and most important data, and users like to work from anywhere using a browser. SOA is the acronym that puts the two together. Again, from a high-level view, it seems sensible and straightforward to chop up your CICS applications into business-related units and give users access to these units of work. The actual mechanics of doing this is much harder. Even so, CICS is now a consumer as well as a provider of Web services, which makes connecting the parts of the new business-based application easier. There are many companies whose main business seems to be in making CICS applications available as Web services. These include Attachmate, Attunity, IONA, Jacada, NetManage, and Seagull (now part of Rocket Software), as well as IBM.
Virtualization is something I talked about in a blog a couple of weeks ago. The importance of virtualization is not only the fact that it gives you a way to maximize the use of devices by applications, but it also allows more devices than you actually have to appear to be available to the virtualized machines. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it gives you a way to control the way the hardware is used. You can monitor and manage how the applications use the physical hardware you have. And here’s the third advantage, The IBM Virtualization Engine allows you to manage across platforms. It’s possible to link with other virtualization software like VMware’s ESX Server, Microsoft’s Virtual PC, and XenSource’s XenEnterprise. Users can then manage a multiplatform virtualized enterprise.
Another area that will take up as much time in 2007 as it did in 2006 is compliance. It is likely that most sites will not receive any more money for this extra work and will therefore be looking for some kind of automation software to ensure that they comply with the regulations. Companies that operate on more than one continent will have the added burden of finding themselves having to comply with more than one set of regulations.
One other area that CIOs will have at the back of their minds in 2007 is on-demand computing. The idea behind this is for the user to be able to call on extra resources when they are needed. All sites experience demand levels that vary during the course of the day and the course of the year. A way of cutting costs is to not have all the processing power necessary for peak periods available all the time. However, the resources can be called on when required. IBM has a way of pricing so that users should pay only for what they use.
Well, there are some of my thoughts about what is going to be important to in the world of mainframes this coming year. I’d be interested to hear your opinions. You can e-mail me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) has definitely been the acronym of choice for most vendor presentations during 2006 and it is likely to continue throughout 2007. The simple idea behind it makes perfect sense in all management presentations. If I can summarize: mainframes contain all the best applications and most important data, and users like to work from anywhere using a browser. SOA is the acronym that puts the two together. Again, from a high-level view, it seems sensible and straightforward to chop up your CICS applications into business-related units and give users access to these units of work. The actual mechanics of doing this is much harder. Even so, CICS is now a consumer as well as a provider of Web services, which makes connecting the parts of the new business-based application easier. There are many companies whose main business seems to be in making CICS applications available as Web services. These include Attachmate, Attunity, IONA, Jacada, NetManage, and Seagull (now part of Rocket Software), as well as IBM.
Virtualization is something I talked about in a blog a couple of weeks ago. The importance of virtualization is not only the fact that it gives you a way to maximize the use of devices by applications, but it also allows more devices than you actually have to appear to be available to the virtualized machines. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it gives you a way to control the way the hardware is used. You can monitor and manage how the applications use the physical hardware you have. And here’s the third advantage, The IBM Virtualization Engine allows you to manage across platforms. It’s possible to link with other virtualization software like VMware’s ESX Server, Microsoft’s Virtual PC, and XenSource’s XenEnterprise. Users can then manage a multiplatform virtualized enterprise.
Another area that will take up as much time in 2007 as it did in 2006 is compliance. It is likely that most sites will not receive any more money for this extra work and will therefore be looking for some kind of automation software to ensure that they comply with the regulations. Companies that operate on more than one continent will have the added burden of finding themselves having to comply with more than one set of regulations.
One other area that CIOs will have at the back of their minds in 2007 is on-demand computing. The idea behind this is for the user to be able to call on extra resources when they are needed. All sites experience demand levels that vary during the course of the day and the course of the year. A way of cutting costs is to not have all the processing power necessary for peak periods available all the time. However, the resources can be called on when required. IBM has a way of pricing so that users should pay only for what they use.
Well, there are some of my thoughts about what is going to be important to in the world of mainframes this coming year. I’d be interested to hear your opinions. You can e-mail me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
Mainframe futures… (part 1)
If I was in charge of a data centre at the moment, what issues would I be concerned about for 2007? That’s the sort of question CIOs and others must have been asking themselves recently. I’ve been kicking around that question recently and below are some of my thoughts. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this topic.
The perennial problem of how to do more with less must be at the top of everyone’s agenda. There is always less money and there are always more demands put on the data centre. For example, the amount of data that needs to be stored somewhere just seems to grow each year and this compounded in some companies by the need to store sound files (whether music or podcasts) and pictures (including videos). This is on top of the growing databases and the increasing number of unstructured files, and, of course, the need to retain everyone’s e-mails for audit purposes. Doing more with less also applies in many cases to manpower. It’s a frequently discussed phenomenon of the aging COBOL programmer. But loss of application programmers also goes with fewer operators (certainly than the heydays of the late 1970s with 20 operators on a single shift!), and fewer systems programmers. The solution is more and more automation – which would be much easier if companies didn’t insist on changing the hardware or software in use.
High Availability is also an important issue. Again there is a lot of talk about how this can be accomplished on mainframes and mid-range boxes. But IT departments can also be responsible for a fairly mixed bag of PCs and networks that also need to be up and running. This all needs to be taken in to account when an HA initiative is undertaken.
Many sites also have issues with licensing problems. William Kim Mongan has an article on this topic in a forthcoming issue of Xephon’s z/OS Update (www.xephonusa.com). He describes the problems with licences his company faced when moving processing from one location to another. He describes how some vendor products are dependent CPU-ID, which means that they won’t run on different hardware. Some have a tolerance mode giving the user a week or two’s grace before new keys need to be entered. IT departments are going to have to ensure back-up or recovery sites will run the software they think it needs in the case of a failover situation or even following all too common company mergers.
Most IT managers will be looking more favourably at Open Source software in 2007. This is a difficult decision for many sites. On the one hand licence fees cost money, but they do bring with the assurance that someone cares about that software. Whereas Open Source may have been developed and debugged by hundreds of different people and should be robust and resilient, but, should you experience a problem, who are you going to call? Having said that, there are many examples where Open Source software may be just what you need for PCs and mid-range machines. And with Linux on the mainframe, we will see the growth of Open Source applications running on the mainframe.
Next time I will look at the future for mainframes in relation to virtualization, SOA, and compliance.
The perennial problem of how to do more with less must be at the top of everyone’s agenda. There is always less money and there are always more demands put on the data centre. For example, the amount of data that needs to be stored somewhere just seems to grow each year and this compounded in some companies by the need to store sound files (whether music or podcasts) and pictures (including videos). This is on top of the growing databases and the increasing number of unstructured files, and, of course, the need to retain everyone’s e-mails for audit purposes. Doing more with less also applies in many cases to manpower. It’s a frequently discussed phenomenon of the aging COBOL programmer. But loss of application programmers also goes with fewer operators (certainly than the heydays of the late 1970s with 20 operators on a single shift!), and fewer systems programmers. The solution is more and more automation – which would be much easier if companies didn’t insist on changing the hardware or software in use.
High Availability is also an important issue. Again there is a lot of talk about how this can be accomplished on mainframes and mid-range boxes. But IT departments can also be responsible for a fairly mixed bag of PCs and networks that also need to be up and running. This all needs to be taken in to account when an HA initiative is undertaken.
Many sites also have issues with licensing problems. William Kim Mongan has an article on this topic in a forthcoming issue of Xephon’s z/OS Update (www.xephonusa.com). He describes the problems with licences his company faced when moving processing from one location to another. He describes how some vendor products are dependent CPU-ID, which means that they won’t run on different hardware. Some have a tolerance mode giving the user a week or two’s grace before new keys need to be entered. IT departments are going to have to ensure back-up or recovery sites will run the software they think it needs in the case of a failover situation or even following all too common company mergers.
Most IT managers will be looking more favourably at Open Source software in 2007. This is a difficult decision for many sites. On the one hand licence fees cost money, but they do bring with the assurance that someone cares about that software. Whereas Open Source may have been developed and debugged by hundreds of different people and should be robust and resilient, but, should you experience a problem, who are you going to call? Having said that, there are many examples where Open Source software may be just what you need for PCs and mid-range machines. And with Linux on the mainframe, we will see the growth of Open Source applications running on the mainframe.
Next time I will look at the future for mainframes in relation to virtualization, SOA, and compliance.
Virtualization – it’s really clever
I’ve recently been taking a look at virtualization and The IBM Virtualization Engine platform, and I’ve got to say that I am very impressed with the concept behind it. I’d really like to hear from people who have implemented it to see how successful they have found it to be.
Virtualization started life in the late 1960s with the original implementation of VM/CMS. The problem that VM/CMS solved was how to let lots of people work at the same time on the fairly limited hardware that was available. It was not unknown in those days for developers to book slots on the hardware to do their work. CMS (Conversational Monitoring System) was developed at Cambridge and gave each person sitting at a terminal their own virtual computer. They had disks, memory, processing power, and things like card readers and card punches, all apparently available to them. They would do their work and VM (Virtual Machine) would run as a hypervisor (rather than an operating system as such) and dispatch the different virtual machines running according to priorities it was given.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the story takes the next step forward with the introduction of PR/SM (Processor Resource/System Manager) and LPARs (Logical PARtitions). This worked by having something like the VM hypervisor running in microcode on the hardware. Users were then able to divide up the existing processor power and channels between different LPARs. And the reason they would want to do that is so the same physical hardware could run multiple operating systems. That meant one large partition for production work and smaller ones for development and testing, but all located on the same hardware. It made management and control much easier.
The next big leap forward takes place in the middle of 2005 with the introduction of the z9 processor. This took the idea of processors and peripherals appearing to be available one step further. Rather than physically dividing up the processor and channels into LPARs, everything was logically divided. These virtual machines are then prioritized and dispatched accordingly. What it also did, that is very clever, is it allowed insufficient or non-existent resources to be simulated, so they would appear to be available.
If that was the end of the story, that would still be quite clever – but it’s not. IBM long ago realized that it couldn’t pretend it was the only supplier of computer equipment. And most companies – through takeovers, mergers, and anomalous decisions – have ended up with a mish-mash of server hardware, most of which, eventually, becomes the IS department’s responsibility. IBM has cleverly extended its virtualization concept to cover all the servers that exist at a site. It combines them all together into one large unit. Now you might think this would be large and unwieldy and completely the wrong thing to do, but in fact the opposite is true. It now becomes possible to control these disparate servers from a single console and monitor them from one place (which could be a browser). Management becomes much easier. It’s not only possible to manage System z, System i, and System p components, it’s also possible to manage x86-based servers. It can also manage virtual machines generated by Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware, and open source Xen.
So, basically, IBM has come up with a way of making virtual components appear to be available to virtual computer systems running across almost any server that currently exists. This maximizes the usage of the resources available to suit the workload. And it has done it in a way that makes management of such a complex system fairly straightforward. Really clever, eh?
Virtualization started life in the late 1960s with the original implementation of VM/CMS. The problem that VM/CMS solved was how to let lots of people work at the same time on the fairly limited hardware that was available. It was not unknown in those days for developers to book slots on the hardware to do their work. CMS (Conversational Monitoring System) was developed at Cambridge and gave each person sitting at a terminal their own virtual computer. They had disks, memory, processing power, and things like card readers and card punches, all apparently available to them. They would do their work and VM (Virtual Machine) would run as a hypervisor (rather than an operating system as such) and dispatch the different virtual machines running according to priorities it was given.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the story takes the next step forward with the introduction of PR/SM (Processor Resource/System Manager) and LPARs (Logical PARtitions). This worked by having something like the VM hypervisor running in microcode on the hardware. Users were then able to divide up the existing processor power and channels between different LPARs. And the reason they would want to do that is so the same physical hardware could run multiple operating systems. That meant one large partition for production work and smaller ones for development and testing, but all located on the same hardware. It made management and control much easier.
The next big leap forward takes place in the middle of 2005 with the introduction of the z9 processor. This took the idea of processors and peripherals appearing to be available one step further. Rather than physically dividing up the processor and channels into LPARs, everything was logically divided. These virtual machines are then prioritized and dispatched accordingly. What it also did, that is very clever, is it allowed insufficient or non-existent resources to be simulated, so they would appear to be available.
If that was the end of the story, that would still be quite clever – but it’s not. IBM long ago realized that it couldn’t pretend it was the only supplier of computer equipment. And most companies – through takeovers, mergers, and anomalous decisions – have ended up with a mish-mash of server hardware, most of which, eventually, becomes the IS department’s responsibility. IBM has cleverly extended its virtualization concept to cover all the servers that exist at a site. It combines them all together into one large unit. Now you might think this would be large and unwieldy and completely the wrong thing to do, but in fact the opposite is true. It now becomes possible to control these disparate servers from a single console and monitor them from one place (which could be a browser). Management becomes much easier. It’s not only possible to manage System z, System i, and System p components, it’s also possible to manage x86-based servers. It can also manage virtual machines generated by Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware, and open source Xen.
So, basically, IBM has come up with a way of making virtual components appear to be available to virtual computer systems running across almost any server that currently exists. This maximizes the usage of the resources available to suit the workload. And it has done it in a way that makes management of such a complex system fairly straightforward. Really clever, eh?
I say I say I say!
It must have been about six years ago last time I looked at “speakwrite” software, and at that time it was a bit useless! A speakwrite machine, you’ll remember from George Orwell’s novel 1984, was a device allowing the user to speak into a “mouthpiece” (microphone) and his spoken words would be written onto the page. Such a device would be really useful for us bloggers – we could record a podcast (OK, Orwell never mentioned these) and let the speakwrite machine create this text that you’re reading!
I know there are an enormous number of products currently available that can take commands from voice, but I thought that the leaders in this area were probably IBM with its ViaVoice and Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance. I decided to give Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking a try. To be honest, I was not expecting too much.
Previously, I had spent time reading through pages of text, training the software to respond to my dulcet tones. Following that, I had said a couple of sentences and been amazed to see what words the software had written on the screen. I would then read out these new words from the screen and see what the software wrote next. As you can imagine, this could go on for a long time as the software produced sentences less and less like my original.
To be fair, I did know of one IT worker who, having damaged one wrist in a car accident and suffering RSI in the other, turned to voice recognition software as the only way to continue working without having to type. He did use the software successfully, but his work rate was much slower than before.
Anyway, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is now at Version 9 and was released last summer (2006). One interesting development is that there is no longer a need to train the software to recognise your voice patterns. It also comes with a wireless headset to make dictation easier – you’re less likely to rip the headset off as you move your head away from the computer!
The advantage of speaking your text into the computer is that you can get up to 160 words per minute, whereas typing is less than that. As well as being useful for lazier people (like me), voice recognition software is ideal for people like my friend who are unable to type. Nuance also makes a business case for its use by illustrating how much time can be saved.
The big question that’s hovering at the back of your mind now is, “does it work?”. Is it any better than six years ago or is it still just a bit of a fad? Well, I can honestly say that I was very impressed with the improvement in the technology. It does take a little bit of getting used to as you switch from dictation to command mode and back, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very good. I’m not sure whether I’m writing any faster yet, I’ve still only been using it for a little while.
So if you do a lot of typing into your computer (words rather than program code), I think it is worth giving it a try.
BTW you might have noticed that Xephon’s MVS Update and MQ Update journals have changed their names this month. They are now called z/OS Update and WebSphere Update. This reflects the fact that most people are referring to z/OS as z/OS these days rather than the sort-of generic title of MVS, and, secondly, changing to WebSphere reflects the additional content necessary to satisfy users of WebSphere MQ. Full details about the publications can be found at www.xephonusa.com.
I know there are an enormous number of products currently available that can take commands from voice, but I thought that the leaders in this area were probably IBM with its ViaVoice and Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance. I decided to give Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking a try. To be honest, I was not expecting too much.
Previously, I had spent time reading through pages of text, training the software to respond to my dulcet tones. Following that, I had said a couple of sentences and been amazed to see what words the software had written on the screen. I would then read out these new words from the screen and see what the software wrote next. As you can imagine, this could go on for a long time as the software produced sentences less and less like my original.
To be fair, I did know of one IT worker who, having damaged one wrist in a car accident and suffering RSI in the other, turned to voice recognition software as the only way to continue working without having to type. He did use the software successfully, but his work rate was much slower than before.
Anyway, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is now at Version 9 and was released last summer (2006). One interesting development is that there is no longer a need to train the software to recognise your voice patterns. It also comes with a wireless headset to make dictation easier – you’re less likely to rip the headset off as you move your head away from the computer!
The advantage of speaking your text into the computer is that you can get up to 160 words per minute, whereas typing is less than that. As well as being useful for lazier people (like me), voice recognition software is ideal for people like my friend who are unable to type. Nuance also makes a business case for its use by illustrating how much time can be saved.
The big question that’s hovering at the back of your mind now is, “does it work?”. Is it any better than six years ago or is it still just a bit of a fad? Well, I can honestly say that I was very impressed with the improvement in the technology. It does take a little bit of getting used to as you switch from dictation to command mode and back, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very good. I’m not sure whether I’m writing any faster yet, I’ve still only been using it for a little while.
So if you do a lot of typing into your computer (words rather than program code), I think it is worth giving it a try.
BTW you might have noticed that Xephon’s MVS Update and MQ Update journals have changed their names this month. They are now called z/OS Update and WebSphere Update. This reflects the fact that most people are referring to z/OS as z/OS these days rather than the sort-of generic title of MVS, and, secondly, changing to WebSphere reflects the additional content necessary to satisfy users of WebSphere MQ. Full details about the publications can be found at www.xephonusa.com.
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
Extending a small network
In an earlier blog (16 October 2006) I looked at Netgear’s wall-plugged wireless range extender kit and mentioned that there were other similar products available. One of those “others” is the Solwise HomePlug, which I’ve recently had a look at.
The problem that both these products try to overcome is the one where a wireless network doesn’t reach as far as a computer that wants to use it. It can also be used where a LAN doesn’t stretch to reach a remote user, but the mains power supply does. And that’s really the trick with these kinds of device. They make use of the network that most buildings already have installed – the electrical circuits.
The Solwise HomePlug plugs into a router and also into an electrical socket. A second HomePlug connects to a socket near where you are working. Here’s the big difference between the Netgear device and the Solwise HomePlug – the Netgear plug now acts as a wireless device and a number of laptops can share it; the Solwise HomePlug connects by wire to a single computer. But this is not a bad thing because, usually, you have only the one computer that needs connecting in this way. Of course, if you have more computers to connect, then you can purchase more HomePlugs.
The HomePlug provides 200Mbps connectivity. It is also very easy to set up. It comes with a CD containing the HomePlug AV Utility, which is installed first, and then you must install .NET Framework 1.1. The main use of the utility is to change the Private Network Name, and you can use it to detect any other HomePlugs. Changing the Network Name allows a password to be added. It’s also possible to upgrade the firmware of the HomePlugs from the Utility.
Those of you who work from home or a small office will find devices like the Solwise HomePlug very easy to use and an easy way to extend your existing network.
The problem that both these products try to overcome is the one where a wireless network doesn’t reach as far as a computer that wants to use it. It can also be used where a LAN doesn’t stretch to reach a remote user, but the mains power supply does. And that’s really the trick with these kinds of device. They make use of the network that most buildings already have installed – the electrical circuits.
The Solwise HomePlug plugs into a router and also into an electrical socket. A second HomePlug connects to a socket near where you are working. Here’s the big difference between the Netgear device and the Solwise HomePlug – the Netgear plug now acts as a wireless device and a number of laptops can share it; the Solwise HomePlug connects by wire to a single computer. But this is not a bad thing because, usually, you have only the one computer that needs connecting in this way. Of course, if you have more computers to connect, then you can purchase more HomePlugs.
The HomePlug provides 200Mbps connectivity. It is also very easy to set up. It comes with a CD containing the HomePlug AV Utility, which is installed first, and then you must install .NET Framework 1.1. The main use of the utility is to change the Private Network Name, and you can use it to detect any other HomePlugs. Changing the Network Name allows a password to be added. It’s also possible to upgrade the firmware of the HomePlugs from the Utility.
Those of you who work from home or a small office will find devices like the Solwise HomePlug very easy to use and an easy way to extend your existing network.
DB2 performance tip
In last week’s blog I passed on two CICS tips that I had been sent. This week I’d like to look at a DB2 performance tip. This one applies to DB2 V8, it is to do with columns, TEXT, and STMT, and was sent in by Bernard Zver, a regular contributor to the DB2 Update (www.xephonusa.com) journal.
If you are in NFM (NEWFUN = YES), the text of your DBRMs, which is stored in column TEXT of the catalog table SYSIBM.SYSSTMT, or the STMT column of SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT, is encoded in Unicode. These columns are marked with the FOR BIT DATA attribute, which means that if you look at the column, using QMF or SPUFI for example, you are no longer able to easily read the contents, because columns with the FOR BIT DATA attribute are never converted, and these columns are now in Unicode.
You can use the CAST function to convert the TEXT column to EBCDIC:
SELECT
CAST(CAST(STMT AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID 1208) AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID EBCDIC)
FROM SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT
WHERE COLLID='DSNUTILS'
AND NOT (STMTNO=0 AND SEQNO=0 AND SECTNO=0)
This query is not user friendly, so here is a scalar user-defined function to make this query easy:
CREATE FUNCTION INFO.STMT
(ITEM VARCHAR(3500))
RETURNS VARCHAR(3500)
LANGUAGE SQL
SPECIFIC STMT
RETURN
CAST(CAST(ITEM AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID 1208) AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID EBCDIC) ;
-- Grant statements
COMMIT ;
GRANT EXECUTE ON SPECIFIC FUNCTION INFO.STMT TO PUBLIC ;
This query uses the UDF INFO.STMT:
SELECT
INFO.STMT(STMT)
FROM SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT
WHERE COLLID='DSNUTILS'
AND NOT (STMTNO=0 AND SEQNO=0 AND SECTNO=0) ;
The result looks like:
.......DECLARE SYSIBM . SYSPRINT TABLE ( SEQNO INTEGER
.......DECLARE SYSPRINT CURSOR WITH RETURN FOR SELECT
.......DELETE FROM SYSIBM . SYSPRINT ....
.......OPEN SYSPRINT ....
.......INSERT INTO SYSIBM . SYSPRINT ( SEQNO , TEXT )
If you have any queries about this, Bernard’s e-mail address is bernard.zver@informatika.si.
Thanks Bernard.
This will be my last blog until the New Year. So, if you do celebrate Christmas – merry Christmas and a happy New Year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then have a good time anyway.
Trevor Eddolls (trevore@xephon.com)
If you are in NFM (NEWFUN = YES), the text of your DBRMs, which is stored in column TEXT of the catalog table SYSIBM.SYSSTMT, or the STMT column of SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT, is encoded in Unicode. These columns are marked with the FOR BIT DATA attribute, which means that if you look at the column, using QMF or SPUFI for example, you are no longer able to easily read the contents, because columns with the FOR BIT DATA attribute are never converted, and these columns are now in Unicode.
You can use the CAST function to convert the TEXT column to EBCDIC:
SELECT
CAST(CAST(STMT AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID 1208) AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID EBCDIC)
FROM SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT
WHERE COLLID='DSNUTILS'
AND NOT (STMTNO=0 AND SEQNO=0 AND SECTNO=0)
This query is not user friendly, so here is a scalar user-defined function to make this query easy:
CREATE FUNCTION INFO.STMT
(ITEM VARCHAR(3500))
RETURNS VARCHAR(3500)
LANGUAGE SQL
SPECIFIC STMT
RETURN
CAST(CAST(ITEM AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID 1208) AS VARCHAR(3500) CCSID EBCDIC) ;
-- Grant statements
COMMIT ;
GRANT EXECUTE ON SPECIFIC FUNCTION INFO.STMT TO PUBLIC ;
This query uses the UDF INFO.STMT:
SELECT
INFO.STMT(STMT)
FROM SYSIBM.SYSPACKSTMT
WHERE COLLID='DSNUTILS'
AND NOT (STMTNO=0 AND SEQNO=0 AND SECTNO=0) ;
The result looks like:
.......DECLARE SYSIBM . SYSPRINT TABLE ( SEQNO INTEGER
.......DECLARE SYSPRINT CURSOR WITH RETURN FOR SELECT
.......DELETE FROM SYSIBM . SYSPRINT ....
.......OPEN SYSPRINT ....
.......INSERT INTO SYSIBM . SYSPRINT ( SEQNO , TEXT )
If you have any queries about this, Bernard’s e-mail address is bernard.zver@informatika.si.
Thanks Bernard.
This will be my last blog until the New Year. So, if you do celebrate Christmas – merry Christmas and a happy New Year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then have a good time anyway.
Trevor Eddolls (trevore@xephon.com)
Getting the most out of CICS
CICS has been around for a long time and has seen an enormous number of changes over the years. And that’s the reason it is still in constant use at so many Fortune 500 companies. It’s re-invented itself and kept up with computing trends, but never lost its overall reliability.
Optimizing its performance has been on the mind of CICS systems programmers since day 1. In this blog, I’d like to pass on two hints and tips that I’ve recently received.
The first one is to ensure that all exits etc are threadsafe and defined as such, so that OPENAPI TRUEs, such as DB2, can be exploited efficiently using OTE (Open Transaction Environment), the dynamic plan exit, for example, and the XRMIIN and XRMIOUT GLUEs. This is to avoid TCB switching, which will have an adverse effect on performance. Readers might like to take a look at the recently updated redbook on threadsafety in CICS.
The second tip is about WS-Security, and it really says, use WS-Security only if it is what you need! It’s worth remembering that the performance impact of using WS-Security to secure Web services is not insignificant. Therefore, if SSL (point-to-point) security is adequate, then use it rather than WS-Security because performance will be better! Also, if all you require is a simple username/password check, then it is better to implement this via a handler program in the pipeline rather than using the WS-Security solution. So, think about what security you really want – in many situations, WS-Security is not what is required and better performing alternatives probably exist.
Talking about CICS (hopefully) gives me the opportunity to mention Xephon’s CICS Update (www.xephonusa.com). If you have something to say about CICS, a simple hint and tip, or you have recently completed a project that is worth sharing (the mistakes and the successes), or you’ve tested software that runs with CICS and identified its strengths and weaknesses, or even CICS performance tips, then contact the editor (TrevorE@xephon.com). Articles from new contributors are always welcome.
My thanks to Andy Wright and Darren Beard from Hursley for their CICS tips.
Optimizing its performance has been on the mind of CICS systems programmers since day 1. In this blog, I’d like to pass on two hints and tips that I’ve recently received.
The first one is to ensure that all exits etc are threadsafe and defined as such, so that OPENAPI TRUEs, such as DB2, can be exploited efficiently using OTE (Open Transaction Environment), the dynamic plan exit, for example, and the XRMIIN and XRMIOUT GLUEs. This is to avoid TCB switching, which will have an adverse effect on performance. Readers might like to take a look at the recently updated redbook on threadsafety in CICS.
The second tip is about WS-Security, and it really says, use WS-Security only if it is what you need! It’s worth remembering that the performance impact of using WS-Security to secure Web services is not insignificant. Therefore, if SSL (point-to-point) security is adequate, then use it rather than WS-Security because performance will be better! Also, if all you require is a simple username/password check, then it is better to implement this via a handler program in the pipeline rather than using the WS-Security solution. So, think about what security you really want – in many situations, WS-Security is not what is required and better performing alternatives probably exist.
Talking about CICS (hopefully) gives me the opportunity to mention Xephon’s CICS Update (www.xephonusa.com). If you have something to say about CICS, a simple hint and tip, or you have recently completed a project that is worth sharing (the mistakes and the successes), or you’ve tested software that runs with CICS and identified its strengths and weaknesses, or even CICS performance tips, then contact the editor (TrevorE@xephon.com). Articles from new contributors are always welcome.
My thanks to Andy Wright and Darren Beard from Hursley for their CICS tips.
Get Mainframe Weekly on your desktop
I have been using widgets on my laptop for ages now. Widgets were originally created for the Mac as small mini-applications that just sat on your desktop until you needed them. They could also be fun to use. A company called Konfabulator created a JavaScript run-time engine so the widgets would also run on Windows.
Yahoo bought Konfabulator some time ago. If you don’t have it already, go to http://widgets.yahoo.com/ and download the software. Cleverly (in a dull sort of way) and ahead of Vista, you can make the widgets semi-transparent (or, I suppose, totally transparent if you wanted). Once you’ve got the software you can then go to the widget gallery (http://www.widgetgallery.com) and choose from over 3500 (and growing all the time) widgets. These have usually been written by people who wanted a simple tool or toy on their desktop.
There are so many types to choose from. For example, on my home computer I have an excellent drum kit widget. There are also lots of traffic camera widgets, so you can check the state of the traffic before you set off on a journey. I have a Dilbert cartoon downloaded each day, I have a link straight into wikipedia to look up just about anything, I have the weather for the next few days, I have a handy calendar, and I even have a dalek that wanders around my screen (don’t ask). Like I say, the choice is huge.
Anyway, if you like widgets, you can now have Mainframe Weekly come straight to your desktop. Download widget 3252, the RSS Feed Viewer (updated 27 November) by Rob Pinkasavage. Once you’ve downloaded it and installed it, you need to right click on the screen and then click on Widget Preferences. Where it says “Selected Feed:”, enter http://mainframeweekly.blogspot.com/rss.xml and click the “Save” button. I set the “Headline count:” to 15. If you click on the Window icon at the top, you can change the opacity (if you want).
Anyway, once you’ve done that, you can have Mainframe Weekly on your desktop all the time and you’ll know immediately when a new blog has been added.
Yahoo bought Konfabulator some time ago. If you don’t have it already, go to http://widgets.yahoo.com/ and download the software. Cleverly (in a dull sort of way) and ahead of Vista, you can make the widgets semi-transparent (or, I suppose, totally transparent if you wanted). Once you’ve got the software you can then go to the widget gallery (http://www.widgetgallery.com) and choose from over 3500 (and growing all the time) widgets. These have usually been written by people who wanted a simple tool or toy on their desktop.
There are so many types to choose from. For example, on my home computer I have an excellent drum kit widget. There are also lots of traffic camera widgets, so you can check the state of the traffic before you set off on a journey. I have a Dilbert cartoon downloaded each day, I have a link straight into wikipedia to look up just about anything, I have the weather for the next few days, I have a handy calendar, and I even have a dalek that wanders around my screen (don’t ask). Like I say, the choice is huge.
Anyway, if you like widgets, you can now have Mainframe Weekly come straight to your desktop. Download widget 3252, the RSS Feed Viewer (updated 27 November) by Rob Pinkasavage. Once you’ve downloaded it and installed it, you need to right click on the screen and then click on Widget Preferences. Where it says “Selected Feed:”, enter http://mainframeweekly.blogspot.com/rss.xml and click the “Save” button. I set the “Headline count:” to 15. If you click on the Window icon at the top, you can change the opacity (if you want).
Anyway, once you’ve done that, you can have Mainframe Weekly on your desktop all the time and you’ll know immediately when a new blog has been added.
Christmas toy or useful tool?
I have been a Skype user for a long time – but, too be honest, I only had three names in my address book. However, just recently, I have been using Skype more and more. And I have been comparing it with the latest version of MSN.
So let’s start with MSN (or Windows Live Messenger as Version 8.1 beta calls itself). It allows you to type in conversations with your friends, and you can start a conversation using a microphone for voice and a webcam for pictures. This is the sort of thing you see in all futuristic TV shows and movies – where one person can see and hear another. It can’t manage the hologram representation as seen in films like Star Wars! In fact, I have used this facility with MSN to interview someone who was on a different continent. They sat in front of their MSN webcam so we could see and hear them, they could see three middle-aged men staring at the screen. We passed the microphone from one person to another so that they could see who was asking the interview question (although there was no need to). And after 30 minutes of grilling, we gave them the job.
Skype, running on your laptop, also offers a typed conversational facility and there’s a webcam picture facility, but it was designed, and primarily functions, as a two-way telephony application. Initially I was using the microphone as the input device and the speakers as the output device. I then upgraded to the headset – which I felt made me look like someone from a call centre. It worked perfectly well, it just meant wearing headgear. The next upgrade was to a plug-in “phone”. This device looked like a phone, but connected via a USB port to the computer. It worked equally well with Skype and MSN.
But now, I have just tested a stand-alone Skype phone. SMC Networks produce the WSKP100 wifi phone, which doesn’t need a computer, just a wifi network. The phone needs charging out the box for eight hours and then it’s ready to go. You turn it on and it searches for local networks. You select your one and enter your security information. Once connected, you can enter your Skype name and password, and that’s it. It loads all your contacts and you can call them, or the phone rings when they call you. I found the whole set up process to be easy and straightforward. The phone is about the size of a mobile (cell) phone, so not very big, not very heavy, and surprisingly thin. It’s big enough so using the buttons is easy, but no bigger. The phone gives 3-hours continuous talk-time and 30-hours standby time according to SMC (although I found it to be less), and can be recharged from a USB socket. (The full details about the product are here: www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&localeCode=EN_USA&cid=14&scid=&pid=1564.) The sound quality is excellent, which is quite important for a phone! If it was a mobile (cell) phone I would have expected more ring tones or the ability to add them, but it’s not a facility you get with landlines so I guess a choice of four is acceptable. The screen is bright and makes it easy to find contacts and call them.
Away from the office, it is possible to use the phone at wifi hotspots. SMC has a deal with The Cloud for this, but it does cost a small amount of money each month. Apart from this, it can’t join a wireless network requiring browser based sign on. However, I tested it round the office and found it had a pretty good range – I never tried taking it outside.
Which is better, MSN or Skype? To be honest, I am using MSN mainly for family and friends for short conversations, but I am using Skype more and more as a business tool. I notice that lots of business cards now carry Skype contact information. I certainly don’t want the salesman I met at a conference as an MSN contact, but I don’t mind adding him to my Skype contacts list. And Skype offers dial out and dial in facilities from standard phone networks – if you want to use it (and Skypecast and other stuff too – see www.skype.com for full details).
Voice over IP (VoIP) seems such as good idea – and one that was actually a long time coming from the first presentation I saw predicting its widespread use. Skype has gone passed the critical mass number so there are plenty of people out there that I need to talk to and using Skype makes that very easy.
Now, the question I posed in the title of this blog is whether a stand-alone Skype phone is a boys’ toy for Christmas or a useful tool. Well it’s definitely a great toy, but it’s also turning into a very useful tool. Belkin and Netgear also sell wifi phones (and probably other companies too). I tested SMC’s and found it very very easy to set up. I have found it light and easy to carry around the office. It means I can accept calls when working on another computer (I don’t have to dash back and put on my headset anymore). If you use Skype now, I would recommend you definitely put it on your Christmas list. You’ll being using it all next year.
So let’s start with MSN (or Windows Live Messenger as Version 8.1 beta calls itself). It allows you to type in conversations with your friends, and you can start a conversation using a microphone for voice and a webcam for pictures. This is the sort of thing you see in all futuristic TV shows and movies – where one person can see and hear another. It can’t manage the hologram representation as seen in films like Star Wars! In fact, I have used this facility with MSN to interview someone who was on a different continent. They sat in front of their MSN webcam so we could see and hear them, they could see three middle-aged men staring at the screen. We passed the microphone from one person to another so that they could see who was asking the interview question (although there was no need to). And after 30 minutes of grilling, we gave them the job.
Skype, running on your laptop, also offers a typed conversational facility and there’s a webcam picture facility, but it was designed, and primarily functions, as a two-way telephony application. Initially I was using the microphone as the input device and the speakers as the output device. I then upgraded to the headset – which I felt made me look like someone from a call centre. It worked perfectly well, it just meant wearing headgear. The next upgrade was to a plug-in “phone”. This device looked like a phone, but connected via a USB port to the computer. It worked equally well with Skype and MSN.
But now, I have just tested a stand-alone Skype phone. SMC Networks produce the WSKP100 wifi phone, which doesn’t need a computer, just a wifi network. The phone needs charging out the box for eight hours and then it’s ready to go. You turn it on and it searches for local networks. You select your one and enter your security information. Once connected, you can enter your Skype name and password, and that’s it. It loads all your contacts and you can call them, or the phone rings when they call you. I found the whole set up process to be easy and straightforward. The phone is about the size of a mobile (cell) phone, so not very big, not very heavy, and surprisingly thin. It’s big enough so using the buttons is easy, but no bigger. The phone gives 3-hours continuous talk-time and 30-hours standby time according to SMC (although I found it to be less), and can be recharged from a USB socket. (The full details about the product are here: www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&localeCode=EN_USA&cid=14&scid=&pid=1564.) The sound quality is excellent, which is quite important for a phone! If it was a mobile (cell) phone I would have expected more ring tones or the ability to add them, but it’s not a facility you get with landlines so I guess a choice of four is acceptable. The screen is bright and makes it easy to find contacts and call them.
Away from the office, it is possible to use the phone at wifi hotspots. SMC has a deal with The Cloud for this, but it does cost a small amount of money each month. Apart from this, it can’t join a wireless network requiring browser based sign on. However, I tested it round the office and found it had a pretty good range – I never tried taking it outside.
Which is better, MSN or Skype? To be honest, I am using MSN mainly for family and friends for short conversations, but I am using Skype more and more as a business tool. I notice that lots of business cards now carry Skype contact information. I certainly don’t want the salesman I met at a conference as an MSN contact, but I don’t mind adding him to my Skype contacts list. And Skype offers dial out and dial in facilities from standard phone networks – if you want to use it (and Skypecast and other stuff too – see www.skype.com for full details).
Voice over IP (VoIP) seems such as good idea – and one that was actually a long time coming from the first presentation I saw predicting its widespread use. Skype has gone passed the critical mass number so there are plenty of people out there that I need to talk to and using Skype makes that very easy.
Now, the question I posed in the title of this blog is whether a stand-alone Skype phone is a boys’ toy for Christmas or a useful tool. Well it’s definitely a great toy, but it’s also turning into a very useful tool. Belkin and Netgear also sell wifi phones (and probably other companies too). I tested SMC’s and found it very very easy to set up. I have found it light and easy to carry around the office. It means I can accept calls when working on another computer (I don’t have to dash back and put on my headset anymore). If you use Skype now, I would recommend you definitely put it on your Christmas list. You’ll being using it all next year.
Oracle talks about the future
I was at the UK Oracle User Group conference last week. Now you might think that Oracle doesn’t have a lot to do with mainframes – but think about IBM and Oracle’s recently-announced strategic initiative to collaborate on the sales and marketing of a series of enterprise business solutions with Oracle applications and technology for Linux on System z. And PeopleSoft and Siebel applications are already available on z/OS.
Of course, Oracle is a major software player in the industry, and the attitude it has can be an important indicator of things to come for many other companies. Plus, of course, there are very few mainframe-only sites these days. Apart from PCs everywhere, there is usually a bewildering array of different (and some quite old) mid-range machines.
The user group meeting gave Oracle employees the opportunity to reiterate a lot of the announcements that first appeared at OpenWorld a month or so back. It also gave the user group an opportunity to share its view of Oracle’s performance with Oracle.
Interestingly, Oracle seems to have absorbed the Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards customers very well into the Oracle fold. And they have done this to such an extent that they even felt comfortable saying DB2 and SQL Server during a keynote presentation (as you know, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards users may very well have chosen that particular product so they didn’t have to use the Oracle database). They were also keen to stress how much they have learned from taking over so many companies. In fact, Oracle has recently “merged” (the preferred corporate term) with Stellent, MetaSolv Software, and SPL WorldGroup.
To be fair, Oracle is now far more than just a database company. It’s also a middleware company and an applications company. And it was keen to show roadmaps for Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards future products as well as its own. Sometime in 2008 it will have completed its Fusion middleware rollout and its Applications Unlimited. I assume, although no-one confirmed this, that gaps in the Applications portfolio identified by senior Oracle staff is what has lead to these recent “mergers” – and probably any future ones.
The other interesting thing was how although they kept showing the roadmap to the future all Oracle staff repeatedly said that users would only upgrade their software “when they are ready to” – so, no more vendor pressure to move to the latest release. In fact, people were keen to stress how a successful Oracle depended on having happy and successful customers.
The UK user group has a symbiotic relationship with Oracle. Ably led by Ronan Miles, it now has easy access to Oracle senior staff and is not afraid to tell Oracle where it is going wrong. And, with its new friendly face, Oracle is taking the criticism and doing something about it. For example, in previous years, Oracle support has been criticized by the user group following its annual survey of members. Oracle has now addressed the problem and the survey shows more users are happy with Oracle support.
This could be the new way to do business: producing new products that offer customers benefits, but allowing the customer to choose their own timescale for migration; listening to users’ needs and doing something about it; and believing customer success equals vendor success. We’ll see how long they can keep it up and how many other companies adopt a similar approach.
Of course, Oracle is a major software player in the industry, and the attitude it has can be an important indicator of things to come for many other companies. Plus, of course, there are very few mainframe-only sites these days. Apart from PCs everywhere, there is usually a bewildering array of different (and some quite old) mid-range machines.
The user group meeting gave Oracle employees the opportunity to reiterate a lot of the announcements that first appeared at OpenWorld a month or so back. It also gave the user group an opportunity to share its view of Oracle’s performance with Oracle.
Interestingly, Oracle seems to have absorbed the Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards customers very well into the Oracle fold. And they have done this to such an extent that they even felt comfortable saying DB2 and SQL Server during a keynote presentation (as you know, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards users may very well have chosen that particular product so they didn’t have to use the Oracle database). They were also keen to stress how much they have learned from taking over so many companies. In fact, Oracle has recently “merged” (the preferred corporate term) with Stellent, MetaSolv Software, and SPL WorldGroup.
To be fair, Oracle is now far more than just a database company. It’s also a middleware company and an applications company. And it was keen to show roadmaps for Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards future products as well as its own. Sometime in 2008 it will have completed its Fusion middleware rollout and its Applications Unlimited. I assume, although no-one confirmed this, that gaps in the Applications portfolio identified by senior Oracle staff is what has lead to these recent “mergers” – and probably any future ones.
The other interesting thing was how although they kept showing the roadmap to the future all Oracle staff repeatedly said that users would only upgrade their software “when they are ready to” – so, no more vendor pressure to move to the latest release. In fact, people were keen to stress how a successful Oracle depended on having happy and successful customers.
The UK user group has a symbiotic relationship with Oracle. Ably led by Ronan Miles, it now has easy access to Oracle senior staff and is not afraid to tell Oracle where it is going wrong. And, with its new friendly face, Oracle is taking the criticism and doing something about it. For example, in previous years, Oracle support has been criticized by the user group following its annual survey of members. Oracle has now addressed the problem and the survey shows more users are happy with Oracle support.
This could be the new way to do business: producing new products that offer customers benefits, but allowing the customer to choose their own timescale for migration; listening to users’ needs and doing something about it; and believing customer success equals vendor success. We’ll see how long they can keep it up and how many other companies adopt a similar approach.
AJAX and Enterprise Extender
I have seen the future and it works – so said Lincoln Steffens back in 1921 after a visit to Russia in 1919. But that’s exactly the way I felt after seeing a demo of William Data Systems’ (www.willdata.com/) new product called Ferret.
I’ll get to exactly what Ferret does in a moment, but what I saw that I believe to be the future of computing was the amazingly fast AJAX user interface. Let me explain… A user working from a browser loads the address of the monitor. There are then the usual security routines to go through (one screen linked to RACF etc), but while you’re typing in your userid etc, AJAX is downloading all the Javascript etc that is needed to make the thing work. The next thing you see are about half a dozen windows showing what’s going on – like any good monitor would – but what’s so futuristic is that all the “pages” as they would be on a 3270 screen are sitting there at one time. A user can shut down unwanted pages and re-open them later, but more importantly, they can drill down for more information. And, because it’s AJAX, the screen refresh is very fast indeed. Lists can be sorted – although that’s not that clever – but new monitor information also appears on your screen in the blink of an eye – and that is impressive. There are also a large number of organized drop-down menus to help users select what information they need to view. Because Ferret maintains its own records, it’s very easy to use the product to see trends and peak usage, etc.
So what actually is Ferret? Well it’s a separate product from Implex (which is perhaps WDS’s best known monitor product), and it monitors Enterprise Extenders. Now many traditional IBM sites have clung on to their old technology because it works and have large SNA networks and old 3745 hardware, even though they now also have IP networks running. Enterprise Extenders and APPN/HPR were introduced some time ago by IBM, but perhaps only in the past two years has there been much of a growth in their adoption. To find out what’s going on in this APPN/HPR environment can require up to seven VTAM commands and then a lot of cutting and pasting of responses. To be able to monitor over time means that these commands need repeating and records of the responses kept somewhere. This is a bit tricky, so many sites just assume because everything seems to be working, it must be working well – not a good assumption!
IBM introduced some SNA Management APIs with z/OS V1.5 that made it easier to get information about performance than using half a dozen VTAM command, but it is still not easy. That’s why WDS came up with their new product. The product carries out configuration monitoring, EE activity monitoring, and EE performance monitoring. There are diagnostic tools, and alerting capabilities. So, it’s interesting in itself because of what it can monitor, but, as I said above, what really makes it interesting is the incorporation of AJAX technology to make it work so quickly and effectively from a user’s browser.
I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of companies taking this route with their products in the near future, but here’s a product that does it now and it works brilliantly.
If you want more information, the product GAs at the end of this month. It’s certainly worth a look.
I’ll get to exactly what Ferret does in a moment, but what I saw that I believe to be the future of computing was the amazingly fast AJAX user interface. Let me explain… A user working from a browser loads the address of the monitor. There are then the usual security routines to go through (one screen linked to RACF etc), but while you’re typing in your userid etc, AJAX is downloading all the Javascript etc that is needed to make the thing work. The next thing you see are about half a dozen windows showing what’s going on – like any good monitor would – but what’s so futuristic is that all the “pages” as they would be on a 3270 screen are sitting there at one time. A user can shut down unwanted pages and re-open them later, but more importantly, they can drill down for more information. And, because it’s AJAX, the screen refresh is very fast indeed. Lists can be sorted – although that’s not that clever – but new monitor information also appears on your screen in the blink of an eye – and that is impressive. There are also a large number of organized drop-down menus to help users select what information they need to view. Because Ferret maintains its own records, it’s very easy to use the product to see trends and peak usage, etc.
So what actually is Ferret? Well it’s a separate product from Implex (which is perhaps WDS’s best known monitor product), and it monitors Enterprise Extenders. Now many traditional IBM sites have clung on to their old technology because it works and have large SNA networks and old 3745 hardware, even though they now also have IP networks running. Enterprise Extenders and APPN/HPR were introduced some time ago by IBM, but perhaps only in the past two years has there been much of a growth in their adoption. To find out what’s going on in this APPN/HPR environment can require up to seven VTAM commands and then a lot of cutting and pasting of responses. To be able to monitor over time means that these commands need repeating and records of the responses kept somewhere. This is a bit tricky, so many sites just assume because everything seems to be working, it must be working well – not a good assumption!
IBM introduced some SNA Management APIs with z/OS V1.5 that made it easier to get information about performance than using half a dozen VTAM command, but it is still not easy. That’s why WDS came up with their new product. The product carries out configuration monitoring, EE activity monitoring, and EE performance monitoring. There are diagnostic tools, and alerting capabilities. So, it’s interesting in itself because of what it can monitor, but, as I said above, what really makes it interesting is the incorporation of AJAX technology to make it work so quickly and effectively from a user’s browser.
I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of companies taking this route with their products in the near future, but here’s a product that does it now and it works brilliantly.
If you want more information, the product GAs at the end of this month. It’s certainly worth a look.
IBM’s new tools
With so much virtualization going on, it becomes very important that systems programmers have to right tools to configure, administer, and monitor both physical and virtual resources in a heterogeneous environment. That’s why IBM has just introduced a new tool to do just that.
Virtualization Manager is a Web-based browser dashboard that can view and manage IBM’s Virtualization Engine’s virtual machines. It works across IBM’s server line, ie System i, System p, and System z (I got told off when I used their old names in my ECLipz blog the other week). Virtualization Manager can also access the x86 instruction set of Intel and AMD servers, and can manage virtual machines generated by Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware, and open source Xen. So, basically, it will discover and monitor virtual and physical resources from different vendors.
The software, which is an extension to IBM Director (a systems management tool), is installed on a management server and works with software already on managed servers and storage resources. The browser-base GUI is then used to configure servers, schedule maintenance, or work with other virtual servers.
Interestingly, IBM is making the software available as a free download. More information is available from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/virtualization/.
HP already has its Dashboard software, I’m sure other companies will be rushing out similar products very soon. Managing the real assets can be hard enough, once you add virtualized assets the job gets even tougher. That’s why users need software to help and that’s why this new software from IBM is going to be very well received.
Virtualization Manager is a Web-based browser dashboard that can view and manage IBM’s Virtualization Engine’s virtual machines. It works across IBM’s server line, ie System i, System p, and System z (I got told off when I used their old names in my ECLipz blog the other week). Virtualization Manager can also access the x86 instruction set of Intel and AMD servers, and can manage virtual machines generated by Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware, and open source Xen. So, basically, it will discover and monitor virtual and physical resources from different vendors.
The software, which is an extension to IBM Director (a systems management tool), is installed on a management server and works with software already on managed servers and storage resources. The browser-base GUI is then used to configure servers, schedule maintenance, or work with other virtual servers.
Interestingly, IBM is making the software available as a free download. More information is available from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/virtualization/.
HP already has its Dashboard software, I’m sure other companies will be rushing out similar products very soon. Managing the real assets can be hard enough, once you add virtualized assets the job gets even tougher. That’s why users need software to help and that’s why this new software from IBM is going to be very well received.
CICS and AJAX
I’ve mentioned both CICS and AJAX before in these blogs and it seems to be a marriage made in heaven to bring them together. On the one hand you have all the advantages of transaction processing on the mainframe – speed, reliability, security, etc – and on the other you have the fastest way of allowing users to work from a browser. AJAX, for those of you just returned from the planet Tharg, allows users to update pages on their screen without necessarily having to send the whole of that screen to the server and receive a complete new screen back from the server. It basically allows users to work as if the application they were using was running locally on their computer – it can make things that quick. No more press the button, go an get a coffee, sit down again and hope the response has arrived!
HostBridge has recently produced a newsletter about CICS and AJAX. They suggest that AJAX enables true two-tier access to CICS (rather than three-tier). They say that AJAX allows the browser to contain the application logic and make calls directly to CICS. The newsletter goes on to say that “AJAX applications also allow you to retrieve data from CICS, maintain the data in memory, and repurpose the data as needed”. What this means in effect is that it takes only on call to CICS in order to provide the information necessary for more than one (ie two or more) views from the browser. This has the immediate impact of reducing network traffic and speeding up the response the user sees.
The newsletter also has some recommendations for the design of the AJAX interface. Their three suggestions are to use AJAX frameworks, add server-side processing, and design based on patterns. The third one really says look at what users like to do and try to design things that way. Otherwise the users just might not want to use it.
HostBridge isn’t alone in looking at CICS and AJAX combinations, back in August, NetManage introduced NetManage OnWeb for CICS, its software that transforms CICS data into standard XML. Once you’ve got XML, you’re half-way towards being able to use AJAX on the end-user interface. Illustro has its z/XML-Host product for XML conversion (see “Putting it all together…”). And FireXML has FireXML for CICS to integrate their ObjectStar system with Web server applications. And a search on Google will probably find lots of others.
The great thing about CICS is that it is a consumer and a provider of Web services, which means that it can be used with all these “new-fangled” Web 2.0 applications. Combining it with AJAX just makes a perfect combination.
HostBridge has recently produced a newsletter about CICS and AJAX. They suggest that AJAX enables true two-tier access to CICS (rather than three-tier). They say that AJAX allows the browser to contain the application logic and make calls directly to CICS. The newsletter goes on to say that “AJAX applications also allow you to retrieve data from CICS, maintain the data in memory, and repurpose the data as needed”. What this means in effect is that it takes only on call to CICS in order to provide the information necessary for more than one (ie two or more) views from the browser. This has the immediate impact of reducing network traffic and speeding up the response the user sees.
The newsletter also has some recommendations for the design of the AJAX interface. Their three suggestions are to use AJAX frameworks, add server-side processing, and design based on patterns. The third one really says look at what users like to do and try to design things that way. Otherwise the users just might not want to use it.
HostBridge isn’t alone in looking at CICS and AJAX combinations, back in August, NetManage introduced NetManage OnWeb for CICS, its software that transforms CICS data into standard XML. Once you’ve got XML, you’re half-way towards being able to use AJAX on the end-user interface. Illustro has its z/XML-Host product for XML conversion (see “Putting it all together…”). And FireXML has FireXML for CICS to integrate their ObjectStar system with Web server applications. And a search on Google will probably find lots of others.
The great thing about CICS is that it is a consumer and a provider of Web services, which means that it can be used with all these “new-fangled” Web 2.0 applications. Combining it with AJAX just makes a perfect combination.
What’s Project ECLipz?
Just recently, people have been talking a lot about Project ECLipz, and, I have to admit, I wasn’t really sure what they were talking about. Yet, it appears that this IBM project has been in existence since 2001 or thereabouts. And the reason behind the recent gossip about it has been the POWER 6 announcements earlier this year.
Basically, it seems, IBM has a goal to converge all its non-Intel server lines onto a single platform. Those non-Intel servers, of course, are what we know as zSeries, pSeries, and iSeries – and if you reverse the order you get the last three letters of the project (i, p, and z). In fact the whole acronym is meant to stand for Enhanced Core Logic for iSeries, pSeries, and z Series. Cynics among you will probably say that as Sun is a major competitor of IBM, they came up with the word “eclipse” and then made it into an acronym – you know,” total eclipse of the sun”.
Why would IBM want to converge their server technology like this – the answer is very simple, it saves money. Obviously, the development of new hardware has a cost, so if you can develop hardware that works for two types of server, that will cut your development costs in half. If you can split it three ways, well then it’s only a third of the cost!
If you look at the iSeries, you find that OS/400 runs on more-or-less a pSeries POWER5 system. This is probably the easiest convergence for IBM because, I’m told, the OS/400 underlying instruction set is quite similar to intermediate code, which meant that only very few parts of the operating system needed porting to PPC. In terms of costs, the hardware development is split in half, with the OS/400 people needing to do a little software development. Now that’s got to look good on the budget sheet.
The big problem for IBM and the ECLipz project is that zSeries hardware is quite a bit different from the other two. For a start there are all those wonderful coprocessors, there are System Assist Processors (SAPs) that are used for I/O, and there’s support for hexadecimal floating point and support for decimal numbers in packed and region formats. Not forgetting those go-faster stripes down the side!
POWER6 itself was announced in February and should be available next year. Some sources, outside IBM, are suggesting that POWER 6 includes some type of z/OS emulation through on-chip microcode that would create a CISC mainframe instruction from RISC instructions. What this means is that the POWER6 processor would be the first hardware able to support the three server lines.
Converging the server lines does make economic sense for IBM. For users of the servers, anything that helps reduce the cost has got to be a good thing. IBM needs to bear in mind that zSeries users, while paying a high price premium, do expect something that is very fast and extremely reliable. Those users won’t be happy if compatibility issues halt the inexorable increase in processor performance they have come to expect.
It just goes to show (as the old Chinese curse would have it) that we live in interesting times.
Basically, it seems, IBM has a goal to converge all its non-Intel server lines onto a single platform. Those non-Intel servers, of course, are what we know as zSeries, pSeries, and iSeries – and if you reverse the order you get the last three letters of the project (i, p, and z). In fact the whole acronym is meant to stand for Enhanced Core Logic for iSeries, pSeries, and z Series. Cynics among you will probably say that as Sun is a major competitor of IBM, they came up with the word “eclipse” and then made it into an acronym – you know,” total eclipse of the sun”.
Why would IBM want to converge their server technology like this – the answer is very simple, it saves money. Obviously, the development of new hardware has a cost, so if you can develop hardware that works for two types of server, that will cut your development costs in half. If you can split it three ways, well then it’s only a third of the cost!
If you look at the iSeries, you find that OS/400 runs on more-or-less a pSeries POWER5 system. This is probably the easiest convergence for IBM because, I’m told, the OS/400 underlying instruction set is quite similar to intermediate code, which meant that only very few parts of the operating system needed porting to PPC. In terms of costs, the hardware development is split in half, with the OS/400 people needing to do a little software development. Now that’s got to look good on the budget sheet.
The big problem for IBM and the ECLipz project is that zSeries hardware is quite a bit different from the other two. For a start there are all those wonderful coprocessors, there are System Assist Processors (SAPs) that are used for I/O, and there’s support for hexadecimal floating point and support for decimal numbers in packed and region formats. Not forgetting those go-faster stripes down the side!
POWER6 itself was announced in February and should be available next year. Some sources, outside IBM, are suggesting that POWER 6 includes some type of z/OS emulation through on-chip microcode that would create a CISC mainframe instruction from RISC instructions. What this means is that the POWER6 processor would be the first hardware able to support the three server lines.
Converging the server lines does make economic sense for IBM. For users of the servers, anything that helps reduce the cost has got to be a good thing. IBM needs to bear in mind that zSeries users, while paying a high price premium, do expect something that is very fast and extremely reliable. Those users won’t be happy if compatibility issues halt the inexorable increase in processor performance they have come to expect.
It just goes to show (as the old Chinese curse would have it) that we live in interesting times.
Wireless working
We’ve been working away on our laptops in a wireless environment for about three years. Everyone can access the wireless router and get on to the Internet, and everyone can share files. Because of our Macintosh heritage we still talk about “Transfer” files rather than “SharedDocs” in “My Network Places” – but that’s just us!
Obviously, all the new laptops come with wireless technology – either on the chip or on-board somehow, whereas our older ones have dongles hanging off the back to access the wireless network. The problem with our office is that we have walls!! You might have come across this problem yourself with your office. So suddenly the predicted distance doesn’t match with reality! In the past, we’d overcome this problem by using two metres of USB cable. One end attached to the USB port on the laptop, the other end hung down the stairs to with the wireless dongle attached. The result was that everything worked nicely – and no-one bumped into the hanging cable (so no need to start on Health & Safety issues).
We recently got our hands on the Netgear HomePlug. This is clever piece of technology that makes use of the wired network found in every building – the electricity supply. In fact, it works in a similar way to some baby listening devices in that one “plug” is put in the wall socket in one room and another “plug” is put in the wall socket in a different room. For baby listening devices, one plug is put in the baby’s bedroom and the other is put in the kitchen or lounge, or wherever the parents are going to be. With Netgear’s Homeplug, one end is plugged into a socket and also into the router, the other end is put in a socket in whichever room it’s needed. The wireless technology in the laptop talks to the HomePlug, which relays it round the building using the cabling. The HomePlug at the other end then talks to the router. And, of course, the whole process can work in reverse – pages from the Internet (or whatever) pass from the router to the first plug, round the cables, out the second plug and wirelessly into the laptop.
Obviously it isn’t quite that simple, there’s a little bit of setting up to do. Luckily, the CD that comes with the HomePlug runs a small program that makes everything work. The total set up time is about ten minutes – allowing time to read the simple instructions and run through the program. It’s simple enough for a novice to do. The signal can be encrypted in the usual way, so you’re not setting up a wifi hotspot for other people to make use of. The two plugs are different – one has an Ethernet cable connection so you can connect to the router (XE102), and the other one doesn’t (WGX102). Our IT people also tried using the plugs through extension leads – which it says in the instructions not to, and we still found that the connection worked. I assume that the data transfer rate would be lower going through and extension lead, but we never actually tested that. It seemed OK at displaying Web pages – that was our test!
Of course Netgear aren’t the only people selling HomePlugs, there’s similar products from Devolo, eConnect, and Solwise. We just tested and used Netgear’s product and found it to be very useful. If you’ve got problems with walls or distance, then this is a very easy solution to the problem.
In a future blog I hope to look at some hints and tips for improving CICS performance. If you have any that you’d like to share with the wider CICS community then drop an e-mail to TrevorE@xephon.com.
Obviously, all the new laptops come with wireless technology – either on the chip or on-board somehow, whereas our older ones have dongles hanging off the back to access the wireless network. The problem with our office is that we have walls!! You might have come across this problem yourself with your office. So suddenly the predicted distance doesn’t match with reality! In the past, we’d overcome this problem by using two metres of USB cable. One end attached to the USB port on the laptop, the other end hung down the stairs to with the wireless dongle attached. The result was that everything worked nicely – and no-one bumped into the hanging cable (so no need to start on Health & Safety issues).
We recently got our hands on the Netgear HomePlug. This is clever piece of technology that makes use of the wired network found in every building – the electricity supply. In fact, it works in a similar way to some baby listening devices in that one “plug” is put in the wall socket in one room and another “plug” is put in the wall socket in a different room. For baby listening devices, one plug is put in the baby’s bedroom and the other is put in the kitchen or lounge, or wherever the parents are going to be. With Netgear’s Homeplug, one end is plugged into a socket and also into the router, the other end is put in a socket in whichever room it’s needed. The wireless technology in the laptop talks to the HomePlug, which relays it round the building using the cabling. The HomePlug at the other end then talks to the router. And, of course, the whole process can work in reverse – pages from the Internet (or whatever) pass from the router to the first plug, round the cables, out the second plug and wirelessly into the laptop.
Obviously it isn’t quite that simple, there’s a little bit of setting up to do. Luckily, the CD that comes with the HomePlug runs a small program that makes everything work. The total set up time is about ten minutes – allowing time to read the simple instructions and run through the program. It’s simple enough for a novice to do. The signal can be encrypted in the usual way, so you’re not setting up a wifi hotspot for other people to make use of. The two plugs are different – one has an Ethernet cable connection so you can connect to the router (XE102), and the other one doesn’t (WGX102). Our IT people also tried using the plugs through extension leads – which it says in the instructions not to, and we still found that the connection worked. I assume that the data transfer rate would be lower going through and extension lead, but we never actually tested that. It seemed OK at displaying Web pages – that was our test!
Of course Netgear aren’t the only people selling HomePlugs, there’s similar products from Devolo, eConnect, and Solwise. We just tested and used Netgear’s product and found it to be very useful. If you’ve got problems with walls or distance, then this is a very easy solution to the problem.
In a future blog I hope to look at some hints and tips for improving CICS performance. If you have any that you’d like to share with the wider CICS community then drop an e-mail to TrevorE@xephon.com.
What’s the OpenDocument Format?
It used to be the case that whenever someone sent me a file from a PC it would be in a format that I didn’t have and I would have to run it through some other application before I could use it. Pain Shop Pro was brilliant because you could use it to convert so many picture file types from one to another. I have a piece of music software, dBpowerAMP, that can convert mp3 files to wav (or most other sound file types) and back again. And I still have Microsoft Office and IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite so I can open most word processor files people send me.
So why should a paragraph moaning about the diversity of file types be followed immediately by one suggesting that we should adopt yet another “standard” file type? Well it does sound a bit odd, but what I’d like to suggest is that we have a kind-of lingua franca file type – one that could be produced by any word processor and opened by any other word processing software. So, not quite such a silly idea!
Back in May, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the open source Open Document Format (ODF) as an international data format standard. And, although not usually thought of as a leader in IT, the Belgium government has instructed its government departments to use ODF for all internal communications. Similarly, the National Archives of Australia has decided to use OpenDocument for their cross-platform/application document format.
There is an Open Document Format Alliance, which is made up of a mixture of vendors and other organizations, and has around 140 members – probably more by the time you read this. It was developed by the OASIS industry consortium and is based on the XML format originally created by OpenOffice.org. IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Novell are keen promoters of the OpenDocument Format.
You might ask what’s the thinking behind ODF. Is it a way of getting back at Microsoft with its ubiquitous DOC format or Adobe’s PDF? No, there’s much more to it than that. The problem really first appeared when people tried to access older documents – not dusty scrolls tucked away at the back of ancient vaults – just documents that had been saved to disk using the word processor of choice some years ago and which couldn’t easily be read anymore. What happens to the files that were created using it, when you throw away old word processing software? And even if you kept the same product but have upgraded to the latest release, there’s always a chance that you used a feature that’s no longer supported – backward compatibility is a nightmare as more development work goes into a product. So, with ODF, you have a standard that works now, and, they predict, will work in a hundred years time.
The file extensions used for OpenDocument documents are ODT for text documents, ODS for spreadsheets, ODP for presentations, ODG for graphics (and there’s a proposed ODF for formulae).
Technically, an OpenDocument file can be either a simple XML file using as the root element, or a ZIP archive file comprising any number of files and directories. The ZIP-based format used in the main because it can contain binary content and, obviously, is much smaller.
Older version of Microsoft Office don’t support the standard, but apparently, new versions will. If you’d like software now that supports ODF, then there’s OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org/). Go to http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ for an early version of Microsoft’s Open XML translator for Word.
So if you’re looking for file types that will work across platforms and across time, then ODF is what you need. If you’ve got millions of DOC and XLS files archived, then you either hope Microsoft’s Office product remains backward compatible forever and you never migrate from Windows or you have a lot of conversion work ahead of you! And with big names like IBM and Sun behind it and people like Google joining in, you know this standard isn’t going to suddenly disappear.
So why should a paragraph moaning about the diversity of file types be followed immediately by one suggesting that we should adopt yet another “standard” file type? Well it does sound a bit odd, but what I’d like to suggest is that we have a kind-of lingua franca file type – one that could be produced by any word processor and opened by any other word processing software. So, not quite such a silly idea!
Back in May, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the open source Open Document Format (ODF) as an international data format standard. And, although not usually thought of as a leader in IT, the Belgium government has instructed its government departments to use ODF for all internal communications. Similarly, the National Archives of Australia has decided to use OpenDocument for their cross-platform/application document format.
There is an Open Document Format Alliance, which is made up of a mixture of vendors and other organizations, and has around 140 members – probably more by the time you read this. It was developed by the OASIS industry consortium and is based on the XML format originally created by OpenOffice.org. IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Novell are keen promoters of the OpenDocument Format.
You might ask what’s the thinking behind ODF. Is it a way of getting back at Microsoft with its ubiquitous DOC format or Adobe’s PDF? No, there’s much more to it than that. The problem really first appeared when people tried to access older documents – not dusty scrolls tucked away at the back of ancient vaults – just documents that had been saved to disk using the word processor of choice some years ago and which couldn’t easily be read anymore. What happens to the files that were created using it, when you throw away old word processing software? And even if you kept the same product but have upgraded to the latest release, there’s always a chance that you used a feature that’s no longer supported – backward compatibility is a nightmare as more development work goes into a product. So, with ODF, you have a standard that works now, and, they predict, will work in a hundred years time.
The file extensions used for OpenDocument documents are ODT for text documents, ODS for spreadsheets, ODP for presentations, ODG for graphics (and there’s a proposed ODF for formulae).
Technically, an OpenDocument file can be either a simple XML file using
Older version of Microsoft Office don’t support the standard, but apparently, new versions will. If you’d like software now that supports ODF, then there’s OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org/). Go to http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ for an early version of Microsoft’s Open XML translator for Word.
So if you’re looking for file types that will work across platforms and across time, then ODF is what you need. If you’ve got millions of DOC and XLS files archived, then you either hope Microsoft’s Office product remains backward compatible forever and you never migrate from Windows or you have a lot of conversion work ahead of you! And with big names like IBM and Sun behind it and people like Google joining in, you know this standard isn’t going to suddenly disappear.
More mainframe information
Last week I wrote about the excellent Arcati Yearbook 2006 at www.arcati.com/yearbook.html, but that isn’t the only source of mainframe information on the Web. There are numerous Web sites created by mainframe enthusiasts out there, many of which are well worth a look. This is a topic that I intend to return to in future blogs.
Http://www.mximvs.com/ is home to Rob Scott’s OS/390 and MVS resources. The Web site says, “This site offers resources for professionals working with MVS, OS/390, ISPF, REXX, and Assembler. Here you will find free software to download and most of them come with the source code. Also included on the site is my free MVS monitor software ‘MXI’, which is the result of over 8 years of effort.”
In fact, the site suggests that MXI hasn’t been updated since September 2004. In fact, the product was acquired by Rocket Software (www.rocketsoftware.com/) and is downloadable from www.rocketsoftware.com/portfolio/mxi/download.php. Information about the latest version is at www.rocketsoftware.com/portfolio/mxi/. The page says, “Rocket MXI G2 for z/OS is an ISPF-based application that enables the systems programmer to display important configuration information about the active MVS, OS/390 or z/OS system”.
Rob Scott’s site has a number of downloads available. There are utility programs such as VTOCUTIL, VARYDASD, CONFIGXX, DELNOENQ, DDDEFCHK, and DDDEFPTH. There are external REXX functions such as STEMPUSH and STEMPULL, LISTSYM, LISTMEM, and the very useful SLEEP. In the MISC section is IEFACTRT, a sample step termination exit that prints job summary messages at the top of the JES2 job log and I/O statistics for each DDname for each step.
Bill Lalonde’s Big Iron site is at http://billlalonde.tripod.com/. The site describes itself by saying, “This page is dedicated to S/390 mainframes and the MVS world”. Clicking on the “Stupid JCL tricks – The Ongoing Series!” takes you to “This Month's Topic”, which discusses searching HFS directories, and includes example JCL.
Clicking on, “The REXX page” takes you to a links page offering a number of different options, one of which is “sample code”. This takes you to a page offering a large number of REXX samples including: INTDATE, REXX, TERMINFO, READDIR, DI, DT, FINDJSAB, MVSVAR, RGNINFO, SYMDEF, ISEE, BOOKSEEK, URLINFO, WHOHAS, TIMEUP, ACFRES, XDSI, FINDJCT, LINKEXT, FINDNTTP, ADDREGN, EQUAL, SUBCOM, and OEMVAT.
Obviously, the IBM site has lots of software – www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/downloads/ says, “you can find the following types of z/OS downloads on this page: as-is z/OS downloads; SMP/E installable z/OS Web deliverables”. Definitely worth a look, although you probably have already!
Mainframe information
So where do you get information about mainframes from? Well, obviously, there’s IBM, and there’s third-party vendors of hardware and software like CA and BMC and lots of others. But where do you go if you want unbiased information? Well you could join a user group, but you’d have to wait for the next meeting. Or you could search on Google – or another search engine – but you never really know how reliable the information is. Sometimes pages have sat there unchanged since 1998 – and the world of computing has moved on a bit since then!!One option is to download The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2006. It’s a fairly large PDF file (5.8MB – maybe these days not such a giant file) and is available from http://www.arcati.com/yearbook.html. It is also possible to order a printed copy.
The Yearbook describes itself as an independent annual guide for users of IBM mainframe systems, and is 124 pages in size. The Yearbook contains some well-written articles and lists of information. For example there are articles entitled, “Software compliance and the mainframe”, “Consolidation and integration in the zSeries environment”, “Event-driven automation: why real-time matters”, “The mainframe market: zIIP and the ‘baby’ z9”, “Linux and z/OS, side by side on Itanium 2”, “Optimizing DB2: get the distribution straight”, “The next generation of Adabas and Natural”, “Taking advantage of the second-user alternative”, and “The main idea: monitor mainframes too”.
There are also some interesting quotes about mainframes including this one from a user: “The current IT budget is roughly 5 times what it was five years ago, only a small fraction of which is spent on the bread and butter mainframe system doing almost all the work”.
The Yearbook contains the results from a survey of 92 mainframe users, and analyses their profiles, plans, and priorities.
A large part of the Yearbook is taken up with a Vendor directory, a media guide for IBM mainframers, a glossary of terminology, and hardware tables. There’s also a timeline showing hardware and software development.
I’m told that there will be a 2007 version of the Yearbook very early next year. I just thought I’d draw your attention to the Yearbook because it is full of useful and reliable information, you can get hold of it straight away, and it’s available at a price you can afford (ie free!).
DB2 9 – some interesting features
The recently announced DB2 9 – don’t call it Version 9 or you won’t sound like you know what you’re talking about – has some excellent new features and I’d like to highlight some of them in this blog.DB2 9 is meant to improve on Version 8 in areas such as performance, scalability, and security – although you would expect any vendor to promise their new software does these three things. The big deal is XML and accessing data, which I blogged about at the end of July. In this blog I want to talk about some of the other features.
First off, let’s be clear, DB2 9 runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, (LUW) and z/OS. So here are some of the things that make DB2 9 stand out – and which you might not have noticed in the original announcement letter.
There are new methods for copying and moving schemas and changing the ownership of a table. For example, to copy a single schema within a database, use the SYSPROC.ADMIN_COPY_SCHEMA procedure. To copy multiple schemas within a database, use the SYSPROC.ADMIN_COPY_SCHEMA procedure multiple times. To copy/move a single or many schemas from one database to another, use the db2move utility with the -co option.
There is a new option with the CREATE DATABASE command that allows users NOT to automatically grant the select privilege on certain objects to public. This can be done using the RESTRICTIVE parameter. For example:
>db2 create db testdb restrictive
Using the new RESTRICTIVE parameter should make a database more secure and remove the need to issue the revoke from PUBLIC commands.
DB2 9 for LUW provides a set of administrative views that can be used in conjunction with the table functions (from V8). While not replacing these table functions, they can offer an easier way of accessing the underlying information. There are 59 administrative views – for some users have to be connected to a specific database and others they don’t.
DB2 9 for LUW has 227 registry variables. (Note: DB2 V9 FP10 had 216). There are 14 new registry variables and three have gone – DB2_STATVIEW, DB2_USE_LATCH_TRACKING, and DB2SYSPLEX_SERVER. The introduction of the table function to display the registry variables has made it easier to keep track of these values.
DB2 V8 let users drop a column using the ALTOBJ procedure. DB2 9 provides the ALTER TABLE command. Users can continues using ALTOBJ, but should code ALTER TABLE on all new commands.
For db2pd there are three new parameters: -pages, -memblocks, and -fmp (that makes 25 in total). -pages displays the pages in the buffer pools; -memblocks displays information about the memory pools; and -fmp displays information about a process in which fenced routines are executed.
There is also a new command, db2pdcfg, which is used with the -catch parameter that allows users to issue other commands from a batch file once an event has occurred, for example a timeout.
There we are – just a smattering of what IBM has put into DB2 9. My particular thanks to C Leonard for drawing my attention to them.
BTW: anyone wishing to contact me directly can get me on TrevorE@xephon.com.
Putting it all together…
For the past three blogs I’ve been talking about AJAX and Web 2.0 and that whole little end experience, but at heart I’m a true mainframer. I remember the days of water cooling and machine rooms with false floors and miles of cabling hidden beneath it. So, this week, I’d like to try to tie up the two ends – as it were. I’d like to talk about an interesting product I came across from a company called Illustro – you can find them at www.illustro.com.
Back in April, Illustro announced support for AJAX Web services for mainframes. They claim they’re the first company to deliver AJAX Web capabilities for mainframe legacy integration and I couldn’t find anyone else making the same claim – but if you know of another product then do let me know.
Illustro – which sounds to me like a villain from a 1960s Batman adventure – has a family of products called z/Ware and the interesting ones are z/Web-Host and z/XML-Host. z/Web-Host is designed to transform a 3270 application into Web-based interface. This can be done without altering the original application. z/XML-Host automatically converts mainframe data to XML documents which can be accessed through Web services using SOAP. So, effectively, the data and business-critical logic become available to any application on any platform. The company claims that you could use Excel to view and update information directly from a mainframe data file.
It’s worth noting that these two products run on the mainframe, so there’s no need for additional servers or anything else.
Now, to be honest, I haven’t tried these products. But the concept behind them seemed worth investigating further, and I thought I’d pass on the information to you. I would be interested to hear from companies offering similar or better products.
Life, the universe, and everything
When Douglas Adams had his characters in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ask the infinite question about life, the universe and everything, they got the answer 42! In my last two blogs I’ve been talking about AJAX and Web 2.0 and the exciting stuff that’s happening out there. But recently Google seems to have the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe not quite, but it does seem to be the most interesting company to follow at the moment.
What am I talking about? Well I mentioned previously that Google was using AJAX in its Google Earth project (earth.google.com) and that it was considered right up there with companies that were Web 2.0 adopters. More recently Google CEO Eric Schmidt's has joined the board of directors at Apple. Is this because a) Apple need all the help they can get, b) Google hates Microsoft so much they want to cement links with suppliers of alternative platforms, or c) Apple want you to be able to download iTunes from the Google toolbar? Or is it a combination of all three?
More excitingly, Google has announced Google Apps, which will develop into a real alternative to Microsoft Office. I run Widgets on my laptop – so I can see my wireless signal strength, I can see a calendar, I get a BBC newsfeed, and I get the weather. I also have the drumkit widget, which I think is very clever, and sometimes, for no good reason at all, I have a dalek wander round my screen. But widgets are owned by Yahoo – another would-be rival to Google. Google (although it offers its own widget-like Web apps) is going for something much more useful. It plans to offer for free (although paid for through advertising) e-mail, calendar, and instant messaging plus Web site creating software. But this is only the first step. Next Google will make available word processing and spreadsheet software. Word processing will be based on Writely, which Google acquired a little while ago. The spreadsheet will most likely be called Google Spreadsheets (how do they come up with these names!). The clever plan behind this is remarkably simple. Everyone, or so it seems has Word and Excel on their computer so who needs another similar application? But, everyone seems to have a different version of Word, etc, and, even though Microsoft now employ Ray Ozzie – the man behind Notes and Domino – they are not so good at sharing files so that different people can work on them. This is where the Google strategy scores heavily. Not only does every user work with the latest version of the software, they can easily e-mail them and edit them.
The other thing that will happen is that these files will be stored on Google’s disks. This makes them easier to share and, kind of, makes Google indispensable. Google already operates a photo storing facility with its Picasa software.
Will Microsoft take this lying down? Of course not – they already have plans for their Live brand. And they’ll be making other plans already.
It’s just Google is being dynamic at the moment with agreements with other companies (like Sun and Dell – and even BA, www.ba.com, is using Google Earth in a mash-up), and it has leading-edge software that people want to use and can use fairly easily (although Google Earth V4 still won’t run on my laptops!!). So maybe not the answer to life, the universe, and everything, but very interesting and useful all the same.
Web 2.0 – more than just “marketecture”
Back in the 1990s, when everyone started predicting the exact date when the last mainframe would be turned off and IBM wasn’t having a particularly great time, IBM tried to counter the bad news by having lots of initiatives – rather like governments do. Governments want you to think that you can’t get rid of them because they are just launching radical reforms to education and health (and anything else their media friends tell them the public want to hear). IBM, similarly, although without saying the words, tried to form the impression that mainframes (they were fashionably calling them servers at the time) would not go away because there were so many exciting and important things happening with them. The old Xephon (www.xephonusa.com) “Handbook of IBM Terminology” defines marketecture as, “A wonderful coinage to describe grand designs whose existence owes more to the creative intellect of marketers than to the industry of product developers. IBM is the past master of creating marketectures, outdoing even the people who write manifestos for politicians”. Web 2.0 sounds like it might be a piece of marketecture. At first it sounds like a proper product announcement. You think you could go out and buy this new version of the Web, but, of course, you can’t. What separates Web 2.0 from being marketecture and what makes it so great is the underlying concept – one that everyone seems to understand without necessarily being able to define it exactly themselves. The term Web 2.0 was coined following a meeting between two companies – O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Web 2.0 is a way of separating companies (or really Web sites) that make use of the latest Web-based techniques from less innovative sites.
So how can you tell whether your company’s Web site is Web 2.0? Well that’s hard to say exactly. You know when you visit a site whether it could be called Web 2.0, but you may not always know why exactly.
Typically, Web 2.0 sites will be making use of techniques such as AJAX (see last week’s blog), Web syndication, and public Web APIs. What I’m talking about are things like blogs, wikis (and who needs to buy Encarta when the wonderful wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org – is only a click away), RSS, and podcasts. Web 2.0 sites successfully use information from their site’s visitors – for example Amazon (www.amazon.com) recommends similar books that you might like when you order a book. Web 2.0 sites can also easily update the software they use – and do. This means that each time you browse the site the experience can be slightly different, but should be better (faster and easier). Web 2.0 sites can incorporate or link to pages from other sites to improve the browser experience (mash-ups). For example the Google Earth maps can be overlaid with bus routes (for example).
Check out the following sites, which are considered to be Web 2.0: www.myspace.com, maps.google.com, flickr.com, www.blogger.com, del.icio.us, and dig.com. eBay (www.ebay.com) is also a Web 2.0 company. It makes virtually no profit when an item is sold on eBay. But (and this is a really big “but”) because there are so many transactions, each tiny amount of money adds up to a very reasonable income. I think eBay is one of the first of what will be a multi-million dollar industry as companies realize that collaboration makes Internet trading easy and effective.
The other big change in the way users work introduced by Web 2.0 is that (like I said last week with AJAX) it is operating system agnostic. You are no longer tied to Windows or Linux (or whatever) as your user platform.
So, there is definitely a Web 2.0 experience to be enjoyed at many Web sites out there. There are also probably millions of sites that could learn from these Web 2.0-enabled sites. There is definitely much more to Web 2.0 than simple marketecture.
AJAX – a big step in the right direction
Every time there’s a great leap forward in computing, you kind of think that you would have thought of that (given enough time, etc etc). For example, when we were all working on mainframes with terminals attached and those guys struggling away in garages built small personal computers for the first time – I remember thinking it was brilliant idea and I’m sure I would have come up with the idea. Then we had a long period of swapping files between PCs using floppy disks, and sending diskettes through the post! That was the only way to share files. I can remember waiting for the Fed Ex man with his box of diskettes to arrive. The solution, of course, was the Internet. I’m sure I must have thought of that idea – didn’t you?
Then we get to the stage where we work on notebook computers, talking across the Internet, and the Web server sends us a page, we make one change or entry and we send the whole page back. Then the Web server sends us a new page – one that probably looks 90% like the last one we saw. Did I say 90%, it could even look 99% similar, but the whole page was sent over the Internet to my browser. It must be time I had another of those "brilliant" thoughts!
And that’s how we get to AJAX technology. AJAX is an acronym standing for Asynchronous Javascript And XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), which was originally coined by Web design consultancy Adaptive Path (www.adaptivepath.com).
Rather than the user pressing a button or hitting the Enter key triggering an HTTP request on the Web server, which then actions that request (by grabbing some data or calculating interest, or whatever), and finally sending back a new page, AJAX speeds things up by actually sitting on the end user’s computer and doing a lot of the work there. An AJAX engine will control most of what the user sees in their browser and be responsible for sending data to and from the Web server. By using hidden frames (typically) communication can be asynchronous, but (again typically) the AJAX engine will be able to handle most requests – which means that pages aren’t sent to and from the Web server. This makes things much faster and reduces network traffic.
The other very interesting thing about AJAX is the fact it control what the user sees on screen. And the reason this is important is because it allows applications like word processing or spreadsheets to be run from a Web server. And the reason that is important is because the application is platform agnostic and it can be updated anytime. Let’s unpick that last sentence a little. Basically, it means that users can run the same application on a Mac, a PC, or Linux – so long as they are connected to the Internet. It means they use the same application no matter whose computer they are working on. So gone are the days of people familiar with using MacWrite having to use Word, or AmiPro (or whatever). Users can always load their favourite word processor etc. And the other big advantage is that upgrades to the application happen easily and automatically. I use Word 2000 on one laptop, but have 2002 on a slightly newer one. They are very similar, but not the same. This would never happen with AJAX. As the application was developed, users would always download the latest version.
AJAX can easily offer word processing etc because it allows drag-and-drop and those other facilities we’re all used to through using a GUI.
But is this all pie-in-the-sky or is anyone really doing this? The answer is a definite yes. Google was a very enthusiastic supporter, and Google Earth (earth.google.com) uses it (although I can’t get Version 4 to work – Version 3 was excellent). Flickr (www.flickr.com) the photo sharing site uses it. And there are lots of others – so many that there’s no point my listing them here.
IBM is a big AJAX supporter. Early this year IBM announced the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) for building Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for different AJAX run-time environments. IBM has said that it will give away its Eclipse-based code to Open AJAX – an organization supported by BEA, Borland, Eclipse, Google, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, and Yahoo.
AJAX applications turn out to be particularly good at tasks such as updating or deleting records, returning simple Web queries, or expanding Web forms. This is because those activities don’t require a new page to be loaded. They can run on any platform that supports a browser. The skills required to write AJAX are really extensions to JavaScript and DHTML – which means there are plenty of developers who could do it. The other big plus for AJAX is that IBM has put its full weight behind it, and Microsoft is also now an AJAX supporter (see their ATLAS announcements).
AJAX users may notice a big difference between AJAX doing the work and a refresh from the Web server. It’s important with AJAX development that users pressing the “back” button see what they expect, and that they see an icon indicating that the computer is doing something. It’s also necessary to use a browser that supports AJAX – some old ones don’t.
On the whole, AJAX seems to offer next generation working today. It’s one of those developments that you think is so obvious you should have thought of it yourself. If AJAX itself isn’t the complete answer then it’s certainly a giant step in the right direction.
Host Access Client Package for Multiplatform announcement
Looking back over the evolution of mainframes, there have been a few “great leaps forward”, but the majority of improvements have come trickling through in a way that seems to go unnoticed – yet the way we’re working today is easier and quicker than last year and a million times better than ten years ago. And those of us who can remember how things were over twenty years ago – well …
One such “trickle” announcement is IBM’s recently announced HACP (Host Access Client Package) for Multiplatform and for iSeries, which are available 8 September. Both versions include Version 5.9 of Personal Communications for Windows and Version 10 of WebSphere Host On-Demand (HOD).
HACP is marketed by IBM as “the solution to all of your host connection needs”. It supports SNA, APPC, HPR, and other related technologies.
V5.9 of Personal Communications has a number of useful enhancements. It now supports Windows x64 platforms – including Windows XP Pro, and Windows Server 2003 Standard and Enterprise editions. The downside to this is that x64 support is available only in “compatibility mode” – ie it’s not available in SNA environments. I assume the thinking is that sites are all migrating away from SNA to IP networks so it’s not a problem.
Another important update is support for Kerberos ticketing. On iSeries (or OS/400 platforms) using Kereberos-based Single Sign-On (SSO) reduces the number of passwords a user needs to know and use (or, as we’ve seen all too often, have written on post-it notes stuck to the side of the screen!).
The list of enhancements also includes more centralized control for administrators – such as the power to control a user’s ability to modify their session’s view. Administrators are also able to identify when a product is being used or even installed – although this requires Tivoli Licence Manager to be already installed.
There are some printing enhancements – allowing lots of print files to be collected and printed as a single job. It’s also possible to use Windows GDI (Graphics Device Interface) print capability for VT host printing.
Finally, there’s support for concurrent IPv4 and IPv6 connections and support for Telnet security.
Version 10 of WebSphere HOD now supports IBM’s Workplace software. This means that users can create HOD plug-ins that will run on any software based on Workplace Client Technology (WCT) on Windows. Support for JSR 168 allows HOD to create portlets that will run on any JSR 168-compliant portal server (which WebSphere is!).
There are some other enhancements such support for FTP’s copy append function.
Overall, quite a useful release upgrade to a useful connectivity package. And, like I say, a small trickle, a tiny advance, making computing better.
A heads-up for CICS people
Because the August issue of Xephon's CICS Update (http://www.xephonusa.com/) journal contains such interesting articles covering important technology areas for CICS users, I thought it was worth just drawing your attention to them.
The first article is by Aseem Anand, a senior systems programmer with US-based Syntel, and it takes a detailed look at the always essential issue of CICS performance. The article is entitled "Analysing the performance of CICS systems". It describes what can be achieved through CICS performance analysis, highlighting areas such as deviation from performance objectives, system modification, and calibrating individual transactions. It discusses which metrics are useful - such as processor usage, I/O rates, message or block sizes, virtual storage limits, paging rates, and error rates. It also goes on to talk about different methods that can be used for performance analysis - measuring a system under full production load and measuring single-application transactions - and how these can be achieved.
CICS has gone from being a bet-the-business subsystem running on hardware locked away in darkened computer suites to being the bet-the-business system that anyone with a browser (and appropriate authority) can use. CICS transactions are now being made available as Web services. Another of the articles in CICS Update looks at the growth of CICS Web services. Laxminarayan Sriram's article briefly looks at CICS' first support for the Internet back in 1994, and runs through its evolution to where we are now - particularly highlighting important developments.
In a way continuing the SOA theme, an article by John Bradley, a systems programmer with Meerkat Computer Services in the UK, takes an in-depth look at bridge environments. In the article, entitled "Determining the bridge environment model for your CICS environment", John describes the four bridge models available - long-running monitor, two-task model, single-message monitor, and the direct model. The article provides the right questions to ask to help you decide on the right bridge environment, and dissects each one.
In addition, the issue also contains articles looking CICS application architecture, a brief look at Attunity's CICS-related products, and the first part of an article discussing CICS TS and Java.
I'm not telling you to rush out and buy it, it's just that sometimes with everyone's busy schedules, interesting stuff like this can be completely missed and a lot of time can be spent later searching Google (or whatever) to collect the same information for an on-site project. So, if you're interested in CICS performance or SOA at the moment, this is a heads-up for you.
Viper – no snake in the grass
Although pre-announced months ago, and officially announced in June, IBM’s DB2 Version 9.0, code-named Viper, was globally released on the 28th July. So what’s all the excitement about? Well, there are improvements in security, ie much better control over which parts of the database are accessible to whom. There’s an updated set of developer tools. There are improvements in compression, ie smaller packets of data can be transferred resulting in better response times. The real “biggy” is DB2’s ability to work natively with XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) files.
The way this works is, DB2 stores XML files and searches them using XQuery. What’s Xquery, you say? It’s meant to be an SQL-like query language that works on XML documents. In effect, DB2 9 is able to store structured data and, importantly, unstructured data in their native formats. The alternative is to store unstructured data as a pseudo-structured record (eg a Character Large Objects – CLOBs). This results in a hybrid data server that stores structured data in rows and columns, and unstructured data in a hierarchical XML format.
The new DB2 Developer Workbench (DWB) is based on the Eclipse framework (another example of IBM embracing the Open System world), which provides the environment in which users can create SQL scripts, stored procedures, XML queries, XML schema documents, and user-defined queries. It’s here that the XQueries can be generated. Additionally, for sites needing to integrate DB2 with .NET applications, there is an updated DB2 data provider plus add-ins for the Visual Studio.NET design environment.
Interestingly, Viper includes self-tuning memory settings that can determine the best configuration automatically based on server usage patterns.
IBM has decided to ship four versions of DB2 9 – Express, Workgroup, and Enterprise, and Express-C. Express-C is free.
IBM is hoping that DB2 9 will have leapfrogged ahead of other database vendors in terms of its capabilities. I’m sure Oracle, Microsoft’s SQL Server, MySQL, and those other vendors will be responding shortly!
All the latest DB2 news is published each month in DB2 Update from Xephon (www.xephonusa.com).
Where have all the flowers gone?
Alright, I don’t mean flowers I mean software companies. This month (June) saw the announcement that Mainstar has been acquired by Rocket Software (www.rocketsoftware.com). We also had ASG (www.asg.com) sealing its deal to acquire Diversified Software Systems and integrating their products into its OpsCentral solutions platform. What else? Well we heard that AttachmateWRQ had completed its takeover of NetIQ – and rather than calling the new company AttachmateWRQNetIQ, or some other extended mouthful of name, they decided that simply going back to Attachmate (www.attachmate.com) would be best. That was announced 5 June. Not to be left out, CA (ca.com) has acquired XOsoft, a company in the continuous application and information availability market. The acquisition enables CA to offer a complete recovery management solution allowing customers to minimize the risk of data loss, reduce the time spent on back-ups, and expedite recovery of critical business services – they claim. So if all this can happen in a single month, who’s going to be left at the end of the year?
Perhaps to avoid a takeover, companies like NetManage (www.netmanage.com) and Cape Clear Software (www.capeclear.com) are forming partnerships, which, in this case, they claim is intended to streamline SOA development. The two vendors' combined solutions, they said, will help move legacy and mainframe systems into a broader service-oriented architecture. NetManage brings its OnWeb and Librados Adapters to the party, while Cape Clear offers an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) designed to enable rapid reuse of process-oriented applications within mainframe applications.
Similarly, GT Software (www.gtsoftware.com) is also forming numerous partnerships. GT Software’s Ivory Service Architect enables mainframe developers to graphically orchestrate mainframe transaction, application, data, and Web services into multi-step, multi-operation business services. It is pushing itself in the SOA arena and has a partnership with Merlin Software, which will help it deploy its products at federal agencies. It also has a partnership with Relativity Technologies to accelerate and boost SOA-enablement. Then there’s the partnership with Relativity Technologies, which has a similar aim. And finally (in my quick look through my files, anyway) there’s a partnership with Skyway Software, who are in the SOA design and delivery market.
Going back to Mainstar… they made quite a few announcements recently. They announced Version 9.01 of their FastAudit/390 Suite. The product is designed to keep z/OS environments trouble-free with high-speed, accurate, and flexible audits. They also announced Version 6.0.0E of RealTime Defrag/Extended Processing (RTD/XP), a disk space management product designed to simplify and automate the process of continuously managing the free space and datasets on each disk under its control.
In the twenty years that I have been producing the news section for Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) Update publications I have never seen quite such a feeding frenzy. It seems that the software giants are safe from each other at the moment, but the successful smaller companies definitely need to form partnerships if they are to avoid being gobbled up in today’s carnivorous market place.
Mainframe-related news items can be sent to Trevor Eddolls at TrevorE@xephon.com.
What’s going on with CICS?
What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies - it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.Now CICS is even better – it can act as a provider of Web services and it can act as a consumer of Web services. It’s now arguably the most useful subsystem a company has. It allows one company to interface directly with another. People sitting at browsers can get information about products, they can even update their own information held by the company running CICS. And yet, there seem to be fewer and fewer companies offering far fewer CICS add-ons – what’s going on?
One important point to make straight away is that when CICS Update issue 1 came out in December 1985, most users were probably using CICS Version 1.6, and the more current versions of CICS out there are far more sophisticated than that earlier version (which we thought was quite special at the time!). It probably means that there are fewer “gaps” in CICS for other companies to fill with their products. It also a sign of how few mainframe software companies there are in comparison to 1985. Some have just gone out of business, but many were swallowed up by larger companies such as CA.
Many recent software announcements in the CICS arena are to do with Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). For example, the August issue of CICS Update contains news that AttachmateWRQ (www.attachmate.com) has announced Verastream Bridge Integrator, its CICS-focused integration product that enables users to transform business-critical CICS functionality into reusable services. Basically, the product allows users to non-invasively extend existing CICS services for use in new SOA application development or integration projects.
Similarly, SOA Software (www.soa.com) and Parasoft (www.parasoft.com) are partnering to offer an integrated governance and testing suite for Service-Oriented Architectures. Their partnership allows users to combine Web services management and error refactoring for SOA and Web service-based applications. SOA Software’s portfolio includes SOLA, a mainframe Web services solution for CICS programmers. Parasoft has SOAtest, a suite of products focused on automated error protection.
So, what’s going on with CICS? It looks like the answer is definitely SOA. IBM has filled in most of the other “gaps” that existed in the product and now has something more than ready to face the brave new world of browser-based working. Those other software vendors are helping to make this SOA development as easy as possible.
CICS Update is published by Xephon (www.xephonusa.com). If you have a CICS-related article that you would like published or even an idea for an article, please contact the editor, Trevor Eddolls, at TrevorE@xephon.com
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