The future of the mainframe

With each new version of z/OS, we see two different things brought together and merged into one operating system. They are the pressures placed on the mainframe by the industry – the direction of travel of the mainframe created by market forces – and secondly, the direction of travel that IBM perceive as the best for the future of the mainframe and, obviously being a business, their own future income. These two forces come together every couple of years and manifest themselves in a new version of the operating system. And that’s what happened recently with the announcement of z/OS 2.5, which should be generally available on 30 September.

So, is this version of the operating system like the captain of some huge supertanker trying to change direction in a stormy sea? Or is it more like small sailing boat enjoying the winds and the currents to push in more or less the direction it wants? Maybe a little tacking and steering will be required, but not much? I’ll let you decide.

IBM has said that Version 2.5 of z/OS is “designed to accelerate client adoption of hybrid cloud and AI and drive application modernization projects”. The move to cloud and the growth in the use of various artificial intelligences everywhere seems to be something most companies are completely onboard with. Recognizing that fact, IBM has affirmed that new AI capabilities “are tightly integrated with z/OS workloads, designed to give clients business insights for more informed decision making”. Developers will be able to access a wider choice of AI-based tools, including TensorFlow and IBM Watson Machine Learning for z/OS.

The other thing that organizations are worried about is security. When hackers were disaffected teenagers and nerdy people working alone, problems with security were bad enough, but now criminal gangs and nation-state bad actors are making ransomware into big business along with drugs and people trafficking. It’s an international problem that no-one can ignore. z/OS 2.5 comes with additional security features that expand pervasive encryption to cover additional types of data sets, such as sequential basic format and large format SMS-managed data sets.

Anomaly Mitigation capabilities seem very interesting and can help to prevent ransomware getting on to the system. It uses the predictive failure analysis (PFA) features, which is designed to prevent problems before they occur, as well as, IBM informs us, “Runtime Diagnostics, Workload Manager (WLM), and JES2 to help further detect anomalous behaviour in near real-time, letting clients proactively address potential problems.”

Other new features include:

• New Java/COBOL interoperability features. IBM says this interoperability “extends existing application programming models with support for parallel 31-bit and 64-bit addressing, simplifying enterprise application modernization”.
•  z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) will integrate Linux applications and utilities into z/OS,
• Additional functions for the integration of cloud storage through “transparent cloud tiering” (TCT) and the support of cloud tier support with the “Object Access Method” (OAM) for data transfer in hybrid cloud storage environments. This will simplify central data archiving and backup on the mainframe.

The good news for anyone who has got to install it is that IBM suggests V2.5 is “expected to be faster and easier to install and upgrade, with one client trial demonstrating the ability to install z/OS more than 30 percent faster than compared with IBM z/OS 2.3 and 2.4”. Added to that there’s a new “simplified management experience supplied by streamlined and automated tasks”, which, they suggest, means “specialty skills may not be required”.

For anyone who already has a mainframe, there are plenty of things in the new version that will make life simpler moving forward. And, assuming you have newish hardware, it is very likely that mainframe sites will gradually start upgrading to Version 2.5. The improvements in security may seem slight, but mainframe security is still the best that’s available on any platform. And that may convince some new companies of the value of using such a powerful workhorse for their computing needs. Particularly, if they have already started moving to the cloud, because the mainframe integrates with the cloud so well.

My conclusion is that it does seem this version of z/OS is giving people what they want and not fighting against the general weather conditions out there.