The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2021 is now available for download from arcati.com/newyearbook21/, – and it’s FREE. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting.
This year, the results came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site between 1 November 2020 and the 27 November 2020. Just under half (45 percent) were from North America. 20 percent were from Europe, and another fifth were from the Asia/Pacific region. 10 percent were from the Middle East/Africa. And five percent were from South America.
The largest group of respondents were from companies with over 10,000 employees worldwide (40 percent). Almost a third (30 percent) had 1001 to 5000 staff. And 15 percent were companies with under 200 staff, and another 15 percent had staff sizes of 201 to 1000 people. No respondents, this year, had 5001 to 10,000 staff.
It was an interesting survey this year to see how various sites are adopting the new technologies that seem to come out every year and how the world of the mainframe seems to be integrating with the other IT platforms used by most organizations. Clearly, working with mainframes is an interesting way to spend your day – particularly as they are able to reach out to mobile devices and the cloud, and, with DevOps, they can speed up what was a very slow process of application development. CICS and IMS continue to have quarterly updates that add value to the product.
In terms of what’s new (or, perhaps more correctly, what appears on a lot of PowerPoint slides), the survey found that 35 percent of sites are already using Splunk. And a further 20 percent said that they were planning to use it. The survey found that 35 percent of sites were already using DevOps (up from 20 percent last year), with a further fifteen percent planning to use it. And half of all respondents said that they were already reusing APIs to speed up application development. And a further 25 percent of sites are planning to reuse APIs. Blockchain has been in the news a lot, and 10 percent of sites reported already using it, with 15 percent planning to use it. With Docker, we found that 10 percent of respondents were already using it with 15 percent at the planning stage.
Zowe, the open-source way of accessing mainframes, was introduced in 2018. 10 percent of sites said that they are already using this open-source technology, but only 10 percent of sites have plans to make use of it in the coming year. I wonder whether usage will grow over the next few years?
When it comes to Web-enabling subsystems, we found that 80 percent of organizations were Web-enabling Db2; 75 percent were Web-enabling their CICS subsystems; and 30 percent of sites were Web-enabling IMS and 30 percent were Web-enabling WebSphere. In contrast, only eight percent of sites already use Liberty, with eight percent planning to install it.
Mainframes in an organization are just one of the computing platforms people use (along with smartphones, tablets, laptops, Power systems, etc), and, for a long time, there has been an issue, at many sites, with mainframes being accepted in the enterprise. The reason suggested by 65 percent was cultural barrier between mainframe and other IT professionals. And this figure has been growing. The next biggest obstacle was seen as the difficulty in retaining the necessary skills. 55 percent of respondents saw this as an obstacle. And this, perhaps, highlights the need for a product like Zowe. Half of respondents thought mainframes are too expensive (or appear to be). And this figure has been decreasing. 40 percent were concerned about the future availability/support of mainframe applications. Just 20 percent thought mainframes are too complex (or appear to be). And 10 percent of sites couldn’t see any obstacles to mainframes being accepted in the enterprise. Let’s hope that figure rises in the future.
Reinforcing the value of the mainframe to organizations, the survey found that 89 percent of sites have seen some kind of increase in capacity, and 83 percent have seen an increase in technology costs, and yet only 59 percent of sites believe their people costs have increased! Also, in terms of costs, 81 percent of sites surveyed said that the bulk of their IT budget is spent off mainframe.
But no organization is going to develop an asset unless they view it as having a future, and we all know the mindset that still exists about the mainframe, treating it as little more than your dad’s technology. Unfortunately, the survey found that just over a third of sites viewed their mainframe as a legacy system. Whereas 40 percent (well up from last year’s figure of 10 percent) still viewed mainframes as strategic. 20 percent viewed them as strategic and legacy.
When asked what, in their opinion, are the main benefits to their organization of the mainframe over other platforms, every single respondent highlighted security. Clearly, all the talk about breaches and ransomware is focusing the minds of mainframers. 90 percent of respondents highlighted the benefit of availability. 75 percent of respondents highlighted manageability, with 75 percent identifying scalability.
This year’s survey found that the last-but-one mainframe model was the most prevalent. So, most sites had a z15 or z14 Model ZR1 installed. The next most popular models were the z14, the z13s and (surprisingly) the z114. Older models (z13, z12BC, z12 EC, z10BC, z10EC, and z9BC) are still out there and still performing well. It must be noted, when looking at these statistics, that many sites had more than one model of mainframe installed. In terms of operating system, 48 percent of sites were using z/OS Version 2.3, and 26 percent were using Version 2.2. A further 21 percent were using the newer Version 2.4.
It’s interesting to see what kind of an impact the much talked about cloud computing is making. Only five percent of respondent said that they were currently using their mainframe for cloud computing. A third (33 percent) thought perhaps some mainframe applications will be cloud-enabled in the future. 22 percent plan for some applications to run using the cloud model. And 11 percent plan for most of their applications to run using the cloud model.
Linux is often in the news, so it was interesting to see what our respondents had to say about it. Just over half of respondents said that they run Linux on the IBM Z. There are considerable cost and management benefits from consolidating distributed Linux workloads onto the mainframe. However, 63 percent of respondents weren’t interested in LinuxONE mainframes. Six percent of respondents said they already had one, with 25 percent expecting to get one at some time in the future. But, no sites in the survey said their primary operating system was Linux.
The reported increase in popularity of Java is reflected in the survey 55 percent of sites (similar to last year’s 53 percent) said that they run Java-based applications on the mainframe, with a further 5 percent (down from last year’s 16 percent) planning to.
Security breaches and ransomware are becoming a major issue – with the average breach costing $3.86 million. Perhaps worryingly, 40 percent of respondents weren’t worried about ransomware. Five percent said they had a solution in place, and 40 percent were worried or very worried about it.
When it comes to being compliant with regulations, eg PCI DSS, GDPR, and the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the survey found that half of sites were fully compliant, with a further 17 percent being nearly compliant with these regulations. However, the survey also found that the figure for sites not having an archiving strategy is 22 percent.
As is so often the case, the bottom line is that the mainframe continues to offer a cost-effective, secure (especially with pervasive encryption), and powerful platform for organizations with the necessary background and expertise in place to support it. It seems that non-mainframe IT staff and managers are not getting the opportunities to find out about the multitude of advantages that using a mainframe can bring to an organization – in terms of security, reliability, availability, flexibility, as well as understanding the true total cost of ownership figures for the platform. Perhaps Zowe will help the mainframe to appear like any other server to a younger generation of programmers and managers.
