The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook - user survey findings

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 is now available for download from http://www.arcati.com/newyearbook14 – 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.

The results came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site between 1 November and 6 December 2013. 51% were from North America, 33% were from Europe with the remainder from the rest of the world.

Half of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide. Below that, with 24 percent of respondents, were staff sizes of 1001-5000, 10 percent with staff sizes of 0-200, nine percent with staff sizes of 201 to 1000, and only seven percent with staff sizes of 5001 to 10,000. In terms of MIPS, 28 percent had 1000-10,000 MIPS, down again from last year’s figure of 36 percent. 16 percent had under 500 MIPS, only 15 percent had 500-1000 MIPS, 13 percent had 10,000 to 25,000 MIPS, and 17 percent had over 25,000 MIPS installed.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. 71 percent of sites of mainframe installations are experiencing some growth, with three sites claiming growth in the region of 26-50 percent. Only eight percent of sites are reporting a decline in mainframe capacity growth. 11 percent of sites are not expecting any kind of change in their MIPS this year. Small sites (32 percent) are most likely to have seen some kind of decline or to have stayed the same, and yet, in complete contrast, they were more likely to see growth in the 26-50 percent range. While some larger sites (above 10,000 MIPS) did report a decline or no growth, the majority were anticipating some kind of growth possibly up to 50 percent per year. Mid-range respondents were typically expecting some kind of growth (89 percent of sites). It is a confusing picture with nearly a third of small sites, 10 percent of medium sites, and 17 percent of larger sites showing no growth or a decline. Perhaps sites have been holding off on growth until the global economic climate brightens up.

The survey looked at whether sites currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Only seven percent of respondents said they did. The survey also asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 50 percent said they weren’t at present. 16 percent thought some mainframe applications would be cloud enabled in the future. And 15 percent  claimed that some of their applications are using the cloud model.

There’s been a huge growth in the use of social media in recent years, and the survey wondered whether those people “using their dad’s technology” found social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc) useful for their work on the mainframe. 18 percent said that they did, with 13 percent not sure, and the rest not using it at all. With IBM having Facebook pages dedicated to IMS, CICS, and DB2, it seems a shame if they’re not being used.

With the growth in number of software products that allow users to monitor the mainframe from a browser on a tablet/iPad or smartphone, the survey looked at whether mainframers were using these devices to monitor or control their mainframe. Only nine percent said that they were.

Another hot topic through 2013 has been Big Data and all the things associated with that (such as Hadoop). The survey asked whether sites had any plans to use Big Data. Just two percent of sites said that they were already using Big Data, with a further 12 percent planning to do so.

The survey also asked about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). It wanted to know how important sites thought it was to make mainframe data available to other platforms. 78 percent of sites said that it was very important to the way they work at the moment. Three percent are in the planning stage, and nine percent expect to do some work on this in the future. When it comes to how important is the idea of people using their own devices (BYOD) to access mainframes, 15 percent of sites said it was very important to the way they work now – but 47 percent said it wasn’t important.

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

The Yearbook can only be free because some organizations have been prepared to sponsor it or advertise in it. This year’s sponsors were: Software Diversified Services (SDS), Software AG, zIT Consulting, and CA Technologies.

Vivat mainframe

“Vivat Rex” is what the populace was meant to shout when a new king of England was crowned. It means “long live the king”. I think that we’ve been able to shout, “long live the mainframe” for a long time now, and recent announcements mean that we can continue to do so.

Mainframes, and I don’t need to tell you this, have been around for a long time now and have faced and overcome all the technical and business challenges that have been thrown at them in that time. And older mainframers can seem somewhat jaundiced when their younger colleagues get over-enthusiastic about some new technology.

We’ve looked at client-server technology and thought how similar it is to dumb terminals logging onto a mainframe. We’ve looked at cloud computing and thought how similar that is to terminals connecting to a mainframe in a different part of the world. But there’s much more to the mainframe than a simple ‘seen it, done it’ attitude. The mainframe is also able to absorb new technologies and make them its own.

We’ve looked recently at Hadoop – there are distributions from Hortonworks, Cloudera, Apache, and IBM (and many others). But you can run Big Data on your mainframe, and a number of mainframe software vendors have recently produced software that connects to Big Data from z/OS. It’s becoming integrated. So long live the mainframe with Big Data.

We’ve also, in this blog, looked at ways that BYOD – personal devices – can be used to access mainframe data, usually through browsers. And many of IBM’s younger presenters at GSE recently were talking about more Windows-like interfaces to mainframe information. Think of it – it’s like 1970 all over again – mainframes in the hands of 20-year-olds! So long live the mainframe with youthful staff and modern-looking interfaces.

We know there are other computing platforms out there, and IBM over the past few years has produced hybrid hardware that contains a mainframe and blades for running these other platforms. This summer’s zBC12 (Business Class) followed last year’s announcement of the zEC12 (Enterprise Class). And 2011 saw the z114, and 2010 gave us the z196. So long live the mainframe and its ability to embrace other platforms. (And I haven’t even mentioned how successfully you can run Linux on a mainframe.)

And thinking about mainframes embracing other technologies, CA has just announced the general availability of technology designed, they say, to help customers drive down the cost of storing data processed on IBM System z by backing up the data and archiving it to the cloud.

What that means is by using CA Cloud Storage for System z and the Riverbed Whitewater appliance, customers can back up System z storage data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage, or to Amazon Glacier, an extremely low-cost storage service for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. Both services are highly secure and scalable and designed to be durable. In addition, disaster recovery readiness is improved and AWS cloud storage is accessed without changing the existing back-up infrastructure.
So, yet again, we can say, long live the mainframe for the way it’s embracing cloud computing.

As a side note: Amazon has Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), which uses Hadoop to provide Web services.

IBM has taken over StoredIQ, Star Analytics, and The Now Factory for Big Data Analytics or Business Analytics. And it took over SoftLayer Technologies for its cloud computing infrastructure. It’s making sure it has its hands on the tools and the people who are developing these newer technologies.

My conclusion is that there are new problems that need to be solved. And there are new technologies available to solve them. But so often those exciting new things are very similar to things that we mainframers have dealt with before. And where they seem different, mainframe environments are able to work with them and bring them into the fold.

There’s really no danger that mainframes are going away anytime soon. So, we’re very safe in saying, “vivat mainframe”.

On a completely different topic...
Please complete the mainframe users’ survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey14. And if you’re a vendor, get your free entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 by completing the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.

Interesting week!

It’s been an interesting week – the auld enemies, Microsoft and Oracle, have made a joint announcement, SPDY is finding its way into IE11, and IBM has been showing off its mastery of big data at Wimbledon. So let’s take a look at what’s been going on.

It’s not quite a return to the 1960s with love breaking out all around, but large organizations are realizing that customers and, more importantly, potential customers, use hardware and software from other vendors – and the best way to do more business is to recognize this and be, at the very least, compatible. And so, with this in mind (I expect), Microsoft and Oracle have joined forces in a new cloud venture that means Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing service will now run Oracle’s database software, Java programming tools, and application-connecting middleware. Azure customers will be able to run Java, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and even Oracle Linux on Windows Server Hyper-V or Windows Azure, and Oracle will deliver full certification and support.

The benefits are that Microsoft gains additional customers for Azure, and Oracle gains customers for their technology who want to use it in the cloud. And it gives Microsoft something that VMware and Amazon Web services don’t have. Companies using Azure cloud service, which lets them build and run programs online, will be able to put information into Oracle’s database.

With many organizations thinking seriously about moving to the cloud, this alliance provides better choices for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), allowing them to rent computing power, storage, and database software over the Internet.

Also this week, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will support SPDY (pronounced speedy), the Google-backed protocol for speeding up downloads from Web sites. The open source networking protocol achieves this by prioritizing and multiplexing the transfer of Web page subresources, so that only one connection per client is required. It uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and transmission headers are compressed. Faster Web pages has got to be a good thing – Firefox and Chrome already use it.

Meanwhile, Google has built QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) into developer versions of Chrome. It’s an alternative to TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and is designed to cut the round-trip time of the back-and-forth communications between computers on the Internet. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is faster than TCP, but doesn’t have TCP’s error-checking reliability. QUIC is based on UDP and now provides its own error-correction technology.

So what new things could IBM bring to Wimbledon? It’s been providing up-to-date information for 24 years now, so what’s different in 2013? Well, the answer is more social media involvement.

Last year, it seems, there were around 100 tweets per second during the men’s final, won by Roger Federer against Andy Murray. So this year, IBM is providing social sentiment analysis, using its content analytics software. That means it can, for example, gauge how popular Andy Murray is in different parts of the UK!

IBM’s SPSS predictive analytics software is at the core of SlamTracker, which deploys a mixture of predictive analytics software, data visualization, and kinetic tracking to see what people consistently did when they won. IBM’s Second Sight technology measures player speed, distance, and stamina. This year it’s integrated with HawkEye, the ball-tracking and line-calling technology.

So an interesting week all round.

Guest blog - Cloud and mainframes: a perfect couple

This week, I’m publishing a second blog entry from Marcel den Hartog, Principal Product Marketing for CA Technologies Mainframe Solutions. You can read more of his blogs here.

I know what you’re thinking: another Generation Z person wanting to ride the cloud hype and make sure we don’t forget about his favourite platform. But bear with me while I explain there is a lot of logic behind this...

I am old enough to remember the time when many of us in IT were surprised by the rise of the distributed environment. And, like many others, I did my fair share of work building applications on both mainframes and distributed servers. I was, however, lucky enough to work in an environment with little or no bias to any platform; our management simply asked us to pick the best platform for any given application.

Soon after building the first distributed applications, we found that we needed the data that resided on the mainframe. Not a big surprise, because most of the mission-critical data was stored on the mainframe AND we had a requirement that almost all the mission-critical data in the company had to be up-to-date, always!

This was not easy, especially in the early phases. We did not have ODBC, JDBC, MQSeries, Web services, or anything else that allowed us to send data back and forth from distributed applications to the mainframe. We had to rely on HLLAPI, a very low-level way of transmitting data by using the protocols that came with 3270 emulation boards like IRMA or Attachmate. And for the data that did not require continuous updates, we relied on extracts that were pumped up and down to a couple of distributed servers every night, where the data was then processed to make it usable for different applications.

The “fit-for-purpose” IT infrastructure we had back then was not ideal because it required a lot of work behind the scenes, mainly to make sure the data used by all these applications was up-to-date and “transformed” in the right way. But the technology became better and better, and with the move from text-based Clipper applications using HLLAPI to communicate with CICS transactions, we slowly moved to more modern, visually attractive programming languages that used more modern protocols like ODBC and JDBC. But since not all data on the mainframe or on distributed systems was capable of being accessed by these protocols (like VSAM files, IMS databases and others), for many applications we had to rely on data transport and transformation routines (and the servers to store and manage it) for many years. Even today, companies pump terabytes of data up and down their various platforms for many different purposes.

The next phase in IT was the switch from home-grown applications to buying applications like ERP, CRM, or other third-party (standardized) applications. And again, these applications not only required data from the mainframe and distributed applications, we also had to extract data FROM these applications to update the other applications our companies relied on. After all, every company runs with a mixture of applications on a mixture of platforms. And to complicate things even more, we do not buy all applications from the same vendors. So we have to exchange data between commercial applications as well. More complexity, more work, more money and more stuff to manage.

Welcome to the world of cloud. Where again, we will run (commercial) applications on a different platform and where we are (again) asked to make sure that our companies most valuable IT asset (our data) is up-to-date across all the different platforms: mainframe, cloud, and distributed. After all, we don’t want our customer data to be different across the different applications; the fact that we have to duplicate across all our different environments is already bad enough.

The efforts to create a pool of IT resources that enables us to create the “fit-for-purpose” IT infrastructure we are all aiming for has, until now, resulted in a very complex IT infrastructure that requires a lot of management. Here is where a latest IBM mainframe technology, comes in. The “pool of resources” can be found externally in the form of cloud services, as well as internally in blades that are configured to run virtualized systems on the mainframe. Adding the mainframe to this pool has big advantages. If you run Linux on the specialized engines (IFLs) on the mainframe, you need a lot less infrastructure to allow the Linux servers to communicate with each other and with your existing zOS applications. So there is no need for cabling and other network infrastructure. This not only greatly reduces the amount (and added complexity) of the hardware needed, it also means less power consumption and more flexibility. In the beginning of this article we agreed that many applications need access to mainframe data. By bringing the applications that need this data closer TO the mainframe, and by reducing the amount of infrastructure devices needed to connect it all, we make things simpler, faster, more manageable, and more reliable.

To make the mainframe part of an internal pool of IT resources that is flexible enough to accommodate the business needs of our management, there is one last step we must take; we need the right software to orchestrate, provision, and decommission servers on demand. There are already a number of vendors who offer software that helps you to provision both internal and external (cloud) resources in a matter of minutes. Simple drag-and-drop applications that provision servers and configure the network and connection settings make it possible to create complex environments in a matter of minutes. But none of them has supported the mainframe (yet). In the near future, however, the mainframe will also be supported, and this will open a new world of possibilities for everybody who already owns a mainframe. Soon, the mainframe will not just be used as part of an internal or hybrid cloud environment, it will act as one of the components you have in your pool of resources.

Yes, a stand-alone mainframe can offer many of the advantages that “cloud” offers: on-demand capacity, virtualization, flexibility and reliability. But not until you are able to use the mainframe as a component in a cloud infrastructure, so that you can bring the applications that need access to their data closer to the mainframe, will the two really be a perfect couple.

Review: Nuance PDF Converter Professional 8

As a regular and frequent user of Adobe Acrobat – the full version, not just the reader – I was intrigued to see whether anyone could come up with a product that was more useful or cheaper, so I welcomed the chance to have a look at the PC version of Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional 8.

It was easy to install and opened up a variety of PDFs that I had lying around. So that meant it was at least as good as the Adobe Reader! So next I had a look at some of the facilities and features it promised. In these days of cloud computing and document sharing, it offered that facility easily and fully. There’s a drop-down menu called ‘collaborate’ that calls up the Gaaiho Collaboration feature. When I installed, I included the Nuance Cloud Connector. I now have an ‘N:’ Nuance Cloud drive as one of my storage drive options. You can also save and open files on Dropbox.

The first thing I wanted to try was the ‘Advanced Edit option in the top row of the tool bar. This converts the PDF into a format that is editable. I changed the font and font size of text in a document. I was also able to insert whole paragraphs of text. I could even have added tables. I liked this feature.

It’s got quite a clever form-filling feature. You can download a form and start filling in the boxes. It’s even clever enough to tab to the next field. And it’s clever enough to convert an old PDF to a searchable PDF. And you can convert your PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect documents.

Nuance also do Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, and I hear they have something to do with Siri on iPhones, so they’ve included voice recognition in this software. It allows you to annotate your PDFs. Not sure whether I really need it, but it’s fun! And if you don’t want to speak, you can type into a resizable text box to make notes.

And like Acrobat, you can reduce file size and split the document. Tucked away on the left-hand side is the Pages tool. That gives you the option to add, replace, and delete pages – a feature I use quite often.

On the right-hand side is a pull-out menu that provides stamp options (you can make a stamp from any area of the PDF), security options, envelope and watermark options, as well as recovery and clip-art options.

Overall, it’s a clever and feature-rich piece of software. Considering its price compared to Adobe Acrobat and the extra facilities it offers, I think it is well worth taking a look at if you’re a regular (or plan to be a regular) user of PDFs.

How much data is enough?

In the past, the only way of storing data was in your head. So, in less developed societies, older people were revered because their heads contained information about how to deal with problems. They remembered how the tribe or village survived last time everywhere flooded or the last major drought. They knew high spots or springs that don’t dry up.

Many societies have tried to make this information available to others by creating songs or poems that recite the lore – so that future generations will not forget the deeds of great heroes, but, more importantly, the list of tips and tricks for surviving in difficult situations.

Then came writing. There was now the ability to list the kings, so it was obvious who should be the next ruler. Or to list the goods that were to be bartered for some other set of goods. Or to record just how many sheep and goats someone owned at the end of each year. And writing in stone, which could last for many years, was later replaced by writing on papyrus, and eventually on paper. With the advent of printing, it became possible to create definitive lists of laws or stories that everyone had access to (well, provided they could read!).

And in our headlong rush through time, we get to the early computers. People could store information on them – like the milk yields of their cows and how much food the herd consumed, or how many coffees were sold in each coffee shop in a chain, or what you wanted for Christmas. And not only could you store data, you could calculate answers to questions. But it was all pretty much driven by humans for humans. And generally you knew where it was stored – even if it was on a mainframe in a different country, you could find the address of site.

But now two of those factors are changing, and changing in a very big way. Now, a lot of the data isn’t created by humans, it’s coming from devices. Let me expand on that. Every time you use your credit card, information about your purchases and where you purchased them is very likely stored somewhere, so the retailer can target adverts at you, and so they have a better idea of what types of product sell well in different parts of the country. Requiring even less human intervention is all the footage that gets stored from security cameras. No humans are involved in the recording and storage. And there are many other examples of devices that just store information. As time goes on, and more-and-more information is stored, there’s going to be a requirement for more-and-more storage. I’m sure someone somewhere has worked out the numbers, but if 500GB of storage occupies half a square foot, and the amount of data stored doubles every year, then in 20 years time, the whole planet will be covered in storage devices to the depth of 18 inches!!

But where is your data? Originally it was on your hard drive or on DASD in your organization’s buildings. But nowadays, I have most of my customer-facing files on Google Drive, and, so long as I’m in a wifi area, I use the CloudOn app on my tablet to show customers PowerPoint presentations as well as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. I also use Dropbox for sharing files with friends. The point I’m making is that I have no idea where those files are physically stored. And, for business files, that brings a huge security issue. For example, European organizations are pretty much prevented from using US-based, or indeterminate location, because they’re outside the EU.

It seems at this rate that there will always be more data to store (somewhere) – and hopefully there will always be enough storage, without covering the whole planet. But will there be any more knowledge in the world?

Back-ups, archives, and Pogoplug

Storage is always an issue. Whether you’ve got petabytes of it on your mainframe or just 16GB on your smartphone or tablet, the issues are always the same. You want speedy access to the data you’re using, and you want somewhere to store the data you’re not using at the moment – but might want to use it later.

Speeding access to data can be helped in a number of ways – storing the data contiguously, using indexes to speed up access to individual fields, using shorter paths from the storage medium to the processor, keeping recently used data in cache storage in the likelihood it will be used again. Human ingenuity has come up with lots of workarounds to ensure that you get the data as quickly as possible.

But there’s more of an issue with archived data. I could have immediate access to it, but then it would cost as much to store as live data. I could store it on some cheap medium and find it takes a week to get it back to a state that I can use. And something along those lines is used by many archiving organizations. Those tapes are stored inside a mountain somewhere, and the data can be restored – but not quickly.

Depending on the kind of business you’re in, someone has made a decision about costs and storage retrieval speed. If your company is in banking or insurance, that data might get back much faster than if your organization doesn’t promise its customers fast access to old data.

The advent of cloud computing added another layer of complexity to storage. You could store your data on the cloud – which, in psychology terms, is called a nominalization. You call it something, which seems to have meaning, but isn’t a concrete real thing – you can’t put it in a wheel barrow. You hear politicians use nominalizations all the time. I’ll vote for prosperity and world peace – but what does that actually mean? Prosperity for someone from a third world country might seem quite close to poverty to me! And world peace can always be achieved by having a tank on everyone’s lawn. Your idea of what is meant by a nominalization may be completely different from the idea held by the next person!

Anyway, I digress. So nowadays, you can store your data on the cloud. You don’t know where it’s physically stored you just know how to access it. And I assume much the same models are used for the price of cloud storage – fast access is dearer than slow access. Amazon came up with, what they call, Amazon Glacier. This is a cheap service for archived or backed up data that you don’t access very often. In line with that pricing model, retrieval can take several hours. Amazon Glacier only charges organizations for the storage space they use.

I’ve been using a Pogoplug for over two years and I’ve mentioned it in this blog a few times. A Pogoplug started life as a small device that plugged into your router and allowed you to plug in memory sticks that you could access from a browser anywhere. The company has recently expanded its cloud offerings and has done a deal with Amazon to offer cloud storage at a very competitive rate. The solution isn’t for mainframers, but makes sense for individuals and small companies.

The Pogoplug Web site at http://pogoplug.com gives all the price plans they’re offering. So, a small organization would be able to back up files from their computers, smartphones, and tablets to one secure location. All the company has to do is buy a Pogoplug device or download the Pogoplug Server software and run it on a Windows or Mac. They can then back-up and archive their files – and we’re talking terabytes of space. Users can continuously copy all or part of their data to Pogoplug’s secure offsite cloud. Any changes they make to their original folder will be synchronized automatically.

It seems like a useful addition to the all-important back-up and restore choices a company has to make.

Cloud wars

There was a time when mainframers simply claimed that they’d been using the cloud computing paradigm all along. Then IBM came up with SmartCloud, its vision for cloud computing, offering SmartCloud services and SmartCloud solutions. Last week saw the announcement of the PureSystems private cloud packages. But for non-mainframe users or non-IBM technology users, the clouds are getting darker!

Now, I’ve been using a Pogoplug as cloud resource for a couple of years now. Next to my router, I have a small Pogoplug box. And attached to that box are a number of big memory sticks with files that I want available wherever I am. I can upload and download the files to any computer and I have the app on my phone and tablet – it’s all very convenient.

But for people who don’t have a Pogoplug, there’s been Microsoft’s Skydrive offering online storage space to (originally) people with an MSN account. It’s handy to keep a copy of your files in the cloud and then access them when you go somewhere else. It also allows file sharing. But you may get irritated by the need to download Silverlight.

And that’s the area where Dropbox is such a success. It allows users to share folders with other people and those folders can contain very large documents. Dropbox, in many ways ,became the de facto standard – everyone had heard of Dropbox. And now, BitTorrent lhas aunched Share, which is its equivalent – and is perhaps aimed at younger people who might be more familiar with using BitTorrent offerings.

The problem with Dropbox and the other similar providers is that any self-respecting IT department is going to have to stop its staff using them. Now sharing a photo of my new grandson is one thing, sharing a business-sensitive policy document on the cloud is something else. Who knows what organizations at some time in the future may have access to those cloud-based files? Internal IT security can no more allow staff to use cloud solutions for sharing files than it can allow staff to carry around unencrypted memory sticks.

There are some sites where you can upload your files anonymously, although you get a slow connection. You can open a free account, which gets you a slightly faster connection, or there’s the paid for service with the fastest connection. Once a file is uploaded, you get a URL that you can share, and then people can download your file. Examples include FileDropper (up to 5GB), FileFactory (upload up to 50 2GB files), FileServe (up to 500GB with an account), and HotFile (you pay when your files are downloaded).

Some organizations have limits on the size of files that can be sent as attachments or received as attachments. That’s why some of these other Web cloud hosts have sprung up. People like: Bigupload (up to 50MB), Box.net (1GB of storage, but the maximum file size is 25MB), Crocko (up to 1GB), DriveHQ (1GB ), Humyo (10GB), Kontainer file storage (50MB), MediaFire (up to 100MB, MegaSWF (Flash SWF files up to 10MB), RapidShare (up to 200MB), ShareBase (up to 200MB), Sigmirror (5GB of free storage), TzFiles (2GB), and uploaded.to (250MB file size maximum).

And there are many other hosting sites that I haven’t mentioned. And many that charge varying amounts for storage.

Up to now, Google, has offered Google Docs as a cloud solution. You could create your Word files and, assuming you had the Google Docs plug-in, store a copy in the cloud. Or you could just create documents using Google Docs and share them.

But now, it appears that Google is going to launch Google Drive – 5GB of free storage available to all users. Users will get a Google Drive icon on their desktop and use it as a virtual drive. And 5GB is quite a lot of storage – although arch-rival Amazon’s Cloud Drive offers exactly the same free.

Bitcasa, which is still in beta, is offering free storage while it’s in beta and paid for unlimited storage afterwards.

With the growth in cloud storage, more IT departments will have to get involved in making sure that there is some way that business-related data can be kept secure in the cloud. And with Google joining the growing cloud space race, end users are going expect cloud storage to be available to them.

Cloud is the answer!

So if cloud is the answer, what exactly is the question? That’s what a new study (which will be published in April) by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC has tried to find out. Now, obviously, I’ve been mixing with the wrong kind of people, but I thought the days when someone in IT said they worked in IT rather than naming the company that paid their salary had gone. I can remember when smart programmers could move from one well-paid job to the next and never worry about the name over the door as they went to work. They just knew about IT and their services were very much in demand. I thought those days were well behind us. I thought the CIO and CFO and everyone else on the board worked together to move an organization forward. But apparently that’s not the case.

It seems that there’s still very much an ‘us and them’ culture, where you’re either part of IT or not. There are plenty of companies out there struggling to get their IT aligned with business needs and opportunities. Suddenly I feel like I’m back in the early 1990s. But that’s kind of what this survey has found.

The report suggests that cloud computing is exacerbating the divide between the business and IT, suggesting: “CIOs are concerned that business leaders see cloud computing as a way to circumvent IT”. We’ve talked about cloud and Bring Your Own Devices in previous blogs, but it seems that some (many?) members of staff view IT’s need for security as a need for control and one that they’re fighting against rather than working with.

The truth is there are many sites using Microsoft products with only a few ITers who are very stretched in order to satisfy the requirements of a workforce that ranges in ability from the fairly IT-literate to barely able to use a mouse (the type of people who demand a keyboard for their iPad!). For those IT staff, saying ‘no’ to an idea can often be the easiest option in order to save time to do everything else that is required of them in a day.

So that’s what leads to results highlighted in this survey of “enterprise infrastructure executives and architects”, which “reveals increasing tension between business and IT stakeholders”. Rather than the cloud being an opportunity for IT to expand and take advantage of this new paradigm, the report spells out that “high expectations for speedy, low-cost implementation of new software systems in the cloud are putting unique pressures on IT departments within the enterprise”.

The bald facts are that nearly three quarters of high-level executives see the public cloud as a way of getting around IT, despite most acknowledging that it doesn’t provide adequate security controls – according to the report. As we all know only too well, iincreasing pressure is being placed on IT departments to reduce costs and complexity, yet at the same time implement fast, low-cost software systems onto the cloud.

81 percent of the 327 respondents see a cloud strategy as a high priority. Seemingly, 58 percent of respondnets are running mission-critical workloads on the public cloud, without a security policy – 36 percent claimed they had a security policy (and six percent seemingly didn’t answer that question!).

Quite sensibly, most respondents thought their IT departments should be responsible for ensuring public clouds met their company’s requirements for performance, security, and availability. Just over a third (37 percent) looked to hybrid clouds as the future. Nearly two-thirds (61 percent) were realistic enough to believe  that it would be difficult to provide the same level of management across both public and private cloud services.

I guess, in many ways, IT liked the dark ages when computing was very much a black-box technology. End users asked for something and, in the fullness of time, they got it. Nowadays, there are plenty of people who can read the IT news on Google or wherever and see what can be done – and they’re wondering why their company isn’t doing it. For mainframe sites, the problem might be the skills shortage caused by too few staff who really understand the technology. For sites running other platforms, it’s so often the paucity of staff they have running their operations. It’s not that those guys aren’t keen to embrace the technology, they just haven’t got the time. But the CIO needs to look out because organizations could outsource their IT to the cloud and there would be no need for in-house expertise – no need for an IT department as such, just a few application champions spread around the departments. Now, I’m not suggesting IT professionals will be without jobs – those cloud providers are going to need staff. But life could very well be different. And we don’t want the future of IT to be driven by non-ITers, do we?

Mainframe maintenance – a new paradigm with new challenges

For many organizations, we’re beginning to see a new model of how IT customer support can be organized – and the model is coming from management who are completely platform-agnostic. To them, IT is IT – it doesn’t matter whether something runs on a mainframe or a distributed platform. And this new way of working brings with it new challenges.

This whole change in staff structure is also being encouraged by the advent of the zEnterprise hybrid machines with their zBX blades running everything from AIX to, potentially, Windows. A consequence is that a mainframe specialist could be dealing with a Linux error message, or a Windows SharePoint guru might be trying to understand what’s going on inside CICS. What can you do to help them?

Or let’s suppose in a more traditional mainframe environment, for whatever reason, you lost some of your top technical people. Perhaps they got jobs elsewhere or perhaps they retired early, but suddenly you find yourself with a huge knowledge gap. Maybe you can transfer someone across from the distributed team. Or maybe you can recruit one of the new generation of youngsters who are learning the benefits of mainframe computing. But whatever you do, there will be a fairly long period of time during which anything out of the ordinary occurring is going to leave everyone scratching their heads and searching Google – whereas, previously, your in-house expert knew exactly what to do. So, in this situation, what are you going to do?

Let’s not worry too much at this stage about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets. Let’s simply focus on the problem. How can any organization, irrespective of how its IT team is constructed, ensure that appropriate expertise is available at all times to whichever staff members are available?

Obviously you can have the manuals, and some could be on the IBM mainframe portal, but that doesn’t give you speedy access to the necessary information. A Google search will reveal hundredsof pages of results, but it takes a degree of expertise to sift through those and find the correct one quickly. And someone without any expertise could spend a very long time reading solutions to completely different problems before ever finding the right one. Not a satisfactory way to provide IT services to customers – whether internal or external to the organization.

So what would be a good solution? How can these issues of staff working outside their comfort zone be dealt with in a way that is good for the business? And what kind of a solution will still be able to ensure those business-critical mainframes are being supported in a year’s time, in five year’s, or even further into the future?

This is where a new breed of solutions that can address this coming challenge are positioning themselves. One of these, Softlib with its iSolve product (www.softlibsw.com/mvs.aspx), allows an organization to combine all its IT-related information into a single virtual library. That means users – your harassed staff – have to search in only one place, not as previously in many places, to find a solution to any problem. And once you have a single location for information available, you can allow product champions and other IT-literate staff access to it – which should result in more empowered and satisfied users and fewer calls to the Help Desk.

It makes sense to organize the information in this single virtual library using themes, so CICS information might be one theme, IMS another, Linux a third, etc. The information in the library starts from IBM and third-party software vendors’ manuals, and can be supplemented with information from newsgroups and other online resources. Plus, you can add your own technical expertise.

Access to the information can be from a Web browser or a terminal server. It can be hosted locally, or as a cloud-based resource. The advantage of the cloud route is that the information is looked after by Softlib and they already have access to a huge number of the resources you’ll need. So you can start using the facility almost immediately. Plus the online documentation is automatically updated when new information becomes available. Other benefits include knowledge usage analytics that can help address missing or outdated knowledge, and seamless integration with CRM, bug-tracking, Service Desk, content-management applications, etc.

All in all, Softlib’s iSolve product has a lot to offer most mainframe sites, and certainly provides an answer to the question of what to do if you restructure your IT customer support and need to extend the working expertise of your staff onto other platforms such as AIX and Windows. It also offers a solution to the problem of losing key mainframe experts in a mainframe-only environment.

Mainframes, cloud, and trans-derivational searches

Communication is a bit of a hit-and-miss business at the best of times. Suppose I was sitting in a large comfortable leather armchair and I wrote the word ‘chair’. I would be thinking about my armchair. You might be sitting at your computer on an office chair with wheels and no arms. When you read the word ‘chair’, you might think that your office chair was what I had in mind. Perhaps a trivial example, but you get the idea.

What happens if I write a complicated sentence and it’s not immediately clear what I’m saying. You would read it and perform a trans-derivational search in your mind to try to find meaning. What is a trans-derivational search? Well, it’s a bit like going to Amazon and typing the word ‘cloud’ into the search box. Amazon will search in ‘Books’, ‘Film, Music & Games’, ‘Kindle’, ‘Electronics’, etc and display all the answers. You can then make a choice. When it happens in your mind, you do a similar search and select the search result that seems to be the best fit for the unclear sentence.

The reason I mention this is because when one person says the words ‘cloud’ and ‘mainframe’, the image in their mind may be quite different to the image in anyone else’s mind. I like to think of mainframes as interesting and powerful bits of kit that keep the business world turning. Someone else may picture rusting hardware that should have disappeared in the 1990s! It’s much the same with the word ‘cloud’. One person may envisage an outsourcing opportunity, while another may view cloud as a security nightmare – a disaster waiting to happen. You can see now just how tricky this communication stuff really is!

There are people who argue that the mainframe is a cloud already. Suggesting that both are resource that can be dynamically allocated and de-allocated on demand, and can be made available within a company with the necessary security and management controls.

Typically the users of cloud computing have x86 platforms and need to be able to get what they want when they want it – ie on demand. They use primarily Amazon, Google, or Microsoft services. And, of course, everyone is now talking about cloud with announcement of Apple’s iCloud.

Going back to the mainframe, recent surveys have shown mixed interest in cloud computing from mainframers. It seems that the closer to the coal face (or whatever the mainframe metaphor for systems people might be) people are, the less interested they are in cloud. Whereas more high-level thinkers are interested to see what advantages cloud computing offers their organization.

Same words, different mental picture. It’s that communication conundrum again.

If you do have any experience of using cloud and mainframes, I’d be interested to hear about your experience over on IT Toolbox (http://datacenter.ittoolbox.com/groups/strategy-planning/data-center-infrastructure-sp/featured-cloud-computing-in-a-mainframe-environment-4234328).

And for those of you who are IMS professionals, don’t forget the Virtual IMS user group meeting on Tuesday. Gary Weinhold and Verna Bartlett from Data Kinetics will be talking about MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications. Full details including how to register are on the Web site at www.fundi.com/meetings.htm.

Cloudy but good

All this talk about 2011 being the year of the cloud rings true. I say that because marketing hype is usually a bit ahead of the curve. But I realize that I’m using cloud computing a lot these days – and I don’t mean (necessarily) for work.

Firstly, I’m using Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. This is a small piece of code that’s free to download from http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect. Once installed, you can save all your Word etc files on your laptop AND there’s a copy in Google Docs. Now, the reason I find that so useful is not simply because I know my documents are backed up (and to be honest that’s a really important reason and the one that I’d use as a selling point to most people), but it also means that I can access the documents from other computers. I have two laptops that I use all the time, and a third one, that’s usually away at users’ sites. I can now access my documents wherever I am and not have to say that I’ll send on the information after the meeting (or whatever).

Google also say on their site that this system allows users to simultaneously edit their files – which again is a great idea, although it’s not something I’ve tried.

Previously to using Google Cloud Connect, I used my Pogoplug for the same reason. I’ve mentioned Pogoplugs before in these blogs because they are so useful. It provides my own personal cloud. A Pogoplug is a little piece of kit that connects to your router. I then have four or five memory sticks plugged into it, but I could have a 2TB external hard drive. I can upload files to the Pogoplug from anywhere using a simple browser interface (https://my.pogoplug.com/) and I can share files with people, so they can see photos I’ve taken or short videos, or even Office documents. And, again, it provides me with a back-up copy of my important files.

The third piece of cloud computing I use is Wyse PocketCloud. I’ve downloaded the free app for my Android smartphone and I’ve downloaded the software for my laptop. Once they’re password synchronized, I can control my laptop from my phone. Which means, if I haven’t got a document with me, I can use my phone to launch Word on my PC and read the document. Last week I sent a document from someone else’s computer to my e-mail address. I used the PocketCloud software to log-on to my e-mail, download the file and print it. So when I returned back to base, there was the document ready for me to take to the next meeting (a school governors meeting – they don’t have wifi, hence I couldn’t be paperless). I’ve sat in McDonalds and called up files! It is a really impressive piece of software. Now, with the other cloud facilities mentioned above, I don’t know how much I’ll need to use it. But it just seems so amazing to be able to do it!

What I’m suggesting is that cloud computing is getting in under the radar and people are beginning to use it already. So, when IT departments suggest rolling out Cloud services in whatever form that takes for them, they will be pushing at an open door. There won’t be usual user resistance because the users will be perfectly happy with the concept. And, of course, mainframers will be saying that they’ve been using these cloud concepts since the 1960s – or whenever they first started working with mainframes.

Which all goes to show that 2011 really is the year of the cloud.

All change in the office

It started with me looking for the best ‘office’ application to run under Honeycomb (Android 3) on a tablet – but I got sidetracked. It seems that Oracle has dumped OpenOffice, and Microsoft has a beta of Office 365 – it’s new cloud variant of the ubiquitous office software.

Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.

It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.

Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.

The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.

If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.

Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?

Johnny head-in-the-clouds

Almost everyone is predicting 2011 will be the year when cloud computing becomes a reality for many organizations. CA produced surveys towards the end of last year showing this to be part of the planning of most of the organizations they surveyed. Other surveys, like BMC’s and the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook found that cloud computing wasn’t quite on the radar of many of the people who actually do the day-to-day systems work.

This week has seen a report from IBM suggesting that 70 percent of small and medium businesses – perhaps not its usual massive mainframe users – are either planning to, or already do, deploy cloud-based IT infrastructures to improve their performance and reduce costs. For the report, IBM surveyed 2,112 business and information technology decision makers at midsize businesses around the world, and the publication is called Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective.

Also in the report was a finding that these same SMBs were moving from cost control to growth in terms of cloud computing. The report says that 62 percent of surveyed organizations are planning to increase their IT budgets in the next year or so. Now one spin on that would be that the world is out of recession and all’s good with the world. An alternative way of looking at it is to say that most sites have reduced or kept spending the same for the past two years and there’s a huge amount of pressure – like a boiling kettle – to update hardware and software.

The survey also found that 70 percent of respondents are actively pursuing business analytics to help give them some kind of insights into the huge amounts of data they’ve generated. The survey also found that 66 percent of respondents say they are embracing the benefits of cloud computing to optimize costs and redundancy while increasing uptime and scalability.

Obviously cloud computing is new to so many of the organizations surveyed and perhaps not surprisingly it was found that more than 70 percent are looking for local business partners with industry expertise for more of a consultative – rather than a purely transactional – relationship.

In other news (as they say) the new CEO at HP, Leo Apotheker is looking to make his company a leader in the development of infrastructure and platform Cloud services with an open Cloud, which many people assume will compete directly with Google's similar Cloud-based offering.

My final words of ‘wisdom’ on this matter is that we all think we know what we mean by cloud, but for many organizations it might be like shopping for a ‘car’ or ‘automobile’. You could end up with a Rolls Royce or second-hand Reliant Robin! As you work your way down into the nitty gritty details of what your organization needs, you can find cloud computing to be a fairly nebulous term!

Cloud initiatives from IBM

2011 has been dubbed by some as the year of the cloud – the year when cloud computing comes off the PowerPoint slides and onto a computer near you. Others have muttered wisely about similarities with client-server computing, which for many years was the ‘technology of the future’ at every presentation and never quite arrived the way we were promised.

Anyway, this week saw announcements from IBM about cloud computing. It announced Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.2, which creates virtual server images in minutes and automates the management of virtual environments and hybrid cloud systems. The software is also claimed to help to better protect data in the cloud. And the software provides ‘image management’ of a virtual environment, which means that as computing needs change the number of virtual machines can be scaled up and down.

Provisioning Manager works stand-alone or with other Tivoli management products. It works across Power-based servers and Intel x86 instruction set-based servers. It can manage LPARs (logical partitions) or WPARs (workload partitions) on AIX servers. It also manages virtual machine images provided by VMware ESX Server, Citrix Systems XenServer, and Red Hat’s open source KVM (but not Microsoft’s Hyper-V, yet) on x86 servers.

The beta availability of new hybrid cloud management capabilities were announced by IBM at the PULSE 2011 conference. Tivoli Provisioning Manager and other components can manage virtual machines across an internal enterprise cloud and an external public cloud. However, this doesn’t extend to other public clouds, yet.

Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (also in beta) utilizes VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection. By doing so, it offloads the back-up function from the virtual machine and ESX Server host to a VMware vStorage back-up server. Storage Manager is then able to request more frequent back-ups, ensuring greater data protection without placing excessive demand on virtualized system resources. It also allows smaller and faster back-ups that replicate only data blocks that have changed since the previous back-up by making use of VMware’s Changed Block Tracking.

The same week saw a discussion about cloud computing at the CeBIT expo in Hannover in Germany. There it was suggested that the adoption of cloud computing was being held back by issues such as security and reliability. One solution to the security issue was to use private clouds or shared private clouds. Another challenge that was highlighted was bandwidth (or the lack of it). They focused on the amount of data that would need to be moved around in a cloud environment might be too much for the existing infrastructure. The fourth issue the conference identified was interoperability – and the need for standards was highlighted. My personal opinion is that too often computing (and technology in general) has been held back by standards – the very fact that there are far too many of them! Have you ever tried to use someone else’s phone charger to charge your phone, only to find it has a completely different connector (let alone different amps and volts, etc). But you remember SOA and the plethora of standards, etc – OK rant over.

I’m sure this blog will return to cloud announcements, developments, and set-backs many times during this year!

Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 has been available for download free from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11 for nearly a month now. 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.

The 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati site did so between 1 November and 3 December 2010. 32% were from Europe and 52% from North America, with 16% from the rest of the world.

44% of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide, while 14% of respondents had 0-200 staff, 10% had 201-1000, 14% had 1001 to 5000, and 14% had 5001-10,000 staff. In terms of MIPS, 50% of respondents had fewer than 1000 MIPS installed, 24% fell into the mid-sized category between 1000 and 10,000 MIPS, and 22% were at the high end.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. Larger, more mature businesses (above 10,000 MIPS) were almost all experiencing some growth, but predominantly in 0 to 10% per year category. Sites in the 1000-10,000 MIPS range were showing a range of results with some sites suggesting a decline while others predicted growth in excess of 50%. Sites below 1000 MIPS were most likely to be experiencing growth of less than 10%, with the largest percentage (of these three groups) predicting a decline. The mainframe market does appear to be quite fragmented with competitive pressures at the lower end of the mainframe market, and some respondents commented about lack of understanding amongst management about the value of mainframe computing.

With the environment and environmental issues getting so much coverage in the media these days, the survey asked whether IBM’s recent green initiatives on things like power consumption and cooling had made the mainframe more or less attractive. Nearly three-quarters (72% – the same as the previous year) said that IBM’s green initiatives made no difference at all. 17% felt it made the mainframe a little more attractive, and 11% felt it made the mainframe a lot more attractive. Clearly “greenness” isn’t much of a selling point for mainframes.

With so much talk about Cloud Computing, for the first time the survey asked the mainframe population for their opinion. It asked whether respondents currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Only 2% of respondents said they did. 34% said they didn’t, and the rest weren’t sure. Bearing in mind that it is still early days for a cloud computing initiative, the survey asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 22% said they weren’t at present. 8% thought some mainframe applications would be cloud-enabled in the future, and a similar number thought most would be cloud-enabled in the future. However, 4% didn’t see a use for cloud computing. It will be interesting to follow these figures in future surveys.

The survey asked respondents which specialty processors (IFL, zIIP, and zAAP) they had. 6% of sites had all three (down from last year’s value of 12%) and a further 28% of sites had two of the three specialty processors (up from last year’s 12%). More sites had zIIP processors (44%) than any other. 36% had IFL processors, and 24% had zAAP specialty processors. 36% of sites don’t have a specialty processor installed.

It seems that at many sites, mainframes are losing out due to management ignorance. The survey quotes one respondent who said: “We do not expect to have a mainframe within 2-3 years. The CIO sees the mainframe as obsolete and expensive, whether or not either of those is true”. Another respondent complained: “Our architects do not understand mainframes and seem to be mostly knowledgeable about Windows. Project funding is project based and not enterprise based, hence a tendency to prefer perceived cheaper solutions, eg Windows.”

The appearance of the z196 processor had a big impact within the industry. High-profile TV appearances of Watson on Jeopardy keep people familiar with the name IBM. However, there is still a lack of understanding of what a mainframe does and what it can do amongst far too many IT managers and other corporate executives.

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

The Yearbook can only be free to mainframers because of the support given by sponsors. This year’s sponsors were CA Technologies, Canam Software, DataKinetics, and Type80 Security Software.

Mainframe computing 2011

This is the time of year when people make predictions for what we can expect to see in the coming year, so here are my predictions...

I predict that the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook will appear in early January and be downloaded by around 15 000 mainframe professionals. The Yearbook includes an annual mainframe user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section.

I also predict the Virtual IMS user group will restart its virtual meetings and newsletters early in the New Year. Virtual IMS is a user group established as a way for individuals using IBM's IMS hierarchical database and transaction processing systems to exchange information, learn new techniques, and advance their skills with the product. The first virtual meeting takes place on Tuesday 8 February at 10:30 CDT. The presentation is by Fundi Software’s Jim Martin and is entitled, “Solving the problem when IMS isn't the cause”. Users might report slow response time from IMS, but you suspect that other systems are responsible. For example, what appears to be an IMS performance problem could be a CICS, DB2, WebSphere, or z/OS performance problem. Your challenge is to correlate performance data in IMS with activity in these other systems in order to discover the cause of the slow response time. This talk will explain how to do it.

With all the hype about cloud computing, 2011 is the year cloud computing will become commonplace. In many ways, this is a major technology change that is being driven by users. They like the simple life (or should I say, we like the simple life). It’s very easy to turn on your browser and have all the applications you want just there waiting for you – like the apps on your phone. You then use the applications as you want them. Users are looking for the same simplicity in their working environment and organizations are going to have to provide this paradigm-shift way of working.

And talking of smart phones, I predict that the device of choice is not going to be a small laptop or netbook, but a large smart phone (or small tablet). Something that you can fit in your pocket, but has everything you need to do a day’s work on it. And, of course, cloud computing makes this easier too.

I predict there will be more GUI-looking software on mainframes so that youngsters will feel right at home using the technology. And I predict there will be much more mainframe automation going on – which will allow the few experts available within an organization to do more work with fewer resources.

Social media will have embraced all sizes of businesses, so if you want to find out what IBM or any other major (or less major!) vendor is up to, you’ll be able to do it in the Twitter, Facebook, whatever, environment you are currently familiar with.

In the consumer market, I predict more people watching TV programmes through laptops and smart phones. It’s so easy and convenient to catch the latest news on a smart phone.

I predict that mainframes will NOT disappear in 2011.

I predict the arrival of more mainframe monitoring apps on smart phones – so you know straightaway if there is an issue with the network etc. You’ll then pull out your tablet or laptop and solve the problem using the nice GUI on the software.

I’d also like to predict world peace and harmony – maybe next year!

2010 mainframe review

As this will probably be my last blog of 2010, I thought it would be traditional to review what’s happened in the mainframe world over the past year.

2010 will probably be remembered as the year of the cloud because it was the year when cloud computing started to be taken seriously across the industry. Microsoft opened its ‘mega data centre’ in Dublin and promoted its Windows Azure environment for development, service hosting, and service management based on the cloud. Google worked with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, and launched a version of the Google App Engine for enterprise users. Amazon promoted its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. And many people suggested that mainframes have offered cloud computing all along – we just called it something else!

IBM’s acquisitions this year include: National Interest Security Company, Initiate Systems, Intelliden, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, BigFix, Storwize, Datacap, Unica, OpenPages, Netezza , PSS Systems, and Clarity Systems.

The big story of 2010, of course, was the launch of a new mainframe range in July. The zEnterprise 196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, and Linux all on the one box. And all this is controlled from the mainframe console by the new Unified Resource Manager. This new mainframe can be thought of as a virtualization hub that manages other workloads in the data centre.

For people who like to stay current with the latest version numbers and dates of major products, CICS 2.1 has been available since the middle of 2009, DB2 10 was announced earlier this year, as was z/OS 1.12, and IMS 12 should be generally available early in the New Year.

The battle between IBM and NEON Enterprise Software (provider of the zPrime product, which allows users to run traditional workloads on specialty processors) has rumbled on in the courts for a year without any sign of an outcome. The European Union regulators have taken IBM to task for not allowing its operating system to run on other hardware, and for not being fair to so-called ‘spare-part’ vendors. The first complaint came from T3 and TurboHercules, saying that IBM ties its mainframe operating system to its mainframe hardware – and thereby destroys the emulation market.

For me and iTech-Ed Ltd it was a good year. I was given the accolade of IBM Information Champion again this year. My blog at Mainframe Update (mainframeupdate.blogspot.com) was again a finalist in the Computer Weekly annual blog awards. I was interviewed by CIPS (the Canadian Information technology Professionals). You can download a podcast of the interview from the CIPS Connections site at stephenibaraki.com/cips/v610/trevor_eddolls_2010.html. I was invited by CA to be on their expert panel for a webinar called “From Here to Eternity: The Mainframe as a Mainstay of the Enterprise” discussing cloud computing. Other panellists were Jon Toigo, CEO, Toigo Partners International; Keith Winnard, IT technical services, JD Williams; and Dayton Semerjian, general manager, mainframe, CA Technologies; and control of the session was maintained by Michael Krieger. iTech-Ed helped produce the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2010, which is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook10. The 2011 edition will be available in January. IBM Systems Magazine's Mainframe Extra eNewsletter was quite taken by one of my regular blogs and they included it in their "Links We Love" section. My articles on cloud computing and IMS was published in the October/November issue of zJournal. The links for the articles are www.mainframezone.com/it-management/ims-and-cloud-computing and www.mainframezone.com/it-management/sidebar-cloud-computing-origins-and-evolution. Exciting things are happening with the Virtual IMS user group that iTech-Ed runs. After a short hiatus, a new sponsor for the user group has been found and webinars and newsletters will continue for members and guests in the New Year. Look out for more details.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Cloud and the future of mainframes

CA Technologies released a survey on Wednesday entitled “Mainframe as a Mainstay”. The survey was conducted on 200 senior level US-based mainframe executives by Decipher Research. Amongst the results was the information that 73% of respondents confirmed that the mainframe is – or will be – part of their organization’s cloud computing strategy. The question posed at CA’s recent webinar was whether that result came as a surprise.

Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of cloud computing. In fact, I’ve an article about cloud computing and IMS in the current issue of zJournal. It struck me that these results were very much in line with the recent results, also published by CA, from a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne, a market research company based in the UK. They conducted more than 300 interviews during August with European IT decision makers. Their report was called “Mainframe - The Ultimate Cloud Platform?”. They found a slightly higher figure of 79% of organisations believing the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. The also found 70% of respondents agreeing that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.

On the other hand, only 10 per cent of mainframe sites in BMC’s survey in October said that using their System z machines to run cloud computing or SaaS applications was an important priority for them in the coming year. Quite a difference! Similarly, my own straw poll at the Guide Share Europe conference at the beginning of November, in an IMS session, found that no-one seemed interested in cloud computing. I think that reflects real-life economics in that they were very much focused on what was available now that would make the business run better and their lives easier – how they could do more with less.

I think what we’re seeing is a difference between the attitude of mainframe staff, who want to get the job done with the tools available now and the pressure of fewer staff etc, and senior managers who are looking more strategically towards the next step.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey has a couple of questions about cloud computing. It will be interesting to see the results from that. And, by-the-way, if you haven’t completed a survey yet, you can do so by going to www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

Among the survey’s other findings we see:

• A majority (80%) responded they will be maintaining or increasing spend on mainframe staff in the next 12-18 months.
• More than three-quarters (76%) will maintain or increase their investment in mainframe software during the next 12-18 months.
• Nearly half of respondents (46%) are looking for industry leadership from vendors on the evolving role of the mainframe in the enterprise.
• 61% of respondents don’t believe the IT industry does enough to promote mainframe career opportunities to recent graduates.
• 35% believe that recent graduates are not as proficient in mainframe technology as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago.
• 61% said that hiring either took much longer than expected, took long enough to negatively impact their IT operation or are still looking for talent after more than six months.

Picking up on the 35% of respondents who believe recent graduates are not as technology proficient as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago, webinar panellists were asked whether this was something they were seeing in the workforce.

I think the truth is that even the ancient Greeks felt that youngsters weren’t as good as they used to be! Certainly when I started working on mainframes, we were a mixed bag of youngsters, and many of those less capable or that-way-inclined left – leaving the enthusiasts and the highly technically-capable. I assume the criticism can always be applied. New people at any job just aren’t very good. And once they are quite good, they’re promoted to a different one.

We hear the mainframe referred to as a dinosaur – even though we know signs point in the opposite direction – in addition, the mainframe has a reputation as older technology with a middle-aged workforce, so the panellists were asked whether the fact that 52% of those surveyed cited Facebook and LinkedIn as the most effective recruiting tools came as a surprise.

My first response whenever a sentence includes the words mainframe and dinosaur is to point out that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 160 million years. Humans have existed for say 200,000 years. Draw your own conclusions!

I’m not at all surprised that middle-aged people are using Facebook and LinkedIn and many other examples of social media. At the end of 2008, the answer may have been surprising, at the end of 2009 it may have surprised some people, but not at the end of 2010. These are IT people we’re talking about – of course they’re going to know what’s going on in the cyber world. I also imagine, next year, that figure will be much higher than 52%. Mainframers know about social networking. Look how many of them blog and are on Twitter.

You can find more information about the survey at www.ca.com/us/news/Press-Releases/na/2010/CA-Technologies-Survey-Reveals-Mainframes-Role-as-Anchor-in-Cloud.aspx.

Mainframes still not all turned off yet!!

BMC published an interesting survey at the end of October. There were more than 1700 mainframe users participating in the survey, and about half of the organizations surveyed have revenues in excess of US$1 billion. I think it’s generally assumed that the total number of mainframe sites globally is between 6000 and 7000.

Highlights of the survey included the findings that 84% of respondents expected to see growing or steady MIPS usage on the platform, with almost 60% anticipating that the mainframe will attract new workloads over the next year.

Against that, 37% agree that it will be a viable platform, mostly running legacy applications and not attracting new workloads. In addition, 4% considered that the mainframe is not a viable platform and companies should consider their exit strategies over the next five years.

The survey found, perhaps not surprisingly, that reducing IT costs in the next year was an important issue. 65% of respondents stated that reducing costs was one of their top four priorities. Other topics in those top four priorities were disaster recovery (34%), application modernization (30%), and business/IT alignment (29%).

The survey found more than 50% of large IT shops indicating they would expand their use of specialty engines in the next 24 months, with zIIP engines being the specialty engine of choice.

The also survey found a strong interest in hybrid management tools across z/OS, z/Linux, and other operating systems. Monitoring and event automation was cited as an important cross-platform tool by 74% of respondents, with similarly high responses for system/task automation (73%), workload/batch management (69%), and performance tuning (66 percent).

The survey found that 50 percent of respondents plan to migrate to DB2 for z/OS V10 in the next 18 plus months.

Tucked away in the report we find 10% of respondents saying that using their System z machines to run cloud computing or SaaS (Software as a Service) applications was an important priority for them in the coming year.

If you’re interested in surveys, you’ll be interested to know that you can still complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. The new Yearbook will be published early in January next year.

And if you want to find out more about mainframe users’ opinions about cloud computing, you can join a CA webinar entitled From Here to Eternity: The Mainframe as a Mainstay of the Enterprise. It’s on Wednesday 17 November between 11:30am and 12:30pm EST. One of the panellists is yours truly. You can sign up for the webinar at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/726909922.

BTW the title of this blog refers to the much-quoted prediction by Stewart Alsop, editor-in-chief of InfoWorld in 1991, that the last mainframe in the world would be unplugged in 1996!