Having your cake and eating it

Everyone knows that mainframes are the best computers you can have. You can run them locally, you can hide them in the cloud, and you can link them together into a massive processing network. But we also know that there are smaller platforms out there that work differently. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if you could run them all from one place?

Last summer we were excited by the announcement from IBM of its new zBC12 mainframe computer. The zBC12 followed the previous year’s announcement of the zEC12 (Enterprise Class), and 2011 saw the z114, with 2010 giving us the z196. So what’s special about those mainframes?

Well, in addition to IFL, zIIP, and zAAP specialty processors, and massive amounts of processing power, they came with the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX), which lets users combine workloads designed for mainframes with those for POWER7 and x86 chips, like Microsoft Windows Server. So let’s unpick this a little.

One issue many companies have after years of mergers and acquisitions is a mixed bag of operating systems and platforms. They could well have server rooms across the world and not really know what was running on those servers.

IBM’s first solution to this problem was Linux on System z. Basically, a company could take hundreds of Linux servers and consolidate them onto a single mainframe. They would save on energy to drive the servers and cool them, and they would get control of their IT back.

IBM’s second solution, as we’ve just described, was to incorporate the hardware for Linux and Windows servers in its mainframe boxes. You’d just plug in the blades that you needed and you had full control over your Windows servers again (plus all the benefits of having a mainframe).

But what about if you could actually run Windows on your mainframe? That was the dream of some of the people at Mantissa Corporation. They did a technology demo at SHARE in August 2009. According to Mantissa’s Jim Porell, Network World read their abstract and incorrectly assumed that they were announcing a product – which they weren’t. The code is still in beta. But think about what it could mean: running all your Windows servers on a mainframe. That is quite a concept.

Again, according to Jim, they can now have real operating systems running under their z86VM, although, so far, they are the free versions of Linux. Their next step will be to test it with industrial strength Linux distros such as Red Hat and Suse. And then, they will need to get Windows running. And then they’ll have a product.

Speaking frankly, Jim said that currently they have a bug in their Windows ‘BIOS’ processing in the area of plug-and-play hardware support. Their thinking is that it’s a mistake in their interpretation of the hardware commands and, naturally, they’re working to resolve it.

The truth is that it’s still early days for the project, and while running Linux is pretty good, we can already do that on a mainframe (although you might quibble at the price tag for doing so). But once the Mantissa technical people have cracked the problems with Windows, it will be a product well worth taking a look at, I’m sure. But they’re not there yet, and they’re keen to manage expectations appropriately.

Jim goes on to say that once the problems are solved it’s going to be about performance. Performance is measured in a couple of ways: benchmarks of primitives, benchmarks of large-scale for capacity planning, end user experiences, and what they are willing to tolerate. So it seems that they have business objectives around performance where they could be successful if they supported only 10 PCs, then more successful with a 100 PCs, and even have even greater success if they can support a 1000 PCs.

Jim Porell describes z86VM as really just an enabler to solving a wide range of ‘customer problems’ by enabling direct access between the traditional mainframe and the PC operating systems that are co-located with it.

I think that anything that gets more operating systems running on mainframe hardware has got to be good. And I’m prepared to wait for however long it takes Mantissa to get Windows supported on a mainframe. I’ll definitely feel then that I’m having my cake and eating it!

A bad time for mainframes?

It seems that nowadays is not a good time to be in the world of mainframes, with BMC Software likely to be taken over, Compuware recording a loss, and to add insult to injury, Oracle is talking about releasing a mainframe!

So let’s start with BMC Software, which got its name from its founders back in the early 1980s – Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. BMC, notably, bought Boole & Babbage at the end of the 1990s and shortly after acquired CONTROL-M and its company, New Dimension Software. But those heady days must seem a long time ago because on 22 April it’s expected to receive final takeover bids.

Elliott Management owns a 9.6 percent stake in BMC, and signed a standstill agreement with BMC last summer, but that ended on 6 April. So they could bid for BMC or nominate directors to its board. People who know about these things are saying that buyout firm Thoma Bravo has joined a bidding group led by KKR & Co LP and TPG Capital LP in order to bid. Their likely rivals are a team comprising Bain Capital LLC and Golden Gate Capital. You can assume people are arranging to have access to large pots of money on the day. Bids are likely to be between $40 and $50 a share. We’ll be watching to see what happens, and, more importantly, what the impact is on users of their mainframe software.

Compuware is probably most famous for its Abend-AID product, which first saw the light of day in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they launched File-AID. Compuware recently reported disappointing fourth-quarter results and said its total year-on-year revenue is expected to drop from $1 billion to between $942 million and $946 million for the fiscal year ending 31 March.

CEO Robert Paul has increased his planned cost-cutting to between $80 million and $100 million over the next two years. (It was $60 million over three years.) A natural consequence of this could be layoffs – and that could impact on the quality of the software mainframe users can get hold of, or may mean longer delays between upgrades.

Interestingly, Elliott Management (see above) is Compuware’s second-largest shareholder, owning 8.7% of the stock. In January, their takeover bid of $2.3 billion ($11-per-share) was rejected by the board. Meanwhile, Sandell Asset Management, which holds 2.8% of Compuware stock, is urging the board to sell the company to the highest bidder as quickly as possible.

And while these mainframe companies are facing financial difficulties, Larry Ellison has launched, what he’s calling, a mainframe-class machine – arguing that any mission-critical app that runs on any Unix system will run better on the new Sparc T5 and M5 servers. In addition, Oracle is claiming that it has passed IBM on integer throughput performance – but that’s compared against IBM Power series.

The big news over at CA Technologies is that CA has filed a patent infringement suit against AppDynamics, which was started by one of its ex-employees. CA got hold of the patents when it bought Wily Technology in 2006. The ex-employee led the design and architecture for several Wily products. You may also remember that last November CA sued New Relic Inc for patent infringements. Again, the founder of New Relic had been a senior executive at Wily.

At least IBM seems to be doing OK. It's just released a $1 billion plan to construct and check Flash technology for enterprise solutions. The  technology should assist firms coping with Big Data challenges. The people at UBS have upgraded IBM from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’, saying IBM has the best strategy of its peers in what it terms the “IT as a service” industry. Plus a new Synergy Research Group study shows that IBM’s share of the cloud infrastructure equipment market has hit a two-year high in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching just over 19 percent.

IBM and social media

Let me turn time back to the very early 1980s. IBM are feeling fairly secure with their mainframe business and have just made the decision to own the small and exciting personal computer business. I’m imaging the Execs talking about the hardware standards they will set and maintain. Then perhaps someone asks about the operating system, but they’re immediately dismissed – operating systems on PCs are two a penny, we can just buy one and use that. They’ll have to do what we tell them!

And in the real world, a small start-up company made a version of DOS (Disk Operating System) their own – MS-DOS. And that little company grew and grew into the Microsoft we know and love today. And IBM? Well, it eventually sold its PC hardware business to Lenovo.

Now some of the youngsters at that imaginary meeting back in 1980 might still be turning up for work, only now they’re hearing about the ‘third platform’, and warning bells are beginning to sound! No-one at IBM wants a repeat of what happened with the second platform, so they are very keen that IBM will keep control of this third platform – even though there are plenty of other players out there already. As an aside, mainframes were the first platform, PCs are the second platform, and this new ‘third platform’ comprises cloud services, mobile computing, social networking, and big data analytics.

My scenarios above may only exist in my head, but we’ve seen IBM embrace other technologies before. Look at how it made Linux run so much better on a big box than on multiple little ones. And now Doug Balog, general manager of IBM’s System z mainframe business, is telling us that IBM is making it easier for customers to run mobile and social networking applications on mainframes.

There’s a couple of easy wins here. For example a bank – and banks are users of mainframe technology – could provide an app for smartphones and tablets that gave secure access to users’ account information. But more likely, the low-hanging fruit will be big data. Big data generally describes large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data that organizations generate. It might come from CCTV footage, recording telephone calls, or just logging the position of company vans throughout the day. It’s just big unwieldy data. Having some way to analyse it so you could derive useful information would be something businesses are likely to embrace. One piece of big data analytics that might draw large organizations in is the ability to identify fraud. Others might be more interested in the purchasing patterns of their customers.

Mobile phones and mainframes aren’t strangers. There are plenty of software vendors that are making the results of their mainframe software available to users working with browsers on smartphone and tablet devices. IBM itself has brought out an aggregation of mobile tools to combine big-data analytics and cloud computing under its MobileFirst heading.

In terms of cloud computing, we’ve seen IBM Docs announcements and, perhaps more significantly, SmartCloud, its storage access product for implementing private cloud storage.

In addition, IBM has demonstrated its Social Media Aggregator (SMA) at IOD, Pulse, and other events. It provides a consolidated view of real-time social activity on specific topics or events, based on hashtags and keywords.

And at the back of IBM’s collective mind – certainly in my imagination – must be the desire to sell mainframes to customers who need these facilities and are currently using alternative platforms. So keeping control of this third platform gives their sales staff a way in to potential customers’ offices.

More data stored off mainframes – user survey finding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Command economies, decentralization, and the z114

It comes and goes. It’s like a pendulum swinging in one direction,  running out of steam, and then swinging in the completely opposite direction. And it applies to countries, economies, and the way people view computing. Let me explain...

During the 1970s, computing, where it existed, was very much a centralized affair. The gods of the mainframe pretty much controlled what anyone was able to do. It was like Stalinist Russia. Everything came out of the centre. You didn’t get it, unless someone at the hub of things deemed it necessary for you to have it.

Currently in the UK, we have the opposite approach in terms of our model of how things should work. Quite logically, you might think, if you live in a rural area with rolling fields full of wheat or livestock, your concerns are completely different from those of someone living in a post-industrial run-down urban area. Of course, this localism easily lends itself to the criticism of postcode lottery. Anyway, we have little islands of individuality separate from each other. Unfortunately, the reality is that political areas tend to include more than a monoculture of just rural or just urban populations. Plus you have different needs for different age groups – you can see where this idea falls down when applied to the real world, but hang on to the little islands metaphor.

Now let’s turn time back to 1989. We find the Berlin wall coming down and the whole centralized power base of the USSR and it’s Warsaw Pack allies crumbling. In the world of computing, we find the balance of opinion has moved right away from mainframes. In the early 90s, their death was confidently predicted. In its place we had millions of underpowered PCs running DOS-based operating systems. And as the 90s progressed we saw the triumph of Windows and Microsoft. We also saw that antithesis of centralization, Open Source software. Unix started life in 1969, and Linus Torvalds’ Linux arrived in 1991. Even IBM, which had developed and standardized the PC in the early 1980s, was working on the development of other platforms. 1988 gave us the AS/400 – now the IBM System i and which now runs on the POWER platform. The RS/6000, running a Unix variant called AIX, arrived in the 1990s and also now run on POWER hardware.

So, having been empowered to make their own decisions and choices of hardware and software, what have users done since then? Well, in the PC world, they go for big servers that are virtualized in order to benefit from the control that gives them. It makes back-ups and business continuity easier.

And now, here we are in 2011 and IBM announces a Business Class (basically not a top-end machine, more one for the everyman mainframe user) zEnterprise – the z114. It’s gone back to being a centralized piece of hardware because not only is it a mainframe, it’s a POWER7 box, and it has x86 blades. So that gives users a smaller footprint, less power consumption, and control of everything using the IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager and the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX). The POWER7 blades mean that AS/400 and RS/6000-heritage users have a home. And the x86 blades not only run Linux x86 applications unchanged, but, by the end of the year, are expected to run Windows applications too.

The culture shock at many sites will come when the distributed applications teams (and they may have many different names) discover that all the things they’ve been planning to achieve (virtualized desktops, virtualized servers, etc) are just part of the techniques that the mainframe people take for granted. And the mainframers are going to have to understand that for many of the people in the other teams, it’s in many ways still about 1992 in terms of business recovery times etc. But when the teams do come together, the synergy is going to be very beneficial for the organization that allow it to happen.

This new mainframe, unusually, comes with a published price tag – $75,000. As part of the package you get the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer to analyse data faster at a lower cost per transaction, and the IBM WebSphere DataPower XI50 for integrating Web-based workloads. The new hardware runs the latest version of z/OS – 1.13. You get 3.8GHz processors (the zEnterprise 196 uses  5.3GHz processors), and you can configure up to 14 of them with 10 specialty processors – zIIP, zAAP, and IFL.

The pendulum has now swung completely back. We have a single box capable of providing all the different computing needs of an organization.

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.

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!

Mainframes and cloud computing

Picking up IT trade papers might make you think that the only real players in the cloud computing world were Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Microsoft, with its ‘mega data centre’ in Dublin has been enthusiastic about its Office Web Apps and Facebook integration. Its Windows Azure is an environment for development, service hosting, and service management based on the cloud. It’s designed to allow developers to compute, host, scale, store, and also manage the Web apps they create. Google is working with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, and plans to push the Web as a platform for enterprise-standard software development. Google now has a version of the Google App Engine for enterprise users. Amazon has its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a Web service providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers. So where does that leave the mainframe?

To answer that question, Vanson Bourne, a market research company based in the UK undertook a survey that has now been published and is called Mainframe – The Ultimate Cloud Platform? Vanson Bourne conducted more than 300 interviews during August 2010 among IT decision makers. The sample comprised respondents in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

The survey results were published by CA Technologies, who revealed that 79 percent of IT organisations believe the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. They also found that 74 percent of respondents believe that the mainframe will have a role in any cloud computing initiative, with 70 percent agreeing that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.

Interestingly, and quite independently, the 2011 Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has two questions about cloud computing in its user survey. If you haven’t completed a survey yet, you can, by going to www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

According to CA’s Dayton Semerjian: “This survey provides indisputable evidence of the mainframe's agility to perform in new IT models such as cloud computing, and on-going durability as a critical data centre platform for decades to come”. Semerjian added: “CA Technologies is addressing these needs through its revolutionary mainframe management strategy, Mainframe 2.0”.

The survey also found that 82 percent of respondents stated that they intend to use the mainframe in the future either as much or more than today – which, sadly, implies that one in five sites are reducing their mainframe usage.

54 percent of respondents felt that the most pressing issues facing them in the next 12 months is an increased demand for training.

When asked why the mainframe is considered a valuable organisational asset, responses included reliability (55 percent), its position as an established technology (52 percent), platform cost-effectiveness (48 percent), and IT attitudes toward change (40 percent).

Linked to training is the problem of an increasingly ageing experienced workforce and a reduction in the number of experienced people available to work on mainframes. The study concluded that 44 percent of IT organisations are grappling with staffing issues created by the greying workforce and difficulty in hiring new staff, and they are concerned that these challenges will make the mainframe less viable in the future.

Managing mainframes from your phone

William Data Systems has come up with a clever way of managing your mainframe network from an iPhone. Now as soon as you see the word iPhone, you probably think it’s an app and you’re going to have to get all your users synchronizing with iTunes before they can use it or update it. The truth is, it’s a much cleverer idea than that!

Let’s start at the beginning, WDS (William Data Systems) has a z/OS network management suite called ZEN, which has a number of really useful components that you can find out more about from their Web site (www.willdata.com). Their customers wanted an easy way to keep up-to-date with what was happening with their networks. And one thing everyone has these days is a mobile (cell) phone – so why not come up with a way of monitoring the network from your phone?

What WDS did, was to utilize the browser on iPhones – Safari, the same one that comes as standard on Macs – and allow users to monitor and manage their mainframe networks from there.

Now because Safari is an integral part of the iPhone, the technology works for all iPhone users. As I said at the beginning, there’s no problem of resynchronizing every user by getting them to plug their phones into iTunes. There’s no fuss about accessing the App Store. It’s all there on the browser.

As more-and-more companies are asking for z/OS network monitoring and management to be done remotely when needed using a single mobile device that support people would be carrying with them, this solution seems to tick all the boxes. If a problem is found, then the techie can find a laptop and fix it, or use the phone to call the service centre and get someone there to fix it. Either way, the problem is solved, perhaps before users have begun to notice. Interestingly, the solution can be used from an iPad. In that case, the screen is big enough for a techie to actually use instead of a laptop – and solve the problem immediately.

What if your organization doesn’t use iPhones? What if you’ve rolled out Blackberrys? Well in that case, WDS has a solution available. If your organization uses Symbian or Android (or anything else), then WDS are developing a solution for your smart phone right now.

It may all seems like something from a 1990s sci fi film, but monitoring your z/OS network from your mobile phone is a solution that’s available now.

And finally, as a mainframe professional, I am hoping that you will be willing to complete the annual user survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. If the company you work for is a vendor, consultant, or service provider, then please ensure their information is included in the vendor information form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.

Do technical blogs help get the message out there or do they just confuse readers?

What sort of a title for a blog is this? Can a blogger really be going to suggest that people reading blogs are going to get confused or, even worse, misled? Well, without wishing to shoot myself in the foot or appear like a turkey voting for an early Christmas, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. The blogosphere is fully of conflicting and confusing information. There – I’ve said it!

Let’s turn our attention away from mainframes for a moment. And there’s a reason for doing so – people reading this article probably already share many of the same assumptions as I do about mainframes. So I want to turn your attention to the gee-whiz gadget at the moment – the Apple iPad. Now before we go any further, let me be absolutely clear that I’m not going to name names – Google makes it very easy to find examples of what I’m talking about. So, here’s the question we may have all asked ourselves: “do I want an iPad?” To help make up my mind, I start searching the Internet for articles and blogs by people who attended the launch. The first thing you find is that opinions are divided. I never bothered to count because the number of pages was very large, so I can’t give you a percentage of “fors” and “againsts”, but, suffice it to say, numerous bloggers were totally sold on the gadget and can’t wait to get their hands on one, while other blogs listed the iPad’s faults – no multitasking, no camera, awkward keyboard, no flash, not HD, and locked into Apple apps, etc. So for someone who doesn’t really understand, how do they make a choice?

So, let’s go back to mainframes and see what people are blogging about mainframe futures. Well, we have people convinced that the IBM z11 processor is the route to Nirvana, and other people suggesting that unless we migrate all our applications on to Microsoft boxes our data centres will come crashing down around our ears. There are blogs extolling the virtues of cloud computing to finally make the end user computing experience like shopping or using utilities (like gas or electricity not like IEBPTPCH or IEHMOVE!). There are other blogs suggesting that using a mainframe has many of the characteristics of cloud computing already and we’ve been doing it for 40-odd years already – plus ça change!

I’m sure I could do exactly the same thing with car models – some writers would extol their virtues, while others would focus on the vices of the vehicle. Or I could use the Internet to make a choice about a washing machine, a fridge, a university course, anything!

The problem is simple. The more egalitarian the Internet has become, the more people are happy to share their opinions or repeat the opinions of others. As a consequence of more people giving an opinion, there are more opinions out there are to read – leading directly to more confusion amongst the browsing population!

So what’s the solution, I hear you ask? Well the answer is to rely on the opinions of people you trust. Now, that’s easier said than done. So, if I wanted to get a good inside into mainframe trends, I would look at the following blogs:

IBM’s Mainframe Blog, which is part of its zNextGen initiative, (http://mainframe.typepad.com). This has a number of short videos as well.

Another good blog is James Governor’s Monkchips site (http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor).

Definitely worth a look is Marc Wambeke's Mainframe Watch Belgium at http://mainframe-watch-belgium.blogspot.com.

There’s a humorous blog by CA’s Reg Harbeck at http://community.ca.com/blogs/execio/default.aspx. I still like his entry, “How to Talk Like a Mainframer”.

Bob Thomas, who owns zJournal, is blogging at http://www.mainframezone.com/bobthomas/.

Willie Favero’s excellent DB2 for z/OS blog is at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2zos.

There's an interesting blog at The Raised Floor by Jeffrey M Birnbaum, Mike Desens, Tom Gross, Rich Lechner, Chris Mines, Jerry Murphy, John Patrick, Neil Rasmussen, Will Runyon, and Steve Sams, which is at http://theraisedfloor.typepad.com/.

There’s a group of techie/creative people working in and around IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK. They produce an interesting blog is at http://eightbar.co.uk/

There are a number of very insightful blogs at IBM’s My developerWorks. You can click on the links from https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/?lang=en_us.

Always up-to-date is Mark Fontecchio’s blog at Mainframe Propeller Head. He’s been a reporter for TechTarget since 2006. The URL is http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/mainframe-blog/
An occasional blogger is Steve Baugh, styling himself The CICS Guy. His blog is at http://thecicsguy.wordpress.com/

And, of course, don’t miss the Mainframe Update blog at http://mainframeupdate.blogspot.com.

But when it comes to buying an iPad, or a car, etc, you’ll have to find your own experts in the blogosphere!

The recession is over, IBM is in profit!

Well, half right at least! IBM has reported its first quarter results for 2010 saying that profits are up 13 percent to $2.6 billion and sales are up 5 percent at $22.9 billion. As a consequence, IBM has raised its profit guidance for the year by 20 cents to $11.20 per share.

The UK managed an 8 percent increase in revenues. The Americas had 6 percent growth. Europe, as a whole, provided revenue growth of 5 percent. And Asia/Pacific provided 4 percent revenue growth.

In terms of hardware – provided by the Systems and Technology Group – sales were up by 5 percent. However, System z mainframe sales fell by 17 percent. This can be explained by the fact the new z11 mainframes are due later this year and people will be holding of purchasing until those new mainframes become available. Trouble-makers may suggest that hardware sales are down because people are running their mainframe applications on TurboHercules boxes!

Software grew by 10.6 percent to just over $5 billion. Sales of Tivoli management software increased by 23 percent. WebSphere middleware sales climbed by 13 percent. Income from Rational development tools was up by 7 percent. Disappointingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Lotus software increased by only 1 percent.

Global Services was responsible for $13.7 billion of sales resulting in a 4 percent increase.

But life isn’t all good news for IBM with that antitrust claim from the European Commission brought by TurboHercules. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was talking about the 10th birthday of Linux on a mainframe – and Linux is open source software. IBM seems unable to make up its mind whether it is the king of open source (Linux) or the arch-enemy of Intellectual Property rights in the open source community (TurboHercules). IBM claims that its battle with TurboHercules in Europe is a result of the hidden hand of Microsoft pulling the strings.

I’m pleased to see IBM making a profit. I earn my living by working with people who work on IBM mainframes. However, recently, I have had a strange nagging doubt. What if you could run mainframe software on a reasonably beefy x86 box with some kind of emulator like TurboHercules? What if the whole mainframe hardware strategy that IBM has been driving for all these years is little more than a house of cards? If that were the case, then no wonder IBM is doing its best to get rid of any company offering low-entry access to mainframe software. I wonder...

Linux on mainframes – 10 years old already

It seems so long ago, back in 1999, when we were discussing the Y2K bug (that was going to bring the universe as we knew it to an end) and whether Linux on a laptop was ever going to scale to mainframe proportions. And, while at the time I said the Y2K bug was overhyped (but then we all said we said that afterwards!!), I was never overly sold on mainframe Linux – wondering what kind of strange hybrid creature it would be. Doh! Not only has mainframe Linux (Linux on System z) now celebrated 10 years of service, it is a hugely successful and growing part of the mainframe world.

In 1999 IBM announced its commitment to Linux and promised to make it available on all their platforms and also produce Linux versions of its software. This meant that IBM would be spending lots of money on Linux and needed it to be a success. I can remember talking to various people at conferences, and the general opinion was one of confusion. IBM sold operating systems, so why would it champion a free alternative? If Linux didn’t become a success then IBM would have wasted lots of money – which could have been spent improving its other products. Alternatively, if Linux did become a success, pundits wondered whether that would result in a drop in IBM’s software and hardware revenues. Conspiracy theorists suggested that IBM would cause Linux development to split into hundreds of variants, weakening its ability to succeed in the marketplace. It all seems so fanciful now!

IBM established the Linux Technology Center in 1999 and announced Linux on the mainframe in 2000. Several Linux distributions (distros as old Linux hands refer to them) now run on a mainframe, including SuSE and Red Hat. Other distributions that run on a mainframe include Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, and CentOS. There are also thousands of ISV applications that have been recompiled to run on mainframe Linux. Importantly, Linux is not emulated on a mainframe, it runs as a completely native operating system – like z/OS etc. However, it is most often found running under the king of virtualization, z/VM, allowing multiple Linux systems to run on one lot of hardware.

There is a specialty processor available for Linux – like zIIp and zAAP – called the Integrated Facility for Linux or IFL. This processor runs Linux work, rather than running it on the normal General Purpose Processor (GPP), and so saves the user money because they are only charged for work running through the GPP. Of course, there is the cost of buying (in reality turning on) the IFL specialty processor.

It used to be that every sentence about a mainframe contained a mention of SOA, but nowadays the word is “cloud”. The IBM Web site says: “Cloud computing promises operational efficiency and cost reduction due to the standardization, automation, and virtualization. High flexibility, scalability, and easy management can be provided by the virtual Linux server environment on System z. Which basically says that Linux on System z is a good thing to have in your cloud computing environment because it is an efficient cloud computing platform.

So, happy 10th birthday mainframe Linux (or Linux on System z as we should be calling it). There are apparently 3150 Linux applications enabled for System z and IBM claims that 70 percent of the top 100 global mainframe customers run Linux – so I confidently predict that we will be celebrating its 20th birthday.