What’s a mainframe, Daddy?

After years of sliding my security card in the lock and entering the machine room/data centre and seeing the mainframes in there change from Sci-Fi-style boxes with flashing lights to more mundane-looking boxes. From seeing simple DASD with less capacity than the memory stick in this laptop be replaced with cache controllers and more sophisticated data storage devices. It always seemed that there were plenty of mainframes around and any normal person (me) was constantly being offered tours round installations. So it comes as a bit of a shock when a youngster clearly has no idea what a mainframe looks like or what it does!

OK, no-one may have actually said those words as such, but that was the message. Plus, I was with some friends on Saturday when the conversation turned to discussing what use a mainframe was in this day and age! As Arcati Director, Mark Lillycrop, so eloquently put it recently, mainframes are thought of as ‘your dad’s technology’. Most of the people I was chatting to felt that mainframes were relics of the past and anything they can do, a few servers could do just as well!

So for many of us mainframe verterans, our job is to get out there and spread the word. We need to tell people exactly what a mainframe is, what it can do, and how people are interacting with them all the time, but don’t realise it. That way, the new generation of youngsters that are beginning to get access to mainframe technology at universities and elsewhere will arrive with a knowledge of what mainframes can do, and why working with them can be so enjoyable.

So let’s just start with the absolute beginner’s guide to mainframes. They are computers – just like your laptop – except that over the years they faced and solved all the problems about back-ups and restores, security, and high-speed data access. They have been around for a long time – which is a good thing because lots of people have moved the technology forward. They allow millions of users controlled access to information – allowing them to create, modify, and save data from almost any data entry device you can think of, including browsers.

Mainframes have been virtualized since the 1980s, and some of the software first saw the light of day in the 1960s. Most Windows data centres have only been virtualizing for the past five years! It’s true that laptops etc are everywhere – in your home, at work, etc – but mainframes are working away in the background. Everytime you take money from an ATM (cash machine) your bank is running a transaction on a mainframe. And it is banks and large financial institutions that use mainframes. And they do it because of the reliability. They do it because, should there be an outage, they can recover back to almost the last second before they went down. Almost no transactions are lost. And as a bank customer, I like that. Lots of non-mainframe-using sites think they are doing quite well if they can recover data back to last night! You see the difference in scale here.

Mainframes run an operating system (z/OS, but could be z/VM or z/VSE) and on top of that are a number of subsystems – you might think of them as apps (but big ones!). These subsystems include CICS and IMS. Now, both of these have been being developed since the 1960s and provide ways of accessing data very quickly and securely. They allow users to fill in virtual forms. And they store data in a way that means it can be accessed very quickly.

Another ‘app’ you may have heard of is DB2. DB2 is a comparative youngster, having arrived in the 1980s. It stores data in a ‘relational’ way rather than the more traditional ‘hierarchical’ way. DB2 is a database that can exist on Windows machines as well as mainframes (and many devices in between).

Mainframes can also run Linux (z/Linux) and all the Linux applications. That makes them very cost-effective replacements for sites with numerous ageing Linux servers. Linux has been available on mainframes for just over 10 years.

And there’s plenty of software available to control all aspects of this mainframe behemoth. And you can link them together at different sites in different countries round the globe.

So if anyone asks you what’s a mainframe, you can tell them that it’s the most successful server architecture ever devised and it’s all around them doing important work.

Mainframe chatter

Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd, and I were asked to take part in CA’s May Mainframe Madness. We were part of a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in their ‘House of Mainframe’ section on 5 May. It was enjoyable chatting to other mainframe professionals and it was very interesting the direction the conversation took.

Clearly, there were two main strands to the conversation. One was the difficulty of convincing (converting?) non-mainframers of the potential of the mainframe. The second was the success of z/Linux at installations.

Looking at z/Linux success first, Murray Theriault told us: “I think what sold it for me was the idea that I could put up 100 z/Linux machines on the same box and have a very small footprint, not to mention no power costs”. Similarly, Marie Kennard added: “Same here – the app we’re putting onto zLinux currently runs on dozens of boxes, most of which are reaching EOL and needed replacing”.  Someone else reminded the group about Aliantz in Australia, saying that they’d “flipped their whole farm to z/Linux in a weekend with little to no outtage”. This led CA’s Reg Harbeck to comment: “zLinux seems to be taking over a decade to become an overnight sucess...”

So it appears that z/Linux is making headway in those sites that already have a mainframe and Linux servers. And it’s definitely the case that the arguments for doing so are irrefutable. Moving some of the applications or even all of them from other Linux platforms is a positive step and the sites doing so are going to see huge benefits in terms of performance, reliability, and, of course, cost savings both in man-power and outages.

But even the success stories seem to be the result of a battle between mainframers and management whose model of computing and whose expectations are the result of using Microsoft Windows. A lot of the hour long discussion was spent on how to get managers in organizations that have mainframes to appreciate what they have, and to understand how to exploit the mainframes potential. The truth is that there’s an even bigger battle to be fought and that’s to get IT people and IT managers at non-mainframe sites to appreciate the opportunities that a mainframe brings.

During the discussion it was said that ‘good news’ mainframe stories don’t make much of an appearance in the IT press. If they did, that would be one way that people would get to hear about mainframes. Mark suggested that many people view mainframes as: “Old, expensive, and your dad’s technology”. And yet, anyone who takes money out of an ATM (hole-in-the-wall) machine is probably linking to IMS on a mainframe. They just don’t know it. The press were not only blamed for sins of omission, but also sins of commission – for printing the same old stories containing the same old wrong assumptions about mainframes.

I reminded the chat room about William Data Systems ZEN product family and how users can control their network from the latest iPad gizmo, or get reports on their smartphones about what’s going on on their network. And, obviously, there was a lot of talk about cloud computing and mainframes – and how they go together like “peas and carrots” (well Forest Gump would have said that if he’d been logged in!). The point is that mainframes aren’t “your dad’s technology”, they very much embrace the very latest technologies and do it in a way that is secure and comes with all the benefits of years of successful operation in banks and airlines, etc.

I did think to run a competition, at this point but I don’t have a prize to give out. However, I would be interested in hearing people’s ideas of how managers and staff at mainframe sites and the rest of the IT world who aren’t mainframers can be convinced of the importance and proven-reliability of mainframes. You can e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com with your comments and I’ll put them together in a future blog.

Other topics that we discussed during our hour included the importance of virtual meetings with the current financial constraints when organizations are less-and-less keen to fund travel/hotels/food etc for people to attend. We looked at green computing and how this issue will most-likely grow in importance with future regulation. The fact that the word ‘legacy’ is actually a compliment. (How many of you have printers that don’t work with Vista or Windows 7, and just have to live with it?) And we suggested names for the next version of z/OS including z/2020 and z/Cloud.

All-in-all it was an enjoyable ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’. Good luck CA for the rest of the month of mainframe madness.