System z ideas come to your laptop!

Two weeks ago I blogged about desktop virtualization and said how it worked best when it used concepts from the mainframe – and this week I’d like to continue that theme.

Although VM/370 was first released in 1972, there had been earlier versions – CP-40/CMS and CP-67/CMS – available since 1967, which makes IBM’s VM operating system, or to give it its proper name – hypervisor – pretty old. 1980 saw the release of VM/SP, 1988 saw VM/ESA, and 2000 saw z/VM – the current version. What made VM so clever and so useful to customers was the fact that it allowed other operating systems to run under it as if they were running natively (ie straight on the hardware). So rather than running one copy of MVS on one lot of hardware, it was possible to run two or three (or whatever) copies of MVS, which all appeared to be running natively on one lot of hardware.

Which means that much of the virtualization technology available on servers and the desktop is pretty much equivalent to mainframe technology in 1972 or thereabouts! It doesn’t seem quite so clever any more, does it?

IBM, of course, moved the concept of virtualization forward by including the hypervisor code with the hardware. It produced the Processor Resource/System Manager or PR/SM as it was known. The IBM Web site defines PR/SM as a type 1 hypervisor integrated with all IBM® System z™ models that transforms physical resources into virtual resources so that many logical partitions can share the same physical resources. Effectively, the VM operating system is now included in microcode in the hardware, which means that the hardware can be split into partitions and each partition can run an operating system. So users no longer need to use VM itself to virtualize their hardware, it’s built in to the hardware.

Can servers do that? The answer is yes and no – or really no, but there are some early attempts at a yes! An organization can now buy a server with an embedded hypervisor sitting on a memory card. When the server is first booted up, a menu-driven configuration process starts that results in the hypervisor being loaded and ready to accept guest operating systems. I guess that moves the timeline for off-mainframe virtualization up to about 1986!

And while we’re talking about virtualization, you may have noticed that Sun Microsystems has announced a Version 2.0 of Sun xVM VirtualBox, its free open source desktop virtualization software. And for people who aren’t sure they really know how to get the best out of the software or what to do when they hit a problem, Sun also announced Sun xVM VirtualBox Software Enterprise Subscription, which offer 24x7 support at a price.

Sun xVM VirtualBox supports Windows (including Vista), Linux (including 64-bit versions), Mac OSX, Solaris, and OpenSolaris. Sun claims that virtual desktops are the future of business desktops because they are more flexible, manageable, and secure than traditional PC architectures. It also claims that the xVM VirtualBox platform provides organizations with an easier way to deliver a standard operating environment across their enterprises. The xVM VirtualBox software runs to 20MB for those of you thinking about downloading it. There’s more information on the Sun Web site at www.sun.com/xvm.

It won't be long until the world of desktops and servers enters the 1990s – as defined by mainframes.

Whatever happened to CICS Update?

The CICS Listserv at LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU had a message on it recently from John Klavon with the subject, “Has anyone received CICS Update Manuals Lately”. He goes on to say, “CICS Update is a Xephon magazine... I have been trying to contact them for a long time since we have not been receiving the book. Does anyone know anything regarding this company?”

John almost immediately got a reply from Scott McFall of ProTech Professional Technical Services, who said: 

“Xephon unfortunately is no more :-(

I still carefully hoard my various copies of the "The Handbook of IBM Terminology" (circa '90-98).....a bible for z/OS sales/bus dev guys like me!

I have been in touch some former Xephon employees recently, Trevor Eddolls and Mark Lillycrop. Mark and Trevor now each have their own companies in the UK and among other things publish The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook (a free download I believe).  Trevor is still publishing books, articles, and online content as well...I believe now for TCI Publications and z/Journal.”

I just wanted to use this blog to fill in some of the gaps in that answer and talk a bit about sharing mainframe information.

CICS Update was the first of the Update publications produced by Xephon. Its first issue appeared in December 1985. It was an A5-sized publication and contained about ten articles written by systems programmers for systems programmers, and also contained code and JCL, so the information in the articles could be implemented by others. 

Xephon originally ran seminars and published surveys. The company was set up in 1980 by Chris Bunyan, Dave Bates, and Jeff Hosier (who created the The Handbook of IBM Terminology – mentioned above). Chris sadly died in 2004. There’s a tribute to him at http://www.itindepth.com/Chris%20Tribute.htm. In addition to the Update journals, Xephon also produced Enterprise Middleware, The Mainframe Market Monitor (now published by Arcati – www.arcati.com), IBEX surveys, News IS, and Insight IS. It also produced the original Dinosaur Myth – debunking the thinking that mainframes would disappear and alternatives were hugely cheaper.

Other Updates that were produces over the next 20 years included: AIX Update, DB2 Update, Domino/Notes Update, NT Update, Oracle Update, RACF Update, TCP/SNA Update, VM Update, VSAM Update, VSE Update, Web Update, WebSphere Update (formerly MQ Update), and z/OS Update (formerly MVS Update).

In 2004, the Update publications were sold to TCI Publications – the people who produce zJournal. I carried on editing them until 2007. Then in March 2008 publication ceased.

The problem with the Updates was that they were subscription journals, ie people had to pay up-front to receive their monthly issue. Nowadays, I guess, when people have a problem with an application or implementing an idea, they just Google it and get free access to information off the Internet. Having said that, there are still a number of people, like John Klavon, who miss receiving their monthly dose of CICS information. This information could stimulate ideas of what could be done at their site, or solve a back-of-the-mind query, or just give them more information about a particular CICS-related topic.

So, the question I’d like to pose is this: would anyone be interested in subscribing (or contributing articles) to a new monthly journal that would be similar in nature to CICS or any of the other Update journals? If you want to get in contact with me directly, my e-mail is trevor@itech-ed.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Desktop choices

Now I like to think of myself as a mainframer – someone who appreciates all that mainframes have to offer in the world of computing. However, like everyone else who works with mainframes, I also use PCs. Now in the past, I have tried to persuade readers of this blog that there are far more choices than just Windows and Office on their PCs. In fact, I have suggested Macs as alternatives sometimes, and I have definitely extolled the virtues of Linux. This week, I’d like to examine a slightly different alternative – desktop virtualization.

You are probably all aware of the success of server virtualization as a way of letting the IT department gain control of its servers again. Rather than having hundreds (and at some sites that was exactly the position!) of boxes all doing a bit of important work, but nobody being quite sure of how much work that actually was, virtualization has allowed sites to make full use of each server, and know exactly what percentage of the server’s capacity each virtual server was using. This allowed sites to use less space and less electricity, and claim to be leaner and greener while at the same time saving money.

Now, desktop virtualization looks set to make a similar major impact. How do I know, well the US-based Enterprise Strategy Group found that 32% (that’s about a third) of the 700 companies it surveyed were already piloting some kind of desktop virtualization technology. In addition, Gartner has predicted desktop virtualization will become mainstream by 2010; and IDC are predicting that a year later (2011) desktop virtualization software will have a $2 billion global market.

The problem with PCs is that they costly and buggy, and their aren’t enough expert staff around to support them. In addition, they have big question marks associated with security, and management is extremely difficult. What’s really needed is something like a central mainframe with terminals attached to it!!!

One attempt at this model is the thin-client approach used in task-based environments where Windows Terminal Services or Citrix’s ICA protocols have been utilized. These have given quite significantly improved returns on investment, with figures quoted of between 20% and 40%. Bear in mind that the average cost of a PC across its lifetime is reckoned to be 10 times the purchase price.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is set to expand beyond the limits we’ve seen up to now. In future, all the advantages of centralized security, scalability, control, and management (and cost savings) will be combined with the advantages of highly personalized PCs. In effect, each user will have available only those applications that they will use and not a whole range of software that different users at different times may want.

In this environment, PC images become much more manageable, allowing administrators much greater control over them. It also allows administrators to meet the end users’ needs more easily. End users are meant to enjoy a better IT experience than they do now – although we shall see how true that claim is in a few years time! The big advantage comes because organizations make major savings on the operational costs of their PCs. And this is in addition to the gains in security, improved service levels, and the ease of deploying new applications.

So, what company names should you look out for in VDI space? IBM, HP, VMware, Citrix, and smaller player like ClearCube, Parallels, RingCube, and Teradicci, and I’m sure there are others. Plus Microsoft, which isn’t a player at the moment, will enter the market at some time in the next few years.

It’s good to see mainframe ideas pervading the PC world!

Search engine rankings

I was helping out an organization recently that wanted to improve its rankings in Google searches, so I thought I’d pass on what I told them. Now I’m sure to many of you this is old news, but there must be lots of other people who could benefit from the information.

Whether a site appears on the first page of a search depends on its ranking. On the Technology Web page, Google tells us that: “PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms”.

First of all, how do search engines know what pages you have on your Web site? The answer is they use spiders or bots, which are automated computer programs that access Web pages and record the links they find. These links are then added to a list of sites to be crawled by the bots in the future. Google’s programs are called Googlebots!

But perhaps more importantly, how does Google (or any other search engine) know about your Web site in the first place? The answer to that is that it either found a link on a site that it crawled earlier, or the Webmaster submitted the site to Google to be added to the list. For Google the URL you need is www.google.com/addurl. For Yahoo, it’s search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. And for MSN, it’s search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Once a Googlebot has crawled your site, the Web pages are downloaded and analysed. The words and phrases that they contain are stored in the index. The index will also note the title, which it uses when displaying a short preview on the search page. The indexing process is fairly sophisticated and gets information from the HTML, images, and even Flash files.

Obviously, each search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate the ranking of a page, but there are techniques that can help increase a Web page’s ranking. One quite important one is the number of other Web pages that link to that page. The more inbound links that exist, the higher the ranking. The problem with that is links to your site are outside your control to a large extent.

The best technique is the use of tags in the head section of a page. Step one is to give a page a meaningful name (meaningful in terms of the Web page’s contents. “New page” is useless. The next step is to get the meta tags right. For example:
meta name="description" content="This page ..."
And include words that then re-appear on the page. It’s also a good idea to include as many words as possible. Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag.

When it comes to laying out the contents of a Web page. It is usually recommended that h1 and h2 tags, or bold text are used to make sub-headings obvious to the search engines.

Google also likes to use the ALT tag on images to help build up a picture of a Web page, so include it. It can also help if you are using graphics to navigate (ie an image of a button). If that is the case (you are using graphics for buttons), then it’s recommended that alternative navigation is also provided. This usually means hyperlinked text at the bottom of the page.

A site map can help search engines know which pages of your site can be searched and to find data. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ will help you build an XML site map that can be submitted to Google, or a text site map for submission to Yahoo. A sitemap also creates more site links – which increases the ranking.

And what should you avoid? Don’t use frames – which means throwing away that old copy of Frontpage you thought you could use to build your Web site. Also, don’t build the site using Flash because not all search engines can derive any information from Flash files. Also avoid writing about a topic on a page that’s different from the title and meta tags.

And finally, update the content regularly so it looks fresh and interesting, and people will want to revisit.

Any comments?

Joining the penguins

There comes a time, when tucked away in odd corners, you find old computers. These computers have been replaced because they did not have USB ports, or they ran old versions of Windows and had small hard drives and it was just easier to buy a new one rather than keep upgrading. Or they were just so slow that a day’s work seemed to take about three days to complete. Or they were worryingly insecure. Or… the reasons why they were replaced just go on. But there is a way to get some more life out of that old hardware, a way to increase their Return On Investment (ROI), a way to make them useful once more – and that’s to install Linux.

Why choose Linux? Well the first answer is that it seems to run on any old hardware – you don’t need 2GB of RAM for the operating system etc. Secondly, it’s free. So if you don’t like it, it’s cost you nothing (well maybe the price of a blank CD!). Thirdly, Linux upgrades incrementally, rather than major leaps such as ME to XP and XP to Vista. This makes upgrading fairly easy, and takes away the nightmare of running an unsupported operating system.

The thing that puts off many people from using Linux is the choice. Now I know that Vista comes in lots of versions (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate), but Linux comes with varieties such as Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Puppy, Mint, etc, etc. Which one is best? And an answer of, “it all depends”, just makes it too complicated. However, I have been using versions that fit easily onto a single CD and allow you to boot up from the CD, even if Windows is installed on the hard drive.

So let’s say you have made a choice of which Linux variant you want (Puppy or Mint might be good starting points – but so are the others). The next stage is to download the Linux distribution you want (a distro). The download files are usually ISO files, and these need to be burned onto CDs as ISO files. With Nero, for example, tell it to burn an image from the File menu and then Open the ISO file.

The next stage is to check that the computer will boot from CD. Go to the BIOS and, if necessary, change the boot priority to the optical drive. Usually the computer will boot OK from your new boot CD. Just watch out for any messages about booting from CD – it’s definitely what you want to do.

The clever thing about the small Linux systems is that they will discover hardware. From then on you can access files on the old C: drive. It should also discover old hardware and make it available. It will then discover networking capabilities and allow you to get on to the Internet.

I would just play with this version of Linux for a while and see how it goes. Once you are happy that Linux gives your old hardware a new lease of life, then install it – so it will boot from the hard drive in future.

There are loads of Web sites that explain the nitty gritty of installing the Linux variant of your choice. They explain things like the /home directory, /root, /boot, /dev/sda or /dev/hda, and /swap.

Like it says in the title, I have started to use Linux for more things than just recovering data from “dead” Windows laptops. Give it a go – and then try OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office and Firefox as an alternative to Explorer, if you’re not doing so already.

25 years of DB2

What kind of a mainframe blog doesn’t mention DB2’s 25th birthday? I hang my head in shame. DB2 celebrated its birthday on the 7th July this year, and like a forgetful relative, I don’t send a card until a month later. But, finally, here is my take on 25 years of DB2.

DB2 – which stands for DataBase 2 – first saw the light of day as an MVS application in 1983. It is a relational database and uses SQL (Structured Query Language) – pronounced SQL by mainframers and "sequel" by non-mainframers, apparently. Where did it come from? In the 1970s, Ted Codd created a series of rules for relational databases, which DB2 was very loosely based on. However, originally, DB2 did break many of Codd’s rules. There was also a VM product called SQL/DS, which was similar in nature.

As well as MVS (or z/OS as it’s called in its current incarnation), DB2 is available on other platforms. During the 1990s versions were produced for OS/2 (if you remember that one) Linux, Unix, and Windows. There have been a variety of naming conventions over the years. Things like DB2/VSE and DB2/6000, which were replaced by DB2 for VSE and then DB2 UDB (Universal DataBase). This current naming convention can make it harder to work out whether a mainframe version of DB2 or a server version of DB2 is being discussed in any article on the topic.

Interestingly, although mainframe and server versions of DB2 are currently very similar in functionality, they are written in different languages. The mainframe version is written in PL/S and the server version in C++.

In the early days, the big competition was Oracle and Informix. Well, IBM bought Informix in 2001, and happily runs Oracle on a zLinux partition. There is also a 31-bit version of Oracle available for z/OS.

Of course, DB2 isn’t IBM’s only database. It has its relational IMS DB. People interested in IMS DB will be interested in the Virtual IMS Connections user group at www.virtualims.com.

As they say, other mainframe databases are available, including: CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, Cincom’s SUPRA, Computer Corporation of America’s Model 204, Select Business Solutions’ NOMAD, and Software AG’s Adabas.

DB2 is currently at Version 9, which you might remember was code-named Viper before its launch.

Happy belated birthday DB2.

Birthday blog

Just to be clear, it’s not my birthday, but I’ve just passed the blog milestone of 104 blogs – so I am now into year 3 of blogging – woo woo!! Blog 1 was published on the 19th July 2006.

In the two years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve tried to stay focused on mainframes and the accompanying software, but sometimes I’ve included stuff about PCs (we all use them), and occasionally I’ve written about useful gadgets I’ve reviewed.

Perhaps one criterion for measuring how successful a blog is, is by counting the number of people who read the blog. A second method would be to see how often a blog gets mentioned by other (unrelated) bloggers. Here are some of the places that have picked up on this blog over the past year.

"Sometimes small isn’t beautiful" from the 21st July was quoted by Mark Fontecchio in Mainframe Propellor Head (http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/mainframe-blog/more-on-the-ibm-swallowing-of-psi/). "Saving money on mainframes" from the 9th June 2008 was discussed by both Mark Fontecchio in Server Specs (http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/05/20/mainframe-specialty-processors-do-they-really-save-money/) and Marc Wambeke in Mainframe Watch Belgium (http://mainframe-watch-belgium.blogspot.com/2008/05/saving-money-with-ziip.html). "IBM launches its zX machine" from the 3rd March 2008 was quoted by Greg Meckbach in the Enterprise Infrastructure eNewsletter (http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/eac638c9-a68d-42f7-8605-be83e7b4d03b.html) and in Computerworld Canada (http://www.computerworldcanada-digital.com/computerworldcanada/20080321/?pg=10). "The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2008" blog on the 18 February announcing the arrival of the 2008 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook (www.arcati.com/newyearbook08) was picked up by Mark Fontecchio in his article in ServerSpecs (http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/02/20/the-2008-mainframe-yearbook-is-out/). "IBM future – Elseworlds" on the 4th February was heavily quoted from in Mark Fontecchio blog "And starring as the Hulk... IBM" (http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/12/31/and-starring-as-the-hulkibm/).

It's good to know that people are reading the blog and referring to it in their own blogs and on their Web sites. Looking to the future, in the next year, I plan to continue highlighting trends and interesting new products in the mainframe environment, while occasionally discussing other computing developments that catch my attention.

If anyone reading this blog is looking for a technical writer, please e-mail me at Trevor@itech-ed.com.

And finally, a big thank you to everyone who has read my blog during the past two years.