Open Letter to the Federal Reserve

Susan Eustis provides some sage advice to the U.S. Federal Reserve — and alerts U.S. taxpayers:

As a senior industry analyst and member of the press covering the IT industry, it has come to my attention that the IT department at the Federal Reserve is interested in throwing out the mainframe and replacing all that functionality with distributed computer systems. As far as I know, there’s no new workload going on the mainframe at the Federal Reserve. This is, I believe, a mistake.

My concern is that because the reliability and the security of the System z are superior to distributed systems, the economy is being put in jeopardy by this decision....

You can read on for more details.

Mid-June 2008 Potpourri

1. Back in February, on the heels of IBM's acquisition of Cognos and coinciding with the System z10 announcement, IBM promised (well, issued a "Statement of Direction") that Cognos Business Intelligence would be available for the mainframe sometime in the latter half of 2008. Most people, including me, thought that was great news and expected to see the product on December 31, 2008, at 11:59:59 p.m. Hawaiian time.

We were wrong. It's shipping this month. Darn it, IBM, you shipped six months early!

I think this announcement represents a major change in IBM's strategic focus for the mainframe. For a decade or more IBM has been trying to hawk me-too distributed platform business intelligence solutions. Those solutions are all premised on, first, copying your most precious enterprise data somewhere else. And, for as many years, more and more customers kept telling IBM, "Thank you, no." What started as a dull roar became a full blown cacophony of objections to this basic architectural pattern, fraught with numerous automatic drawbacks concerning security/privacy protection, information currency, workload management (just ETLing the data is hard work), service availability, and so on. So, to IBM's credit, it looks like they're doing a 180 and reinventing the mainframe for business intelligence. I say, "About freakin' time." I also have a little inside information to say this: watch this zBI area closely. There's more to come.

2. James Governor is exactly right: IBM has not done a good job explaining the value of CICS (and IMS, for that matter) as the best place to develop and run whole classes of brand new business services within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This despite the fact that it's already happening: current and new CICS and IMS customers — yes, there are new CICS and IMS customers — are constantly developing great new business services in their favorite transaction managers, and for thoroughly sensible reasons.

There's a lot to say on this subject, and I plan to say more in a more formal way. But, as a start, I'd like to point out that Java is a terrific programming language, but no programming language will ever define all of enterprise computing. (I'd like to think that someday nobody except perhaps middleware and operating system developers will ever need to work directly with programming languages, at least as we understand them today, but I plan to live a long time.) CICS and IMS are language-agnostic, while Java EE servers such as WebSphere Application Server are decidedly not. So if you happen to want to develop a new business service in, say, C++, you should probably choose CICS or IMS or z/TPF. OK, technically you could write some C++ to run in z/OS UNIX System Services, more or less running as a daemon, and access that via Java Native Interface (JNI) from WebSphere Application Server for z/OS. And yes I know WAS for z/OS can run COBOL EJBs. But those techniques are cheating. :-)

3. "Reconsider the Mainframe" writes Rusty Weston in the latest issue of Smart Enterprise Magazine.

4. Jans Wessels, writing in South Africa's ITWeb, says that "Powerful servers are still the best solution for processing high volume transactions."

5. Save the mainframe! The Bluffton (Indiana) Fire Department responded to a terrible blaze at Farm Credit Services earlier this week. "...Before they were ordered out of the building, firefighters managed to take the mainframe and some other items from the building and place them on a tarp in the backyard." (I wonder if that tarp provides both FICON and ESCON connections.) No one was hurt, thank goodness.

Still More Potpourri

1. Ian Bramley lists his Top 15 Reasons to Stay On/Move To the Mainframe.

2. IBM announces "Getting Started" prices for several WebSphere products running on z/OS. Nobody pays more, but if you need just a little bit of some WebSphere products then you'll pay less, even if you don't create a separate LPAR. Very nice.

3. David Kurtz at TalkingPointsMemo.com, one of the preeminent political blogs, comments on a report about the Pentagon's "antiquated" accounting system. The report quotes one ex-Pentagon IT director and blames "old-style" mainframes running COBOL, which Kurtz then characterizes as capturing the Pentagon's problems best.

But TPM's erudite readers pounced, correcting Kurtz on his factual misstep. To his credit, Kurtz quickly posted a follow-up from a reader: "As a coworker says, with only mild exaggeration, every 'regular' PC and server could blow up one day, and it would be an inconvenience; if every IBM mainframe stopped working, the world would basically shut down."

4. Micro Focus is trying to acquire NetManage. NetManage's best-known product is Rumba.

5. You can recycle your mainframe in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, for free, but don't try to recycle your furniture. Fax machines, hard drives, mobile phones, and radios are among the items they'll also accept without charge.

Of course what's really going on is that a private contractor charges county taxpayers $0.063 per pound they collect, then that contractor turns around and sells the metals and other valuable bits. It's just good business. If you'd also like to drop off your diamond jewelry and slightly used Toyota Camry, I bet they'll be delighted.

6. A major auto company lost a tape containing sensitive customer information. Come on, folks -- let's get those tapes encrypted, OK? I don't want to read any more of these stories. Thank you. [UPDATE: I read another one. :-(]

7. Larry Dignan ponders the Alpha and the Omega that is the mainframe. For more background, CNET interviews IBM Software Chief Steve Mills.

8. "Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters," observes The New York Times. Unless data center managers start buying a lot more mainframes, the IT industry is set to pass the airline industry by 2020 as a polluter.

9. Unisys's CFO has a contrarian view of the mainframe market: "As you know, our Clear Path server revenue is in long term decline as the mainframe market in general experiences industry-wide secular declines."

Thoughts On CICs and MQ following Impact 2008

Is CICS just a cashcow? That's the question I found myself asking at Impact 2008 last week. Is it really enough to service enable a CICS system,  or will a renaissance require the kind of skills drive that IBM is putting into other areas of the mainframe business? My concern is that some of the noises from IBM sounded like the bad old days of the 1990s when IBM often seemed content to see the mainframe profitably walk off into the sunrise. I used to argue with Linda Sanford at the time that IBM needed to look beyond MIPS growth and try to find net new customers for the box. Leverage existing workloads? I am most interested in net new workloads on Z - and I don't just mean Linux-based.

SOA helps customers to extend existing investments and IBM is investing in all the surrounding tooling to make this easier.

My problem with this argument as it relates to CICS is largely down to the fact that without skills growth a platform can only ever be a cash cow. The law of leaky abstractions is a major problem for service enablement. As Joel says:

“The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting.”

What happens if you want to change the underlying enterprise data model, for example? You can’t do that without changing the code. You can service-enable all you want, but SOA is as much about component and service isolation, enabling flexibility and portfolio maintainability, than service reuse. Martin Nally Rational CTO (As seen on RedMonkTV here) made a similar point in our unconference last week.

When I wrote a blog a while back called Mainframe = Youth, which gathered together a number of news stories that all talked to mainframe skills rejuvenation, it was clear that it was the skills revival, not the product, that was the story, as least as far as the wider market conversation was concerned. If SOA is veneerware it is far less valuable than the hype would suggest. But how do you get under the veneer?

Could CICS remerge as an information management platform, not just a transaction management system, or is that IMS role and never the twain shall meet? Either way I think net new skills will drive net new workloads. What about you?

update: now this is too funny. I forgot my colleague Cote had taken this picture:

More Potpourri

1. The Chicago Tribune reports on the excellent career prospects for new mainframe professionals in Illinois. Illinois State University Assistant Professor Chu Jong, associated with that university's mainframe curriculum, says it's not uncommon for his graduates to receive six or seven job offers.

2. You can now download the open beta release of IBM's WebSphere MQ Version 7 for z/OS (and for Linux on System z) at no charge. Click on "Trials and demos" on the left menu to get there. MQ V7 will be generally available in late June, 2008, so don't wait too long to take the beta for a spin. Please let IBM know what you think.

WebSphere MQ is the most popular reliable messaging transport for connecting basically anything to anything. Many enterprise architects argue that WebSphere MQ is foundational to successful service-oriented architectures, especially on System z. I agree.

3. IBM reports 1Q2008 earnings after the U.S. markets close on Wednesday, April 16.

4. The Blocks and Files blog asks, "Seriously, why does IBM bother?" This skepticism arises after IBM researchers announced a breakthrough in spintronics memory technology which could lead to a new class of storage devices within 10 years.

It's a fair question, but there are some simple answers. The basic answer is that IBM has had tremendous success commercializing (and profiting from) storage technologies, so this research is hardly unusual and is in IBM's self-interest. Examples include hard disks, floppy disks, and most tape-related technologies (such as vacuum column loading). For example, Alan Shugart at IBM invented the floppy disk to load microcode onto System/370 mainframes and peripherals. The fact that other companies might also benefit from IBM's research — as "free loaders" — is interesting but not directly relevant to whether IBM spends money on R&D. IBM has done quite well collecting both direct sales and royalties from these inventions. And yes, R&D is inherently risky. IBM has spent a lot of money researching so-called millipede storage, and it's extremely unclear whether IBM will ever see any profit from that effort. But the only criterion that matters to IBM is whether the company itself is better off for investing billions in basic research. Given IBM's track record I side with the researchers: yes, it is, without a doubt.

It's also worth noting that there are some government subsidies that encourage certain types of research. The U.S. space program is one famous example. IBM does receive some government support, although the pharmaceutical and pure defense industries tend to receive a lot more.

I do think Blocks and Files raises an interesting point indirectly. If Wall Street is so focused on short-term quarterly results, putting pressure on research investments, how can society encourage more research? (Society is the ultimate "free loader." :-)) The traditional answer has been patents, but there are a lot of companies, including IBM, that think the patent system needs fixing.

Today's Potpourri

1. Japan Airlines (JAL) becomes the latest customer to adopt z/TPF. z/TPF is IBM's extremely high performance transaction processing system, ideally suited for industries such as travel and transportation and financial services. JAL values z/TPF's 64-bit architecture, familiar Linux-based development tools, and sub-capacity pricing aligned with their business volumes. The full press release, in its original Japanese, can be found here. JAL is the largest airline in Asia and a member of the oneworld alliance.

There are signs Japan's traditionally ultra-cautious enterprise IT market is transforming as many Japanese companies become much more savvy, exploiting new technologies to help their businesses. For example, IBM has already sold new System z10 mainframes in Japan.

2. So what's the price for IBM's C/C++ compiler for z/OS, an IBM-MAIN forum poster asks. As little as $6 per month is the answer. I paid more for lunch today, and it wasn't nearly as good.

3. Slashdot picked up the New York Times story that Kevin refers to. Fortunately most of the Slashdot commenters know what they're talking about when it comes to mainframes, although a few still have strange misconceptions.

4. Blogger Arthur Cole waxes less sanguine than most about where the mainframe is headed. What do you think? Stephen Swoyer has a much different take.

5. IBM's relationship with ACI Worldwide is deeper and broader than ever. The two companies have an aggressive partnership to help financial services customers move electronic payment and ATM applications such as BASE24-eps to System z. Now IBM is taking over management of ACI's internal IT needs.

6. Interesting article about Marist College and their 700-odd Linux servers running on a single IBM System z9 mainframe. The article touches on the convenience of virtual firewall protections which Marist has implemented. Some of the servers support internal Marist administrative needs while most of them are available to students for classwork and other projects. All the servers live in harmony, and the students cannot change their own grades or tuition bills, for example.

New York Times: "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking"

Few readers of this blog are unfamiliar with Stewart Alsop's 1991 claim that in five years' time the last mainframe would be unplugged.  It's become a piece of good humor over the years - with even Stewart himself sharing in the laugh by appearing in the pages of one of IBM's annual reports to "eat his words."

Still, the issue has always been one considered from the point of "if."

On Sunday, the New York Times took a "why" look at the dynamics behind the comings and goings - and mostly the staying power - of various technologies.  The article is called "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking," and is certainly worth a read.

Front and center in this reporting is the IBM mainframe.  The article even includes a colorful (well, one of them is in color) pair of mainframe photos that not only show how far the mainframe has come, but how far fashion and hair style seem to have evolved during the mainframe's lineage.  See below (and be sure to check out the Times article).

Java Grown Up with the System z10

If you read the newspaper articles and watch IBM executives speak on television about the new System z10, you will hear them use some interesting phrasing concerning performance: "...up to 100% faster for CPU-intensive applications."

That's a bold claim, but I think what's most interesting about the System z10 EC is that, for perhaps the first time, this machine is a mainframe-supercomputer. Its quad-core processor technology is state-of-the-art in every respect — not just in I/O performance and execution integrity, but in sheer number-crunching punch. The hardware decimal floating point support is one example, but another example is how Java and XML workloads behave on this machine compared to its predecessors, which were already quite good.

I guess it's no secret that Java simply requires more processing capacity than, say, compiled C/C++ or COBOL, ceteris paribus. That's true on any platform. Processor capacity is never free — except during off-peak hours :-) — but in the large scale enterprise systems world (i.e. mainframes) we care about how code scales, because we worry about supporting the largest number of users as economically as possible. So we keep COBOL, PL/I, C/C++, and other code — and create billions of new lines each year — in part because the code execution is efficient and has evolved with the organization's performance needs in mind.

Before I was born the great debate was between COBOL and Assembler. High level languages like COBOL were slow and inefficient but more portable, and Assembler was peppier but harder to learn and maintain. The high level languages mostly "won." However, when IBM created the System/360 architecture, Assembler got a boost because it was more portable, able to run on any bigger System/360 or any successor. A lot of that Assembler is still running, and a lot of people are still writing new Assembler.

Anyway, there's a similar debate concerning Java, although that debate is probably winding down now. IBM and other vendors keep incrementally improving Java technology, with progressively faster just-in-time compilers and better platform optimizations. In 2004, when IBM introduced the zAAP technology, Java economics radically improved, and Java invaded huge numbers of mainframe sites. And now, in early 2008, we have the System z10. The new quad-core design once again radically improves Java's economics, with Java typically much closer to that "up to 100% improvement" figure than other workloads. So if you roughly double the core Java performance, increase the number of cores to as many as 64 per machine, triple the memory (for those memory-hungry Java applications, to trade memory for CPU), steer work better using HiperDispatch, allow up to 32 of those 64 cores to be license-free zAAPs, and run the whole thing on zNALC-priced z/OS LPARs that enjoy another "technology dividend," what does that do to the economics?

It means the System z10 is the ultimate Java platform, that's what. And the machine still runs everything else you ever wrote (or will write) in the other languages, faster and better.

Now, contrary to popular belief, path length still matters. Java is not the universal programming language; no language is. (Well, maybe Rational EGL, which lets you program in one easy language and deploy to either a COBOL or Java runtime, without learning either language. Darn useful, that.) But the new System z10 challenges traditional thinking: what if mainframe processing power were comparatively cheap and abundant, especially for Java? What if mainframes really were supercomputers?

System z10 is a disruptive technology.

It's fascinating working with Java developers who experience running their code on the mainframe for the first time. Their first reaction is typically, "It can run?" Then, "Wow, it runs!" Yes, write-once/run-anywhere really works, at least for J2EE applications.

But the next reaction is often, "Are you sure what the mainframe is saying about my code is true?" That's because there are no coding secrets when you run on the mainframe. WebSphere Application Server for z/OS can produce a flood of juicy SMF records to help expose poor quality (e.g. poor performing) code quickly and precisely. Tools like Jinsight (free and exclusively for System z) and Tivoli Composite Application Manager peer even deeper inside. The mainframe is the best Java diagnostic environment on the market, at least "out of the box." All this introspection can be a blow to the sometimes fragile egos of application developers who suddenly learn that, no, code to look up an account balance probably shouldn't require two full CPU-seconds per user. Make sure you understand that psychological dynamic.

One solution is to award bonuses to developers who meet or exceed performance targets. There are some complexities in how to run such a program, but the concept makes sense and can help establish a new performance-oriented esprit d'corps within the development community.

Sample Jinsight Screen

New mainframe z10 introduced

Now that was different. I woke up this morning and opened up my laptop. There, on the front of my screen is the Yahoo messenger. The top story is “IBM rolls out new Mainframe”.  That was pretty cool.
 

And so is this new server. The z10 mainframe continues the trend to reduce the amount of electricity and cooling per mip. And it’s got a tremendous amount of new capacity. Now a customer can get 64 engines vs. the 54 engines that are available on the z9 server. With its faster engines, the overall capacity of the z10 server is 50% larger than its predecessor.
 

A New York Times article includes comments from Hannaford Bros and Nationwide Insurance. Nationwide has consolidated 1300 applications across 480 virtual servers running Linux for System z. They believe they’ll save over $15 million dollars over three years and are running ahead of schedule. 

That brings to mind the technology dividend that comes with the System z architecture. If you’d purchased any of the specialty engines, IFL, zAAP or zIIP, on previous System z servers, you’ll get the same number of z10 engines plus the extra capacity of this first in the industry quadcore processors at no additional charge. And this upgrade will be far easier to handle than if you were operating “scale out” x86 servers. Typically, a mainframe gets upgraded in a matter of hours. Hundreds of x86 servers being “technology refreshed” would take weeks or months and a tremendous amount of additional power and floor space to be refreshed. That would take a tremendous amount of labor to accomplish to upgrade those x86 servers when compared to the z10 servers as well.  Oh, and did I mention that you’d be paying for each of those server images? Maybe that’s a new metric to consider…instead of TCO, look at the Total Cost of Upgrade.
 

So let’s go back to the customer scenarios and “discover” a new mantra for the mainframe. Customers are now taking applications and databases that are operating on separate servers and re-hosting them on the mainframe. Once running on the mainframe, the applications and databases take advantage of the reduced floor space, improved mean time to failure, reduced security intrusion points, capacity on demand and the resiliency of the mainframe. In essence, it becomes the same code in a different container provides a superior operations environment. That’s where the real savings come from. That’s a new mantra when considering the IBM System z z10 mainframe server. Add some new work to an existing mainframe and save.

IBM Announces the System z10 for the Next Generation Data Center

As Tuesday, February 26, 2008, begins in each timezone, IBM announces the new System z10 for all the world's next generation data centers. Here, for example, is the Japanese language press release:

http://www.ibm.com/jp/press/2008/02/2601.html

We mainframe bloggers will try to keep everyone informed as we hear more from IBM, so check back for updates. I suspect we'll also have some interesting thoughts and perspectives to offer.

I see that Wikipedia already has a short article. That's fast!

UPDATE #1: Released at 12:01 a.m. New York time, here's the English version of the press release along with a short video and some pictures:

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=825324

UPDATE #2: And here's a picture of the new greenest of green machines:

UPDATE #3: IBM has posted a large number of official announcement letters. Here are the links to the PDFs. Let's read together, shall we?

• 108-154: IBM System z10 Enterprise Class -- The forward thinking mainframe for the 21st century


• 108-155: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine types 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments


• 108-156: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine type 2107) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments


• 208-038: IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager for Linux on System z, V3.1 is designed to enable optimization of energy consumption for heterogeneous IBM systems


• 208-039: IBM ISPF Productivity Tool V5.10 enhancements deliver increased efficiency for ISPF users


• 208-041: IBM DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition offers one-time-charge price metric for net new workloads on IBM System z


• 208-042: Preview: z/OS V1.10 -- Raising the bar and redefining scalability, performance, availability, and economics


• 308-001: IBM GDPS V3.5: Enterprise-wide infrastructure availability

UPDATE #4: Yowza! The System z10 EC announcement is 391 pages!

UPDATE #5: OK, not so much reading. Most of those 391 pages are model conversion tables. So I could skim the announcement quickly for the golden nuggets.

One of the most surprising facts is that the System z10 is available immediately. (Maybe you can send a truck to Poughkeepsie to pick one up today?) The new HiperDispatch feature looks very interesting. There's a bit of a caution in the announcement suggesting that workloads could vary more than usual in how they perform when moving up to the System z10. That makes sense, because there's an awful lot of new technology packed into this model that's way beyond the typical model upgrade. Going from a single core 1.7 GHz processor to a quad-core 4.4 GHz processor design is a big leap.

4.4 GHz per core! (I've got to start getting used to saying "cores" now.) And up to 1.5 TB of memory per machine. Many more capacity model choices to make the costs smoother. Uniprocessor performance increased up to 70% for z/OS mixed workloads -- quite a jump. I also like how IBM is fencing off the HSA. It's 16 GB, but you never see it, and you don't have to pay for it. The Capacity for Planned Events (CPE) looks like a great idea. You can get up to 3 days of capacity for activities like relocating data centers. There's a nice statement of direction concerning z/VM and LPARs. You'll be able to manage all processor types and all operating systems within a single z/VM LPAR. (At present you have to fence resources.) New and improved OSA networking. InfiniBand coupling for Parallel Sysplex, raising the local distance limit up to 150 meters. (Sort of a mini-GDPS distance! Definitely nice for campuses.) There's something about some new time of day capabilities in the base configuration which looks great. The processors now support 1 MB page sizes, and there's both Assembler and C/C++ support for them.

This is a major leap. Still reading.