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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.

by Timothy Sipples

April 13, 2008 in Future, Innovation, People Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Solaris is coming, Solaris is coming.....to System z

Wow....I felt the earth shake just now....IBM and Sun have announced a live demo of Solaris on System z. Experts at Sine Nomine – the same folks who were at the epicenter of the Linux on the mainframe movement – have brought the two companies together and showcased the possibilities at this week’s Gartner conference in Las Vegas. 

Click here to see David Boyes from Sine Nomine discuss the project from the Gartner event floor. 

Amazing. But why are they doing this? To make customers’ lives easier. One question I hear all the time is: Is IBM trying to take over all computers? Does IBM believe that a mainframe or a collection of mainframes can replace all the servers in a business? The answer to that is simple: NO. 

How do I know that? Because an IBM mainframe can never be the sole computer in any business and the reason is, it doesn't have it's own front end interface....well, maybe it does....the punch card and the 3270 terminal. But they really didn't take off the way IBM anticipated, so now you have ATM's, Kiosks, Web browsers, cell phones, pda’s, PC's with 3270 emulators....a cornucopia of front end devices as the human computer interface. In that regard, IBM's mainframe has to work as a master collaborator to make sure that it can interoperate with that wide range of front end processors and as such, has had to augment the 3270 data stream with slick new XML and web services built into it's systems.....but I digress....we are talking about Solaris on the mainframe....is this to be a demonstration system, a proof of concept, or an actual supported system? 

It’s a demo today, but it's intended to be a supported system – and it’s only a matter of time before we see it. We've learned already that customers may desire open source computing on z/OS, zVM and Linux for System z. They just aren't willing to service it themselves. Sure, they can download a myriad of tools from the internet, but they can't download a service contract. So they look toward distributors or vendors to provide service for those offerings before they'll put them into production. The same will be true of Solaris on System z. 

On this lovely mainframe, we also realize that code development is generally created on the desktop...an x86 platform and as such, typically favors native operating systems as the deployment platform as well. Those platforms are predominantly Windows, Linux and Solaris-based. But because of openness and portability, Solaris and Linux can be deployed on multiple hardware platforms now. Today, deployment of servers on the x86 platform has been considered Scale Out computing....just keep adding more and more server images, each dedicated to a single operating system and typically a single application or data base server. In many respects, these servers have the appearance of an appliance, because they are "single" function devices. Those servers might satisfy the needs of a lot of folks (e.g. clients), but typically excel at a single function. 

In the last couple of years, it seems like the next new thing is Virtualization and server consolidation...the ability to host multiples of these "appliances" in a single container and, in doing so, make the operational environment more green - use less energy, cooling, floor space, etc, but still meet businesses' service level agreements. Well, you'd think that virtualization just got invented. Nope - it's been around for over 40 years, with IBM's zVM as the cream of the crop in systems virtualization. We've already learned the power of virtualization when associated with Linux for System z. There have been a large number of deployments and over 90% of those deployments are on zVM. With Solaris on System z, 100% of the deployments will be on zVM. That's because the operational environment will take advantage of some of the native System z resource sharing and management tooling, in addition to offering the opportunity to manage each Solaris image independently. 

The virtualization available on System z through zVM has a number of distinct advantages over the Johnny-come-lately virtual servers on other platforms - the ability to run at 90% and higher system utilization without fear of failover for a very large number of operating system images; the ability to add or remove capacity on System z by turning on or off additional processors without suffering a service disruption and in doing so, meet tactical business processing needs on demand; the ability to leverage hardware and system memory to communicate between operating system images, which in turn reduces the number of system intrusion points; the compartmentalization of one operating system image from another one to provide an additional layer of security; the ability to use zVM services across Solaris system images for common auditing, disk and tape back up processing. 

The net of this is, it's the same code that you might be running on a different hardware architecture, but when executed within the zVM hypervisor, inherits much of the operational superiority from that environment, with no significant additional cost. And then there is the hardware benefits of the System z architecture...it had an OnStar like call home capability and autonomic healing capability long before the blue prints were written by GM or other server platforms. IBM's mainframe remote support facility provides electronic diagnosis of system failures and with redundant hardware built in, can switch over to the backup components and in parallel "call home" to dispatch a customer engineer to correct the problem. In the case of CPU failure, the z architecture will swap in a processor, transparent to any operating system running on its hardware to continue processing unabated. It's like changing the tire while the cars in motion and calling ahead to have a new spare put in the trunk, again without having the car stop. 

Let's continue that automotive metaphor. The mainframe is intended to be a super highway. There are folks that believe it's just a parkway...allows only cars and it's not heavily traveled. Today's announcement is just another occasion to demonstrate the super highway nature of the mainframe. It enables all kinds of vehicles to travel on its roads and the traffic is moving along very quickly. In fact, there are sensors in this mainframe highway to detect bottlenecks and provide re-balancing workloads to meet service goals, another value that Solaris on System z will be able to take advantage of as well. But let's not forget, the interstate highways are selective, they don't accept bicycles and pedestrians. There are other roads, running at a slower pace for those folks to travel on. Yes, they'll reach the same destinations, but it will take them a bit longer to get there. So in that sense, the mainframe is not going to "take over Solaris". There will be certain application and data serving workloads that will more naturally appeal to a consolidated effort on a mainframe and there will be other workloads that can continue to run independently on other server hardware or for that matter be virtualized in an x86 environment, quite possibly because they are stateless and don't need the resilience, security and capacity management that a mainframe brings to the operational environment. 

Linux on System z has been wildly successful in its ability to consolidate workloads. Does Solaris present a "weakness" in the force driving Linux ubiquity? No, quite the contrary. It's about flexibility and choice. In many cases today, Linux is evolving as a server of choice in the x86 world and collections of those servers can be easily consolidated to IBM mainframes running Linux. But in some cases, a UNIX workload, like Solaris, must first be ported over to Linux before it can take advantage of the virtualization and scaling capabilities of the mainframe. In addition, some operational tooling is different, so there might be a skills hit or a procedural hit to make a change. Well, just as Linux is Linux, regardless of where it's deployed, the same objective holds true for Solaris. Common code is a re-compile vs a port and the objective is to enable the same operations model, but offer some new capabilities, through zVM, that further reduce the operational complexity of running many, many Solaris images on the same mainframe. 

So back to the celebration....there's a new choice coming to town, Solaris on z. The benefits of the Solaris operating system as many businesses have grown to enjoy on other architectures, with the benefits of the operations model and virtualization capabilities of IBM's System z mainframe and zVM. Long may they both prosper to give businesses the choices and flexibility they need to build global system deployments that meet their business governance, privacy, security and resilience needs in solving problems along with the myriad of other options available for them to deploy on this modern mainframe.

by JimPorell

November 28, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Introducing the 6th IBM Mainframe Operating System: Solaris?

The Associated Press reports on IBM and Sun's new collaboration announcement concerning the Solaris operating system. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz called this announcement "a tectonic shift in the market landscape."

As most of you know, the IBM mainframe currently has five widely deployed and supported operating systems available: z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, z/VM, and Linux on z. A single machine can run all five, in any combination, in multiple secure instances dynamically responding to business demands, at the same time with the highest service qualities.

Next up it appears: Solaris on System z. In fact, Sine Nomine Associates already began work over one year ago to bring Solaris to the IBM mainframe, so maybe OS #6 is a lot closer to delivery than anybody knew. It took a little more than one year to bring Linux to the mainframe, for comparison.

Solaris is particularly popular among telecommunications companies who have racks and racks of smaller servers, typically running C and C++ code, to perform tasks such as call accounting. There's a lot of Web hosting on Solaris. Solaris is Fujitsu's preferred UNIX^TM solution, and Fujitsu is one of the largest technology service companies in Japan. I could go on, but the introduction of Solaris on System z would help many customers around the world lower their costs of computing (including power, cooling, and data center space), scale up in addition to scaling out, improve the quality of their service delivery, and take advantage of increased choice and flexibility offered with all the applications and middleware available for the other 5 operating systems via in-memory, secure, high performance connections.

Solaris on System z would become in fact the third UNIX or UNIX-like operating system for the mainframe. Linux is "UNIX-like" of course, and z/OS is UNIX. (z/OS contains z/OS UNIX System Services, a complete, certified implementation of UNIX.) [Update: One develops z/TPF applications nowadays using Linux (e.g. gcc), and z/TPF is acquiring lots of in-built software familiar to UNIX users, so arguably z/TPF is at least trending toward acquiring UNIX-like characteristics.]

Now that Solaris on System z looks like a not-too-distant capability, do you think you'll be trying it?

by Timothy Sipples

August 16, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

What's in a name? Send us your feedback.

In watching the recent Transformers movie - and seeing/hearing the word "mainframe" come up a few times - I began to wonder about just what the name stands for. 

On one hand, it's not uncommon that some mainframe enthusiasts consider the name itself to be somewhat archaic - to suggest that perhaps the vitality and new innovation around the mainframe platform is cheated by the antiquity of its own name.

On the other hand, the most common public uses of the term recently seem to be coming from very youthful and non-intuitive sources.

I took a spin around the web and found a number of interesting uses of the word "mainframe."  You might be surprised at what I found.  Some are old and others new - but each of them are surprisingly cool.

So here is the question:  Is the word "mainframe" lugging baggage behind it, or is it actually, well, cool?

Lady Mainframe - the avatar host of the popular internet gaming news source, Gaming News with Lady Mainframe.

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Techno DJ in Germany, known as "DJ Mainframe"

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From the mid-80's toy series G.I. Joe, here is computer specialist "Mainframe."

 

YO JOE!

 

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Here's another toy named "Mainframe," complete with push-button action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Creative services and entertainment consulting firm.

by Kevin Acocella

July 13, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (3)

Skills shortage?

Been following a conversation on the IMS listserver about how to keep IMS data for 15-20 years (e.g. for legal reasons or whatever). Started with good technical recommendations and moved on to what about the skills? No point in having the data if you don't have anyone who knows IMS in 20 years time. Just read this great entry on the subject:

Why blame somebody else for missing skills. Every company should have a list of critical skills. If that company takes skill seriously, they will know that they need to educate some people with IMS.

It should not be that difficult to hire some students from university, tell them if they start learning IMS they will have a job for the next 20 years and off you go. Or something like they did in Germany "Small computers, small salary, big computer, big salary". Or tell them a Java/PHP/C/C++/J2EE programmer competes in a global market with 100 Mio chinese and people from india. How about somebody who knows TSO and JCL? Likely to compete with less than 10000 people in the world.

Sure it takes at least 2-5 years till they can walk alone, but it's worth the effort.

Spot on.

by pwarmstrong

February 22, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

eWeek on Mainframe Vitality

eWeek: Long Live the Mainframe!

eWeek is long on the mainframe, as noted in this article reported from the SHARE conferrence last week in Tampa.

Here's the story: eWeek: Long Live the Mainframe

It gives some great attention to the academic initiative as well as the $100 million mainframe simplification effort.

What's cooler is the increased attention that zNextGen is getting.  It's the core of the youth movement around the mainframe with over 200 members from over 80 companies (led by a 23 year old mainframe whiz, no less).

by Kevin Acocella

February 20, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MASTERS OF THE MAINFRAME!!!!

Masters of the Mainframe!!!

The mainframe continues to attract new talent and enthusiasm from some of the brightest students in IT and business programs today.

Check out just a few of the new faces – each of whom competed in the 2006 IBM Master the Mainframe Contest.

Across the U.S. and Canada, over 1,000 students put their mainframe skills to the test in pursuit of a number of awards, including an opportunity to visit IBM’s Poughkeepsie facility in New York – the center of the universe as far as mainframe research, development and manufacturing is concerned.

Contests like these are being planned worldwide.  Last year's student mainframe contest in the U.K. drew over 700 students.

Keep an eye on this blog for more information on the contest winners.  Awards will be presented formally to the top students at an event in Poughkeepsie in March.  We’ll be sure to post the pictures from the event.

*Send pictures of you and your mainframe to kma@us.ibm.com.

 

by Tim Washer

February 6, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Strong Mainframe Growth Continues

IBM announced 3rd quarter earnings yesterday afternoon. TheStreet.com reported the details, along with other financial news outlets. System z hardware revenues surged 25% versus 3Q2005 (then the first quarter of System z9-109 sales). Software, particularly WebSphere and Tivoli, also did extremely well. Both those software brands have huge System z portfolios, it's worth noting.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that unit shipments ("MIPS") must have grown more than 25% since price per unit is declining.

Just one word: wow.

by Timothy Sipples

October 18, 2006 in Future Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Old and Getting Older

[Crossposted from The New Mainframe.] Part of my challenge in writing this blog is to provide enough meaningful information about why I'm in Japan without giving away sensitive IBM details. Please bear with me if I seem a little abstract in this update, but that's the reason.

Several days ago I mentioned that it's harmful to your business if you allow your IT infrastructure, including your mainframe, to deteriorate. Inertia can often be the most costly decision of all. One simple situation that everyone can understand is if a person is bleeding. Of course that person would seek a doctor immediately, understanding there will be costs. But the costs of inaction are far more dire: death is much more expensive.

The analogy is imperfect but valid. Let your mainframe age too much — get behind in your upgrades, hang onto old hardware too long, rely on unsupported middleware — and your business will suffer. You will pay more for software, maintenance, and support (if you can get it) every month. You will buy demonstrably more expensive computing solutions as your businesspeople desperately try to deliver new function, bypassing what you've neglected. You will bleed talented employees who will leave to work for a more progressive company. You will compete against businesses who have better technology and thus superior business functionality. You will actually experience more planned and unplanned outages with longer recovery times — newer hardware and software have substantial improvements in those areas. And you will risk compromising your customers' privacy because newer systems have better encryption facilities than older systems. Already one corporation which couldn't protect customers' privacy went out of business.

I guess it's no secret that the most technologically advanced industrialized country in the world, Japan, is struggling with this issue of aging IT infrastructure spectacularly and uniquely.

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is part of the answer. SOA fosters reuse of IT assets so that your technical infrastructure can respond much more quickly and easily to changing business demands. It's also one of the few ways businesses and governments will be able to reduce their IT expenses over the long term while actually improving their capabilities. SOAs will only be successful if the mainframe provides services (the S in SOA) and hosts at least the major part of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). (The ESB is the core foundation of any moderately sized SOA.) Quite simply, if your mainframe is not the key ingredient in your SOA then you really don't have an SOA strategy.

Mainframes are as youthful as you want them to be, and they deliver the highest qualities of service for the lowest total costs per transaction. SOA means you can exploit your mainframe's abilities for maximum business advantage. You can bet at least one of your competitors has already figured out these facts.

by Timothy Sipples

February 11, 2006 in Future Permalink | Comments (9 ) | TrackBack (0)

DB2 meets CMDB and RSS: an interesting future

I have known BMC's Fred Johannessen for quite a few years now and always enjoyed working with him. I am enjoying his blog and I figured he has some ideas worth considering and analysing. I wish BMC would just hand him the money and say: "go build this" because the idea is really interesting.

The idea in question? CMDB meets RSS. (Configuration Management Database meets Really Simple Syndication).

Why not use RSS as a mechanism to announce changes to the CMDB? Interested parties (business user, network ops, development, or DBAs say, could subscribe to a particular system relationship, and if it changed, they could be automatically notifed of the change.

Fred makes the great point that most organisations don't have mature change management processes in place. The niceness of RSS in this context, is that its very good for the kind of lightweight workflows where the process is not that well-defined.

Fred's key insight - Change management above all requires effective communication, and RSS is an effective and lightweight communications and notification.

So what vendor will be the first to market with an RSS or ATOM-based change management notification client?

by James Governor

December 12, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

SOA is going to need mainframe skills and disciplines

One of my tenets on SOA is: "Screw the S, screw the O, its about Architecture."

The mainframe's shared resource model means it is naturally somewhat service oriented. Shared resources, shared services... same difference. Of course most mainframe apps weren't constructed with flexibility in mind, but that doesn't mean they aren't going to play a huge role in SOA deployments at the great majority of Fortune 500 firms.

What does this mean? SOA is a huge opportunity for people with experience of developing to, and running, large scale data center environments. That means the zEcosystem. Sure you'll need to learn some new jargon, and rethink a few things, but that's why its called an opportunity, rather than a certainty.

Joe McKendrick over at ZDNet is writing a blog on service oriented architecture that any mainframe-savvy architect should be reading, because Joe understands that SOA involves governance, and tensions between different takes on the subject, and brings these tensions out in his blog.

The last few years have not been about SOA, but JBOWS (just a bunch of web services). The distributed folks may have standardised the interfaces, but they haven't yet stepped up to the plate on quality of service, governance and architectural discipline.

In Joe's latest piece, a rundown of a SOA Insitute event, he argues: "The same deliberate methodologies and processes that go into managing mission-critical mainframe or data center applications need to be applied to SOA".

It does sound like an opportunity doesn't it?

Its always good to disagree with your competitors in public so I let me take this opportunity to push back against Ron Schmelzer at ZapThink. According to McKendrick he said: "Focus on the smallest problem you can and apply the SOA approach."

Focus is good but I disagree with the reductionism- in my opinion that is the way to create "lunchbox services" (see the article), not SOA. How granular to make the service is an absolutely key question, which imho can't be reduced to make it small. Make the granularity of the service and you may end up doing something stupid, illustrated by this great story from Service Oriented Enterprise.

SOA requires discipline and architectural rationalisation, with some data and process modeling, and certainly with some knocking together of heads, both internal and external. Don't take my word for it - check out this case study from Sprint. Ed Vasquez, leading Sprint's SOA efforts, is a great guy, very helpful, with plenty of experience of the macro-issues in SOA governance. I quote from the Infoworld article here: “One of the nice things about SOA adoption is that adoption, implementation, and deployments can be incremental as long as you keep your eye on the bigger picture.”

Vendors in the mix at Sprint include Attachmate, GT Software and Infravio. But Ed's SOA governance approach is more important than any software. 

The granularity of mainframe services being orchestrated and managed is a gating factor for success in SOA. That is why people with mainframe skills should be thinking about it.

Its about architecture, right, and who understands that best but those with mainframe experience?

So how about a call to action to close, after my little bomb the other day: It would be interesting to see IBM create a zSeries SOA forum, comprised of a number of mainframe integration and performance management vendors, and ideally customer architects too.

by James Governor

November 4, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (1)

A Big Machine Makes A Big Impression

I am a student of the Berufsakademie Berlin, which is an organization where students can get a degree after three years of study. During the time between the lectures I have to work in placements. I am employed by IBM Germany as an industrial trainee and get practical experience and my degree at the same time.

My longest internship so far has taken me far away from home: To Bedfont, a borough of London. Whilst this is great enough on its own, the fact that I am working in the Technical Sales Support Team for the zSeries makes things even better. Before I came here I knew literally nothing about the mainframes, apart from the fact that IBM has become a giant with these machines.

Now, after my time in this team has come to its end, I have got insight into many interesting aspects about mainframes. Most of all I am impressed by their abilities in resources sharing, either using LPARs or z/VM. Another great thing is their reliability. It is possible to reboot an image under z/VM or an LPAR without affecting another system at all. Whilst usually this is not necessary in production systems it is very useful for development and test systems.

It is an interesting experience to work with big machines and always keep security and availability in mind. I definitely will install Linux on my home PC and get more familiar with it, when I go back.

IBM has started an academic zSeries initiative and our team takes part in it in Europe. Our team tries to establish contacts to lots of universities across Europe, to offer them material for zSeries lectures. This material is mainly about the operating systems on the zSeries (z/OS, z/VM, Linux) but the student learns a lot about the general architecture as well. I help preparing this material, because as a newcomer, I am the perfect tester.

It is really encouraging to see how many universities all across Europe have expressed their interest so far. Recently I found an IBM press release regarding this initiative where I found universities in the U.S. and Canada, Europe, China, Australia and Latin America which already signed for these programs.

Newer generations, young inexperienced people like myself, are more familiar with Intel PCs and their operating systems (Windows or Linux in some extent). But the mainframe world definitely needs young people who can design, develop and manage the big machines. The universities simply try to serve that need and IBM offers a lot of support for that. I can imagine that this might convince many more universities to offer zSeries lectures as well.

IBM creates lots of material which the universities can use and sometimes even provide teachers as well. The material is designed in such a way that it manages the balance between explaining the important and often confusing things and explaining them in such a way, that the reader remembers that stuff, when he has finished a lecture.

IBMers around the world are working on the zSeries education material and our team here in Bedfont is providing exercises and tutorials. At the same time they provide all the materials you need for such exercises. They even prepared a z/VM image with several guests (including a z/OS and another z/VM guest) to serve as a playground for the students on a mainframe in Montpellier / France. So the universities are not required to buy a mainframe as a “byproduct“ of getting their new course. :-)  IBM really tries to approach only the educational point of view and not the sales point of view.

I would like to visit such a lecture in my last year at university as well. Even if that is not possible, I am looking forward to a day event at my university where our team can introduce the mainframes to my fellow students. Most of all, I would like to come back to the IBM zSeries family. Maybe I will be able to write my dissertation next year about a topic related to the zSeries. And then there is still the question of where I will do my last two internships and what happens after my last year at university...

by s-bolz

October 19, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Open Documents -- Part 3

The battle over OpenDocument Format has begun and Microsoft is using their traditional brass knuckles approach. It was revealed this week in some blogs that a recent article, "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument", which ran at Fox News was written by a journalist hired by Microsoft. (See an interesting rebuttal). The stakes are high. The issue is who owns documents, the document creator or the software that was used to create the documents.

Let's make it personal and down to earth. Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children all have computers on the local area network at home. They recently had a busy weekend. Mr. Smith created a presentation which he will take to a conference and present using his ThinkPad. Mrs. Smith wrote a newsletter which will be distributed to dozens of members in a local non-profit organization she belongs to. The Smiths' daughter completed a school term paper replete with graphical images, clip art, and photographs. The Smiths' son is a graduate student in business and he developed a spreadsheet to reflect a ten-year financial plan for a new business idea. Who owns these four documents? (read more)

by John Patrick

October 15, 2005 in Future, History, Innovation, People, Programming, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

SOA and Mainframe

I have just read this:

Mainframes 2005: Politically Correct and Good for Business

At last week's SHARE User Events in Boston, the editors of 5 Minute Briefing had the opportunity to meet and speak with industry practitioners and vendors from all points of the data center. We've come away convinced that the mainframe has seen a renaissance, and is now the platform of choice for open systems and open standards (SOA) initiatives. As one IBM executive pointed out to us, the word "mainframe" may have not been politically correct a few years ago, but more and more vendors now are trying to point out how "mainframe-like" their products are. For more insight into issues that affect data centers, subscribe to Database Trends and Applications magazine at www.dbta.com/subscribe.html.

SOA - agree, bring it on.

Mainframe-like - anyone like to supply a definition? Here are a few bits from Wikipedia:

Modern mainframe computers have abilities not so much defined by their performance capabilities as by their high-quality internal engineering and resulting proven reliability, "expensive" but high-quality technical support, top-notch security, and strict backward compatibility for older software. These machines can and do run successfully for years without interruption, with repairs taking place whilst they continue to run. Modern mainframe computers have abilities not so much defined by their performance capabilities as by their high-quality internal engineering and resulting proven reliability, "expensive" but high-quality technical support, top-notch security, and strict backward compatibility for older software. These machines can and do run successfully for years without interruption, with repairs taking place whilst they continue to run.

...corporations found new uses for their mainframes, since they can offer web server performance similar to that of hundreds of smaller machines, but with much lower power and administration costs...

Financial institutions have not experienced these security-related failures with their mainframes, so many organizations are reassessing their entire data handling practices, often focusing on data recentralization on secure systems

etc etc etc

by pwarmstrong

September 7, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

zNextGen at SHARE

The youth are stepping up (myself included).  Over 50 folks attended the zNextGen happy hour during SHARE last week.  I had the chance to meet with customers from Payless Shoes, CA, and Action Software to name a few.  There was a lot of great conversation and enthusiasm.

We're going to include all these zNextGen folks in talks with IBM on how to proceed into the future and recruit new talent to the platform.

IBM is launching a contest for US and Canada college students this fall semester.  We expect to drum up a lot of exposure and excitement around the platform.  This contest was put together by a small group of customers and IBMers (similar to the make up of zNextGen).  We know that a group of this makeup can accomplish great things and we are very excited about the future with this much larger group.

A little bit about the contest:
A team of IBM new hires, university students and non-IBM mainframe professionals have worked together since January to devise a contest that would help to get students interested in mainframes.  Our major focus was to create the contest in such a way that students with little/no mainframe experience could get some value out of the contest, along with students who may already have extensive mainframe experience. 

The contest will be run in the U.S. and Canada (excluding Quebec), and any student with a professor enrolled in the IBM Academic Initiative is eligible to compete. Enrolling is a simple, no cost process -- see http://www.developer.ibm.com/university/scholars/ for more information.

Each contestant will be given a mainframe user ID, and we'll provide an account for them so that they can remotely access a z/OS mainframe hub.

The contest is divided into three parts:

Part 1: Breaking the ice

We provide extensive screen shots and direction, guiding students along and telling them exactly what they need to do.  This part of the contest is designed to get students comfortable with navigating the mainframe user interface, as well as introducing them to some basic mainframe concepts.  The first 200 students to successfully complete this section get T-shirts.

Part 2: Practical experience

This section will require more work from the student.  Using the skills they learned in Part 1, they will perform some more extensive systems programmer-type tasks.  The first 25 students to successfully complete this section get a 4GB iPod mini.

Part 3:  Real world challenge

This section is very challenging, and will require extensive work from the student.  The third place student in this section gets a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP).  Second place gets a Sony PSP and a two-day trip to the IBM mainframe lab in Poughkeepsie, NY.  First place gets an IBM laptop and a trip to the mainframe lab in Poughkeepsie.

by Christopher Baran

August 30, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Mainframes and the Virtual Datacenter

A little more than five years ago (see "in the news") IBM announced that it would begin installing and supporting the Linux operating system on its mainframe computers. A lot has happened with Linux and with mainframes since then, but first of all, what is a mainframe? Is it a "main" frame, a main "frame", or something else? The wikipedia offers a history and perspective on mainframes, but my recollection is slightly different. IBM computers used to be constructed in steel "frames" that would fill a large building -- and required a lot of plumbing to provide the circulating water to keep them from overheating. In one of the frames was a "console" -- think of it like the keyboard of a PC -- which provided many dials and switches -- like an airliner cockpit -- that enabled the "system operator" to control the computer and tell it what to do. That particular frame was the "main frame".

Today's most sophisticated mainframe, the Z9, stands a mere 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighs 3,836 lbs, and occupies a footprint of 27 square feet. I was in the room at the Hotel W last month when the Z9 was announced. It was quite impressive to see the sleek space-age system on stage with the power to replace thousands of separate servers. More than a billion dollars was invested in the engineering and development of the machine.

People have talked about the death of the mainframe for years but after seeing the Z9, you can be sure they are not going away for a very long time. In addition to the Z9, IBM announced an extension of it's incredibly powerful virtualization engine software. The combination of the new mainframe and the new software will make it possible to turn a real datacenter into a virtual datacenter. This is a really big deal. CEO's, CIO's, and CFO's are making plans to consolidate their datacenters using the new combo because virtual datacenters require fewer people, offer more reliability, and are much less costly to operate. Sounds good, but what is a datacenter and what is a virtual datacenter? (read more)

by John Patrick

August 15, 2005 in Future, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Looking back at the "graphically" challenged mainframe gives a view to its future

I'm new to blogging, so I'm taking a stab at this. I've got the pleasure of attempting to keep the flame going for this venerable platform. In the mid 90's, it appeared that someone was trying to blow out our pilot light. Right now, it seems like we are cooking pretty well and the flame is burning brightly.

Where's the mainframe going?

In many cases, it's just as important to look at where it has been and how history constantly repeats itself.
I'm a child of the mainframe. My dad was into computer operations so wanting to be like him, I took up the charge as well. My high school was pretty progressive. I got to learn "wire on board" programming at an early age. I was one of the few males in typing class so that I could reduce my error decks for the punch card machine. Back then, the mainframe's interface was that punch card and later, the 3270 terminal. Not much of a human computer interface.... The person acquiring the terminal or punch card was an IT operations person. And then, something happened....the PC was invented. And this was the beginning of chaos, of a sort. The mainframe people were no longer entitled to that terminal. Someone else was in charge of buying freshly minted PCs. I whole new crew of people came in to put "lipstick" on those boring terminal screens. And a whole new style of graphic programming came in.

Well, that pretty face of graphic programming is now a staple in our lives. It's changed our world. It's made the back rooms of many businesses available and accessible to a much wider range of consumers and business partners. Wait times have been reduced or eliminated via a paperless society. Public and private sectors have collaborated in an attempt to provide a safer environment for the community. Collaboration is at an all time high.

The simple transaction of the past, has now evolved to multiple transactions in a workflow. The difference is the launch point is no longer isolated to the 3270 and point of sale terminals, it could also be from a web browser and that could launched from a cell phone, kiosk or PC in the home. And the workflow is evolving. In addition to executing the requested transaction, additional workflows are inserted to manage operational risks or look for better value, such as credit checks and instant auctions. Transaction volumes have increased tremendously. The borders for commerce have been opened up globally.

And at the same time, information is more accessible now as well. In order to speed the paperless society, data is captured to faciliate fast access and reduce complexity for the next time that a transaction might be processed. Privacy considerations are paramount. Information must be accessible and protected at the same time. While this has always been true, the additional windows into the back room have opened up the channels of data to greater exposure by the masses.

And yet, the back room, home to the mainframe, has evolved in parallel. It has not been an innocent bystander watching time pass it by. New access methods, such as Service Oriented Architectures and the Internet can be directly accessed via the mainframe. New protection mechanisms for intrusion defense, data confidentiality and regulatory compliance analysis have evolved. Main stays of the past, such as fault avoidance, continuous availability and rapid diagnosis and repair have been enhanced to keep pace with the growing transaction volumes. Modern management interfaces have evolved and virtualization of services have continued to make this mainframe more accessible and usable by the mass of programmers that grew up in the "graphic" programming generation. These servers themselves have become "eco-friendly" leveraging a fraction of the energy, floor space and cooling of past generations of computers. And finally, new business problems are being solved in creative ways, by leveraging grids of Linux systems in conjunction with the venerable mainframe operating system. But these boxes are no longer alone. They are surrounded by open standards and accessability to the wealth of capabilities in the PC and RISC based computers. Seamless, end to end computing is now possible for the enlightened business that is looking to leverage the best of all worlds. There never was a time when one size fit all businesses. And  that remains true today.

The good news is that the Information Superhighway has been well paved for the next generation of computing. The mainframe remains an integral part of that system and all on ramps are open and ready to continue adding new destinations. And it sure is easier to get access to these systems than the ASCII paper tape and punch card of its original manifestations. Badge access is no longer required either. You can enter the mainframe at your nearest web portal.

You've got a lot of systems talking about mainframe qualities of service at main street prices. In the future, I'll talk about how those platforms are really "almost as good as a mainframe" and discuss some of the unique capabilities that provide value. As a start, think about Storage Keys in the hardware and system software and how they are leveraged to isolate applications, data and system functions from each other as the basis of the IBM integrity statement. Other areas are Resource Recovery Services that enable two phased commit and simplify business process integration. What do you see as unique characteristics of the mainframe?

by JimPorell

August 9, 2005 in Future Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Mainframe Geek

Recently on Slashdot I found myself reading many postings on the topic "What is Mainframe Culture?". It turns out that Mainframers have a real sense of identity. In fact, they seem to me like the prototype geeks. A geek is defined as a "person who is interested in technology". I went to Geekfinder and entered 'mainframe' as search expression. Sure enough, the result list had over 2000 matches. What would qualify you to apply for one of those?

You might be a real mainframe geek if ...

• YOU WRITE ALL YOU EMAIL UPPERCASE.
• when called to court, you look for a Principle Of Operation to take your oath on.
• you still think they should have never started casual Friday.
• you have a large supply of punchcards that you use to write shopping list on the back
• you have either grey hair or no hair.
• all your tattoos are in EBCDIC.

Seriously. There is one personality trait that mainframe people learned early on: to share. Sharing a bag of candies means that you don't eat them all yourself. It also means not to give them away to the first guy around, but to save some for your friends. Mainframers grew up with the concept that they don't own the machine and are not the only one online. That they cannot grab all the resources all the time. They had to apply for machine time to run their programs through the reader. When they started to use screen interface, they logged on to the "Time Sharing Option". Writing batch jobs, the first thing to declare is which resources are needed.

The concept of virtualization, sharing a system through the use of abstracted and architected interfaces, is inherent in the mainframe culture. Slowly the Unix geeks find out that more than one application can run in an Operating System. Recently more and more Windows geeks run multiple Operating Systems on the same machine. On Virtual Machines. Pretty soon, they all will cherish the mainframe culture. They will think twice before re-booting an OS just because there could be many other applications running. They will no longer turn the power off just because they see the blue screen of death. Clint Boulton has written a piece about a 24 year old programmer now hooked on mainframes.

In a virtualized IT infrastructure the server, network and storage resources are shared among all the business applications. Running a successful data center means to assign these resources to the applications and transactions according to business priorities along efficiency, reliability, availability and performance. If this what you do, treat yourself to a state-of-the-art caffeine delivery vehicle. You are real mainframe geek.

by Boas Betzler

July 25, 2005 in Future, History, People Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBack (1)