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Another New Mainframe Customer...and It's a Big One

BC Card, the largest credit card company in Korea, has announced that they have chosen IBM System z as their next generation IT infrastructure. The company has never had a mainframe before.

They have chosen System z10, z/OS, CICS Transaction Server, DB2 for z/OS, WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, and several other software products. They are also consolidating many distributed servers to System z10.

"We chose System z for its continuous operation, service quality made available through IBM's mainframe software solutions, and economic returns for the years ahead," said Jeongkyu Lee, Chief Information Officer at BC Card. "We're aiming to become Korea's premier Global Payment Service Provider. We see System z as a critical success factor for our business objectives and service level requirements for customers."

Congratulations to BC Card, and welcome to our community.

by Timothy Sipples

December 16, 2009 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

IBM Eating Its Own zAnalytics Cooking

Let's go right to IBM's press release:

IBM today announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics, which will provide IBM sales teams and developers new levels of insight to better meet the needs of clients worldwide. The cloud will launch initially with more than a petabyte of data, the equivalent of more than 300 billion ATM transactions.

IBM also announced a new solution, the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud, for clients to build their own private cloud environments based on the same Cloud infrastructure that IBM is using internally....

"Blue Insight" will run on a System z10 mainframe computer with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography — capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second, with redundant backup support.

The steady drumbeat continues. It is quite obvious that IBM has a clear and strong vision (and reality) to promote System z for business intelligence applications. Is your organization understanding yet what IBM is delivering?

by Timothy Sipples

November 17, 2009 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

The Mainframe's Future is Analytically Cloud-y

I have blogged several times about IBM's renewed (and bigger) push into analytics and business intelligence, and so has James Governor recently. IBM has completely changed its strategy, pushing aggressively to build and to promote business intelligence-related solutions on System z, especially those concerning "operational business intelligence" where the mainframe has unique advantages. Customers have been pleading with IBM for years to take another look at BI on z, and IBM is stepping forward (finally) with some new and big ideas.

I remember talking with a CTO at a major financial services company years ago about his problems meeting his end users' requirements for more and better business reporting. There was (and is) an ever-growing need for more and more timely analytical information. He pointed out that his two mainframes literally ran almost the entire core business efficiently and cost-effectively, processing all the core transactions and data for his firm and scores of others. (Only two machines! This company also served several other financial institutions, offering common services. True cloud computing before the term was invented.) But, for reporting, it was no longer viable for his development team to write "yet another custom program." They wanted to take a more streamlined, standardized, end user-driven approach that could respond much more quickly to ad hoc business requirements.

At the time he asked IBM for a solution, and they said, no problem, install additional servers — probably hundreds, to meet regulatory requirements for financial data security — start with a big ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) each night, run your analytics (on stale data, no doubt), and then push some of the (stale) results back to your operational databases on the mainframe. And the CTO, to his credit, said (closely paraphrasing) "Are you bulls**tting me? Go back to the drawing board. You're no better than Oracle." And he wasn't the only CTO saying much the same, often quite forcefully.

So IBM went back to the drawing board, and how. IBM quickly realized that there's no other feasible way to solve many major analytical and business intelligence problems without placing those functions directly in and on the operational systems. And that quite often means mainframe hosting, of course. Ergo, IBM has invested heavily to imbue the mainframe with new BI-related capabilities: Cognos, SAFR, ILOG, dashboards, event-driven middleware, Smart Analytics Cloud for System z, etc. (More to come, I'm sure.) IBM has also introduced solution packages so customers can say, "I'll have one of those, please" and IBM can quickly present a complete proposal at a competitive price.

IBM is really onto something, I think. I am hearing from so many customers about their pressing, unsolved BI and analytical problems — and how if they can solve these problems they would gain tremendous competitive advantage. I'm also hearing from people who manage IT infrastructure who are frustrated with the current too-high cost deployment patterns for these solutions. A lot of them are seeing massive and growing server farms that run busy for only a couple hours per night, per week, or even per quarter. That sort of deployment is unsustainable from a cost point of view, so managers are certainly looking at virtualization and cloud computing. But one problem is security: the information these systems handle is often extremely sensitive, and only the mainframe (with its unique technologies and security certifications) is capable enough to virtualize many of these sensitive data workloads. I am also hearing increasing problems with the ETL step: it's getting more and more difficult to physically move data through the ETL stage(s) as operational data grows. Why not improve the efficiency of ETL by bringing data warehouses physically closest to operational databases? System z does that best. Better yet, how about avoiding ETL completely, at least for certain tasks?

I am seeing high and growing demand for System z-based BI solutions. Many customers already "get it." The global economic environment is causing many others to reconsider their architectural approaches, to incorporate the mainframe more strategically (and more directly) into their BI/analytic service delivery. I think IBM is quite smart to invest in this area, and I'm pleased to see IBM's new thinking and its results.

by Timothy Sipples

October 6, 2009 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Random Mainframe News for Early July, 2009

The Mainframe Blog takes no summer (northern hemisphere) vacation, nor does mainframe-related news. Here are pointers to the recent mainframe stories and happenings that interest me and hopefully you as well.

by Timothy Sipples

July 1, 2009 in Events, Innovation Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Think Again

IBM is encouraging customers and policymakers to think more carefully about the choices they make in such diverse areas as electricity generation and distribution and....shipping frozen chickens and fresh carrots?!?! Yes indeed....

Our planet faces serious challenges. Information technology — yes, including mainframes — must rise to solve increasingly complex optimization problems. Sure, it's marketing, but the message is both serious and exciting for IT people like me. IT itself, poorly optimized, can negatively impact the planet. Certainly this blog has raised the point repeatedly that mainframes help slash data center energy costs like nothing else, and (some) IT people need to get past their prejudices and start implementing more mainframes and fewer servers averaging 5% busy. (And application and information architects need to stop sitting on the sidelines and actively help optimize data centers by making energy-sensitive architectural decisions. Infrastructure does matter a lot and must not be an afterthought.)

But it's not just about energy, and it's not only about the data center. For example, why does our planet still waste up to 50% of food? Why are we still supplying full power to vacant homes and offices? Why are over 40,000 Americans still dying every year in car accidents?

Let's solve some of these problems. We have the technology. What are we waiting for? What are you waiting for?

UPDATE: Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors, just released a study which evaluated 63 companies in the technology, consumer products, leisure, and drug sectors. They looked at corporate environmental policies, including focus on averting climate change. The #1 company? IBM. Tesco, Dell, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and Nike round out the top 6.

by Timothy Sipples

December 8, 2008 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Who do you trust? RFG? Yes. HP? No

In my last entry, I talked about the misleading information that HP provided regarding a consulting report to get off the mainframe. In that dialog, I also referenced the same consulting group giving pro-mainframe support and then asked rhetorically, who do you trust, RFG or RFG? I’ve worked closely with Robert Francis Group and I was wondering why they would have done this.

 

Well, it looks like RFG is a lot more trustworthy than HP who misused the consulting report. Today, RFG put out a press release in which their headline reiterated:

RFG Still Believes That the Mainframe Is One of the Best and Most Energy Efficient Platform Options. 

Well, it was certainly nice to see that and their explanation. Anyone hazard to guess when we might see a retraction or correction from HP?

by JimPorell

November 17, 2008 in Economics, History, Innovation Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

HP attacking the mainframe? Like a car vs. a truck

Well, HP is at it again. They are making more generalities about IBM’s venerable mainframe to scare customers off that platform. Check their facts and sources, though and you’ll find that something’s rotten in

Palo   Alto

. Their comparisons are just not realistic. In this note, I’ll be giving you some consolidation efforts that IBM has seen with its customers.

 

Before we get into that, though, let’s do a quick comparison benchmark to establish a baseline. Let’s compare a four passenger Mini Cooper car to a two passenger Freight liner truck cab . Benchmark 1: which is cheaper to commute to work in? Pretty obvious, but I’ll vote for the car. Especially given gas price vs. diesel now…the car is the “green” solution. Benchmark 2: We want to move the contents of our house. Most people would say the truck, but they’d be wrong. We need to accessorize and add a trailer to each vehicle. Now the Mini happens to put the tailpipe right in the middle of the car on many of their models. Why? You’d have to be a moron to put a trailer on their car. As for the truck, with a large enclosed trailer, you can put all kinds of materials in it. In fact, you might even put a couple of the Mini’s inside. So we’ve just proven that with the right benchmark, either solution is appropriate. But benchmarks aren’t reality either. Most people will move their family in the car and outsource to a shipping company to move the contents of their house. So continuing that analogy, there is no one computer that will solve all of a business’ problems, neither a mainframe nor a PC server will do the job by themselves. It’s all about collaboration and using the best servers for the right jobs.

 

So let’s get back to HP’s claims. I’m a little confused by Robert Frances Group claims right now. In the HP quoted report, they say you get less electricity and floor space with a PC server than you do with a mainframe. I’ve never seen a mainframe that only ran a single workload. Most of them will have transaction processing, batch, interactive, query and decision support running all at the same time. It’s true that you can take one workload off of a mainframe and run it on a PC server and then compare that PC server to a mainframe. The data might actually be real, but as information, it is “incredible”. A single PC server may be smaller than a mainframe and use less electricity (The car). But no single PC server is going to be comparable to a mainframe running multiple workloads. In fact, RFG published a paper in which they said a mainframe will use 3% of the electricity of a comparable PC server cluster attempting to accomplish the same workload. It will also use a fraction of the floor space. (The Truck). But don’t believe me….here’s exactly what they said:

 

RFG believes mainframe computing platforms have many of the characteristics that will ameliorate, if not eliminate, the current challenges data center managers face with power and cooling. First, mainframe power consumption and heat characteristics are, for many companies, the most efficient servers in the data center. This is true in an absolute sense, where the energy per square foot is lower than any data center system measured by our clients. More significantly, this is massively true in a relative sense, when comparing power used per transaction. On a total workload throughput basis, mainframe system power consumption is almost negligible when compared with distributed systems on a power per transaction basis. As power and cooling costs continue to rise, IT executives should reevaluate mainframe computers total cost and overall value in reducing data center operations costs.

Quote used with permission of Robert Francis Group.

 

So who are you going to believe? RFG or RFG? Well, in the HP cited paper, RFG just republished the results of a report done by HP. So don’t throw RFG under the bus. Just understand that it’s HP’s low quality and misleading information at work, once again.

 

As for the Alinean update, it’s a single workload in each example. And in them, they talk about the SAP application server. But what about the database server? Typically, if the application server is on z, the database server is in DB2 for z/OS. Did that move too? The labor costs for System z appear to be much higher than the norm for a business. The report discusses the price of an older mainframe and again, some incredible Software license charges. But what if SAP was added to a newer mainframe? How would that have compared in this report? What if it was added to an existing, newer mainframe, what would the incremental charges be as compared to net new computing servers?

 

HP mentions the BART system avoiding 50% of their paycheck errors. Wow…that sounds like a big number. They went to Peoplesoft, from what I guess was a homegrown application that was running on a mainframe…at least that’s what HP wants you to believe. So it sounds like the BART people are better running trains than they are at writing programs? I doubt it. That wouldn’t be fair to the hard working people at BART. But remember, if there are two paycheck errors a month and it goes down to one paycheck error a month, that’s a 50% reduction as well. (The Car). So sometimes the big numbers quoted are really just a meaningless indicator to scare you into thinking something else. How many errors a month was BART really seeing? I don’t know and neither do you based on HP's comments.

 

So let’s talk about something I do know about….consolidations of servers are occurring and System z has been a great place to do that. Nationwide and DGTI are two examples.

IBM has published a paper on SAP consolidation capabilities on System z. The HP press release described a customer that had mainframes and Windows servers. By eliminating the mainframe, they had a common skill set based on Windows. But how real is a customer with a single computing infrastructure? Maybe for relatively small customers, but not with larger ones. RENFE is the Spanish national rail agency. Prior to its reorganization into the two new operating companies, RENFE was composed of 18 separate business units, each with its own intranet system running various line of business applications. These included human resources systems, helpdesk applications and various internal communication portals. To drive better integration across the business and improve process efficiency, RENFE made a strategic decision to create a single information portal for all employees and that was based on System z.

 

IBM is eating its own cooking by consolidating many of it’s thousands of application and database servers onto System z. But that’s not the whole story either. They are also consolidating some onto System p and some onto System x. In each case, IBM is looking at underutilized stand alone servers, the baseline for the PC server marketplace and leveraging virtualization technologies to get a large reduction in physical server images. IBM is putting the right workload in the right place that makes sense for the business environment. (The Trucks).

 

We see constant examples of taking 100’s of underutilized standalone PC servers and consolidating through virtualization down to 10’s of higher utilized PC or RISC servers or individual mainframe servers. In each case, the customers are saving substantially on labor, environmental and capital costs. HP will tell you that 100’s to 10’s is good enough.

IBM mainframes, though, can get that down to single digits in many cases.

 

Look at HP’s Brazilian Navy example. A lot of folks may perceive that a mainframe could never go on a Battleship, Aircraft carrier, early warning aircraft or other military location. Well, those folks would be wrong. Today’s modern mainframe, the System z, going as far back as the zSeries z800 processor meets or exceeds the electrical, floor space, ambient temperature, humidity, air pressure and vibration specifications necessary to satisfy the locations in which those servers may be deployed. See page 12 to view a subset of these specifications. In addition, it provides operational redundancy built into the hardware architecture and operating systems that exceeds the availability requirements necessary to satisfy those particular business needs. And with its open programming models, including Java, J2EE, C/C++, in addition to the venerable COBOL and PL/I capabilities, it provides a hosting environment to capture those programming needs.

 

In fact, development belongs on the desktop. The most creativity and tooling is possible in that desktop and you can reboot the system at will to test your applications. IBM’s Rational Developer for System z (RDz) and Rational Team Concert suites provide an Integrated Development Environment that can leverage the simplicity of the open programming environment through its Eclipse.org tool base, but easily apply those skills and knowledge to mainframe application deployment. You want mainframe development skills? You have them in your hands already. Get the tools and put those people to work.

 

One of the principals of the mainframe has always been that the operating system, middleware and hardware are responsible for data locking, security, system resilience, storage management and capacity management. This enables multiple workloads to operate as individual processes and maintain the integrity of the system and the data. On other platforms, it’s typically the application that is responsible for many of these characteristics. In order to achieve these qualities of service, additional products must be acquired and additional code may have to be written by application developers to deliver these qualities. The point of this all is that a business might actually reduce the amount of code necessary to achieve their business objectives if it was targeted for deployment on System z and reduce their operational risk at the same time. To summarize this point, it can be the same code from distributed systems in a mainframe operational container and deliver superior operational performance. Same code, different container with superior operations model.

 

So this started by pointing out inaccuracies in the HP press release. How can a business use that information? Well, maybe to buy an individual compute server, that information may be helpful (The Car). But looking at an enterprise that needs to satisfy multiple business needs, it doesn’t appear too helpful at all (The Truck). They use Apples to compare to

Oranges

. Customers continue to grow their compute power on IBM mainframes. New problems are being solved in creative ways, leveraging the best of the mainframe in collaboration with other systems. Like RENFE, get on board the IBM mainframe.

 

 

by JimPorell

November 12, 2008 in Economics, Innovation, People, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

The New Mainframe: The System z10 BC

Today IBM is introducing the new System z10 BC. At quick glance, it's another home run for IBM. This new machine really is every bit like IBM's top-end Enterprise Class machine, with the same quality attributes and functions, but in a smaller (half size) package covering the small and medium capacity ranges. "Medium" is getting very large, though.

It's surprising to see IBM introducing this model this year. I think mainframe watchers were expecting the z10 BC perhaps in mid-2009.

One piece of big news: big price reductions. IBM has slashed the price of z10 BC specialty processors (with memory) by 50%. Also, the press release now openly says "starting under $100,000."

I'll likely have more to say on the Mainframe Blog in the coming days but, for now, IBM offers plenty of z10 BC goodness for your reading enjoyment. And you can get your own z10 BC as early as October 28, 2008.

UPDATE: Here are some of the interesting highlights as I see them, in no particular order:

• IBM continues to offer more value while reducing prices. As mentioned, the specialty engine pricing (with memory!) stands out. Novell and Red Hat are supporting this new pricing with Linux promotions, for example. Also, there is another "technology dividend" (10% lower MSUs versus the z9 BC). One of the most interesting technology dividends is the A01 model: there is now a 3 MSU mainframe! This is fantastic news for the smallest mainframe customers.
• Full speed uniprocessor performance looks to be about 42% higher than the z9 BC. That's a healthy jump, although for many workloads (certain crypto, decimal floating point, Linux, Java, XML) that figure probably undercalls the improvement.
• There are many more capacity models available than even the z9 BC. That helps improve efficiency and lower costs.
• Minimum memory is now 4 GB with a dedicated 8 GB HSA. That's nice for customers with less-demanding memory requirements and probably explains a little of IBM's lower pricing. Maximum usable memory is up to a hefty 248 GB, but until June next year the maximum is 120 GB. Obviously there's a higher density memory part coming, and it's nice that IBM is telling us that so we can plan ahead and know the z10 BC can grow, particularly in consolidation projects.
• Speaking of which, in terms of overall positioning the z10 BC is now a much more capable consolidation server, helping sustain much larger consolidation projects than the z9 BC. This factor should be very helpful as consolidation and virtualization becomes much more pressing in even small data centers.
• There are no dedicated spares in a maximally configured z10 BC (10 engines activated), but if you want a spare it's a lot easier to do: just configure only 9 (or fewer) engines. That's much more realistic for more customers.
• The I/O has been improved in quite interesting ways, including z High Performance FICON (zHPF) and elimination of some planned outages for I/O upgrades.
• HiperDispatch is supported on the z10 BC, along with all the other big z10 processor improvements such as the 1 MB page size.
• There's a new and unique CPU Measurement Facility feature, to collect system activities at the processor level without inducing different behavior in microcode levels and above. Actually, it's not completely new -- apparently it's been a poorly advertised feature in previous machines, available to IBM engineers. But now it can be activated on-the-fly, without re-IPL (rebooting) the system, and IBM is opening it up more. This should be quite helpful in chasing down deeply buried bugs and performance issues. IBM has always been exceptional in system serviceability, so it's nice to see they aren't resting.

What new capabilities in the z10 BC are interesting to you?

by Timothy Sipples

October 21, 2008 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

OpenSolaris for System z Now Available

Sine Nomine Associates has now made its first OpenSolaris for System z release available for free and public download. This is a "prototype" (but working) release, available to all who wish to learn and to explore this additional mainframe operating system.

Congratulations to Sine Nomine on achieving this significant milestone.

by Timothy Sipples

October 16, 2008 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

How Mainframe-Like

I was in San Jose for the SHARE conference week before last, always a good show.  Since I don't live in San Jose, it meant travel and in this case air travel.  On the plane I snagged the Sky Mall magazine from the seat pocket for a little light reading. (Sleep is a good thing to pursue while in flight.  Maybe it would help?)

In the Tiger Direct section of Sky Mall, I found the "X300 3 User Expansion Kit" from NComputing.  Remember when computers could have more than one keyboard?  Oh, and they could have more than one screen.  Oh, and the screen and keyboard usually went together as something called a "terminal".  Yep - those were the days. Well, they're back. Ahhh...

Ironic, isn't it, how invention rears its head in the most surprising places.  With all the surplus compute power of small computers, someone at NComputing [re]created the ability for more than one person to share a single PC with no loss of the "your personal settings" experience. Nice! To their credit, the inventors have rendered this product runnable on Linux as well as the ubiquitous Windows.

Truly this is a nice piece of work.  But to us mainframers, umm, hello?  Why has no one done this before?  We've been putting terminals on the desks of hundreds and thousands of users for years. (Indeed, some people mistakenly apply the term "mainframe" to any computer which directly servces more than one user.)  I gotta say "way to go" to the folks who now allow us to do this with a PC. But I also have to ask "what took you so long?".

A sample of this little multi-user beastie is here:

         http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=102157712

-- R;

by sirsanta

August 30, 2008 in Innovation Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)