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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 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.

Did You See the SDF III Announcement? :-)

Some blog readers might know Screen Definition Facility II (SDF II). This IBM tool helps developers create common, easy-to-use 3270 user interfaces more quickly. SDF II has been around for at least two decades, and that greatly exceeds my professional IT career, so I can only guess there was an original SDF I. (Was there?) SDF is still popular, and you can still order it.

If you close your eyes (permanently) and pretend that mainframes didn't evolve over the past 20 years, SDF II is the end of your story. You'd believe that there's no other way for a user to interact with a mainframe, at least directly, except through 3270 terminal screens. Who wouldn't prefer a mouse and graphical interface, particularly a Web interface? OK, maybe the airline check-in agent, who is still a lot faster getting you onto your flight using the traditional interface.

I'm still not sure why so many people get this aspect of mainframes wrong, that the mainframe requires a particular user interface.

Today at IBM, a mainframe serves most of our "w3" internal Web pages. (Because it's the most cost-effective solution.) If you polled IBMers to ask what server provides those pages, most wouldn't have a clue. Except for the fact "w3" works extra-reliably and with consistently excellent performance, users cannot perceive any differences.

We use a great deal of WebSphere Portal on our mainframe — it's our SDF III, so to speak. IBM also introduced WebSphere Dashboard Framework Version 6.0 for both z/OS and Linux on System z late this year. Together with Portal, Dashboard Framework delivers personalized content with advanced user controls. There are features like charting, alerting, and what I call "business blogging." Anything that a Web browser can do a mainframe can deliver, and the tools to create advanced user interfaces are quite sophisticated. There's a good demo available if you want to see what 2007's mainframe looks like to its users.

If WebSphere Portal, Dashboard Framework, and Lotus ActiveInsight (which runs on Linux on z) are too amazing, you should know that for years every copy of z/OS, and OS/390 before it, has included the IBM HTTP Server. Please start using it if you're aren't already. It's historical fact that the first Web server anywhere outside Switzerland was Stanford University's mainframe, and the first interactive Web application anywhere on the planet provided access to live mainframe information. You can download PHP for z/OS for example, at no charge, to build your own interactive Web applications. CICS Transaction Server also has HTTP capability at no additional charge. So do z/TPF and all the popular Linux on z distributions.

I'm still not sure why people are surprised when I point out these facts. Maybe the historic popularity of 3270 terminals (and terminal emulation) disguises the fact that mainframes have always provided multiple user interfaces over the years. Before I was born almost everyone interacted with mainframes via punch cards, and paper-based typewriter-like devices served as the interactive terminals of their era. Telephone interaction with mainframes via tone dialing came along and is still popular. GDDM and its predecessors provided fully graphical user interaction, even before the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Light pens and graphical vector displays were used starting at least 50 years ago. Now we have Web user interfaces, so is it any great surprise that mainframes started speaking HTML and HTTP before nearly every other server did?

I mention this issue because it's quite important to bust this particular myth, that the mainframe has only one type of (old fashioned) user interface. Most business users want graphical Web interfaces, so if you're not delivering them, who (what) will? I directly interact with a mainframe every day, but I cannot remember the last time I used a 3270 terminal emulator. The face you present to your users is critical, just as the face your company presents to your customers determines your business success.

There's nothing wrong with terminal interfaces per se, and many users are quite productive with them. I have a guess that many blog readers happen to like this traditional user interface, but what you use and prefer shouldn't influence the service you deliver to most business users.

Enjoy SDF III — er, WebSphere Dashboard Framework. :-)

the greaterIBM connection

One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he hosted a reception for a group of former executives of the company. A few were retired but most were in senior positions in other companies. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been expanded -- big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.

When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what's the matter, couldn't you find any other jobs?". Another change is that in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM. Some have come and gone multiple times. The turnover has strengthened the company.

And now we have social networks. In the early stages there was a perception that social networking meant eleven year-old girls on MySpace. Now businesses are realizing that it is more likely forty or fifty year-old business people on Facebook and Xing and LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse. The Internet has enabled everyone to be connected to everyone. Whether it is reading blogs, posting to wikis, updating status on Facebook, or making new connections through viral invitations, it is clear that a big company like IBM has a lot to gain by "connecting" past, present, and future IBMers to each other and with the company. IBM calls it "the greaterIBM connection". On Monday evening the company hosted a greaterIBM reception at the Metrazur at Grand Central Station in New York. More than four hundred attended. It was good to reconnect with some colleagues I had not seen for quite a few years.

Will social networking payoff in business terms? Nobody knows for sure but in my opinion it is certain -- as soon as we see the New York Times run a front page story that social networking is a fad, in trouble or peaking out we will have confirmation that success is a sure thing. A short term inhibitor is that there are so many different social networks. As web standards evolve I am confident that we will have a world where people will create one profile and then be able to decide which part of their profile is accessible in which networks.

IBM sees the potential and is investing the time and resources to build a large and active network. The possibilities are endless -- collaboration on projects, networking to hire or get hired, crafting deals, referrals to and from IBM and its business partners. As a bonus, social networking is fun and good for morale. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the greaterIBM connection as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 after nearly four decades at IBM, I don't really feel like I left anyway! The stories that I have been writing since 1998 over at the patrickWeb blog fall into a number of categories. One section is devoted to "IBM Happenings". I am sure I will also be writing and linking at the greaterIBM connection along with others. Cross linking will increase the overall "connectedness". That's what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking networking and the blogosphere so seriously.

the greaterIBM connection
Greater IBM Wiki

Big Blue Going Green

When you click on a link, a server in a datacenter somewhere gets the job of finding the web page or process you requested and delivering it to your browser over the Internet. One user on the Internet and one server at the other end serving one web page  is quite trivial. With millions of users around the world visiting the web site at unpredictable times and making unpredictable requests for millions of documents, pictures, music, videos, processes and transactions, it can become a nightmare for the people who are managing the datacenter. In the last five years there has been a six-fold increase in computing capacity and a 160 fold increase in storage. Along with the increase in capacity comes a huge increase in complexity and in electrical power usage.

Imagine looking through a window into a corporate datacenter (even though many of them are underground and have no windows) and you would see thousands of steel boxes mounted in six-foot-high racks with cables everywhere. This part of the problem has been addressed by new technology called virtualization, pioneered by IBM decades ago but greatly refined in recent years. (See "Virtually Real or Really Virtual"). Imagine a virtual datacenter. When you peer through the window you see three boxes -- a server, a disk storage device, and a  network card. There is a person at a large video console who is looking at what appears to be a dashboard. It shows a pictorial diagram of all the things going on in the datacenter. When one application area needs more server, storage, or network capacity the virtual datacenter automatically re-allocates capacity from another application area that currently has excess capacity. The virtual datacenter keeps resources  balanced, and when a component fails, the virtual datacenter automatically allocates a spare or underutilized component to take over. Virtual environments allow a big reduction in complexity but the even bigger problem is the huge growth in electrical power. In many cases companies are not able to get the additional power they need either because the power company does not have the capacity or because the datacenter is not designed to accommodate the physical changes necessary. Even if the power was readily available there is a negative impact on the environment. Hence, Big Green.
   
    IBM is redirecting $1 billion per year across  its businesses, mobilizing the company’s resources to dramatically  increase the level of energy efficiency in IT. The plan includes new  products and services to enable IBM clients to sharply reduce data  center energy consumption and make them more “green”. The problem is sizable. Big companies spend tons of money on power. In IBM's case it is a half billion dollars per year. The priority has been on getting the servers and storage that are needed to achieve various business results -- need another feature for the web site, throw in another server. Have growth in web visitors -- throw some more servers at it.

IBM is  leading by example. One of their "green" projects is consolidating 3,900 servers onto 30 new top of the line mainframe servers. The result is not only more compute power but dramatically less use of electrical power and space. One of IBM's customers went from 300 servers to six. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center consolidated 1,000 servers onto 300 and saved $20m in costs while freeing up datacenter space for more hospital beds.

Datacenters have been popping up everywhere -- most of them built before 2001. The datacenters are very large rooms full of many different kinds of equipment --   designed in the same  way they were decades ago -- like a kitchen where the stove puts out more heat so you turn on the air conditioning to cool down the entire room. The chef is comfortable and others in the room are freezing. IBM is designing datacenters for customers where  cooling "zones"  are specific to the type of equipment in each zone. Green datacenters not only save space and energy but also benefits the environment overall. In the past the electric bill has been allocated as overhead to all parts of the company. Redesigns are saving many millions of dollars. With the huge growth of energy for the IT infrastructure the CFO is reallocating energy  expenditures from general overhead to  the CIO so they can see  what IT is really costing.

IBM has made a sizeable consulting business out of helping customers understand their energy usage and then designing and supervising the building of new Datacenters and cooling equipment. Having overseen the construction of thirty million square feet of advanced space, IBM has learned a lot. The virtualization is helping a lot too. It can now optimize the use of servers around energy use. For example, as workload declines, perhaps at night, servers can be virtualized and "moved" to underutilized servers and then automatically turn off the servers that are not needed for a few hours.

(See other  IBM Happenings)

IBM Announces the "Gameframe"

The world's press is abuzz with IBM's announcement of the "gameframe." IBM will work closely with Hoplon Infotainment to marry the Cell processor with the IBM mainframe, resulting in a single system that can realistically simulate virtual worlds for huge numbers of online gamers.

The New York Times, Associated Press, International Herald Tribune, Forbes, and numerous other media outlets have the story. One typical example is here.

What's your reaction?

DB2 Viper is out of the cage

Viper has arrived for the mainframe.  Now officially called DB2 9 for z/OS, this release is a very big deal as it brings XML to the party with integration of both XML and relational structured data in the same database. 

Adding support of the XML data structure - vs. forcing XML into a relational structure - allows a more dynamic use of both  types of data.  Gone are the days that a complete database design task is required to simply add a field to a record in the database.  XML allows users to easily drop such a change directly into the existing database - evolving the hierarchical information without disrupting the traditional relational data. 

One of the DB2 9 beta customers even told us: “this is XML without compromise.”  It's what they've been waiting for.

What's more - this catapults the mainframe's strength and capability as an enterprise data server for SOA.  Historically, most business-critical transaction information resides on the mainframe but the majority of SOA efforts have been on other platforms.  Now, the mainframe is emerging as an exceptional SOA platform given its performance and security characteristics.  So this is perfect timing for Viper on z.

Check out Tim Prickett Morgan's article from IT Jungle: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh031207-story05.html

Resistance Is Futile

There have been some recent, lively discussions within the IBM-MAIN e-mail list about various examples of "IT inertia." For example, one list member described how his company's management is reluctant to move its older COBOL code to IBM Language Environment. LE was introduced in 1991 and found widespread use starting about a decade ago. The specific company's IT management cited "risk" for trying to avoid this relatively simple and straightforward migration, never mind that this path is well worn, with thousands of successes. LE has several functional benefits, including better debugging and trace analysis, compatibility with DB2 V8 and higher, and commonality among programming languages to simplify operations and maintenance.

Several people responded that inertia has its own risks, and many of those risks bear directly on an enterprise's business results and may be beyond the IT organization's internal view. Quite simply the business may have other ideas, like buying some small servers to hide under their desks in order to get their work done while they wait, possibly forever, for IT to respond.

One of the major design objectives of the IBM mainframe is to help businesses run all code that's still valuable, thus maximizing returns on this $20 Trillion investment. This almost fanatical devotion to compatibility is quite unlike other platforms and minimizes vendor-induced churn. That said, just because you can doesn't mean you should. The mainframe is also designed to run the most cutting edge application development and hosting technologies and to support the highest rates of business change. The platform has the most sophisticated virtualization and application isolation technologies, resulting in what IBM refers to as the highest evolution in "on demand" computing.

Old together with new. Stability combined with dynamism. These are excellent characteristics for an enterprise system since each part of the business has different needs and experiences different rates of change yet must still work together to serve the market. The technology is all there, readily available, if only the IT organization understands the modern mainframe's capabilities and works closely with business interests to use them.

I am encouraged to see so many people on IBM-MAIN respond along similar lines. Both the current and new generation of mainframe professionals seem to understand intuitively this issue.

Mainframe v-business

The emergence of 3D Internet and Virtual Worlds was mentioned on the blog before, especially since Hoplon is running on the Mainframe, as James wrote in his piece. The industry and news outlets are picking up the trend around these metaverses, Reuters has opened a news office in the virtual world, manned by a real world media journalist. He just wrote an interesting article "IBM eyes move into Second Life ‘v-business’".

I can see a huge potential for a 3D, highly immersive, presence-aware front to the tons of data stored on the Mainfame and the uncountable business processes running on the big iron. It will be interesting to see who first comes out with a SecondLife gadget that is linked directly to a CICS trans.

More spaceships built on the mainframe than any other platform

On Illuminata Perspectives, Gordon Haff compares a MMOG (massive multiplayer online game) run on a mainframe, Hoplon Infotainment, with a game that uses a massive cluster of servers.  Haff credits the mainframe with flexibility in adding more software features for the players, the economies and abilities in scaling, and security and reliability.

Per James' earlier post, Hoplon CEO Tarquinio Teles discusses this further on RedMonk Radio.     

Mass Mainframe Consumption

"China has begun to enter the age of mass car consumption. This is a great and historic advance.” So proclaimed a news agency, Xinhua, some time ago.

It seems that we will  soon see mass mainframe consumption as well. What if the functions and robustness of the System z9 technology with its virtualization capability would be available at an entry point for every one? What if the Information Integration Processor, the On demand upgrade capability, enhanced networking and connectivity options and crypto functions were build in?
That would be just the right mainframe for the masses. See Jim´s comments in this piece.

How about a Sandbox Slush Fund for new zSeries workloads?

I was reading ITIndepth, Anura Guruge's punchy analysis site, when something struck me.

Anura points to an issue for IBM right now - the idea that Linux is for Intel only. [Of course given AMD's punchy performance against Intel, we should probably be saying x86, not Intel, but Anura's point stands. Its still not clear where POWER fits in.]

In another analysis he questions the economics of the zAAP processor, an offload processor for Java workloads on the mainframe. That is, a place to run Java workloads without paying through the MIPS.

Ok, so we have IFL (Linux offload) and zAAP (Java offload), and at some point in the near future, I expect to see, though this is pure speculation, that IBM will also offer an offload board for XML too.

Here is a primer on some of the economics and problems facing IBM and its customers when it comes to paying, or charging for new workloads.

I was thinking about how IBM could make economics less of an issue, and I thought, why not overdeliver?

We see a lot of overdelivering in the Microsoft world, when they are fighting in the trenches for new workloads against competitive platforms. I was talking an OEM recently, and he described how MS was providing all kinds of free service and support to encourage a closer relationship and technical hooks. I know of MS paying for the consulting and deployment fees charged by value added resellers in some public sector organisations, to ensure good outcomes. Why can't IBM do the same thing.

Why not include extra capacity- say 10%- with every mainframe shipped, as a new workload sandbox? Just call it a slush fund for customers. Its effectively free money, off the books, to be applied to new workloads, for new developments. Don't charge $125k for it. Sure IBM could put some restrictions on the processors - but the fewer the better. At RedMonk we're always thinking about ways to lower the barriers to entry. Sometimes doing so means don't use DRM, sometimes it means provide better documentation. But sometimes it also means provide free stuff, under the radars of corporate purchasing. That's why Linux became successful in the first place. But I would keep the-lets call it a slushpuppy-"free", like Google 20% time.

Why not use similar thinking for zSeries? Offer the free capacity to ISVs as well as enterprises- that would help with relationships in the zEcosystem. At the moment, mainframe ISVs are often workload constrained, which means they just dont have enough hardware to deliver a new cool feature in time to support a new zOS release, for example. The slushpuppy could help with that.

Of course the folks running IBM generally, and zSeries specifically, might think this idea is insane. Not charge for 10% of the box, on our most profitable product line? "Ludicrous - we would go out of business."

It is my contention however that if IBM doesn't do even more than its already in order to encourage new workloads to the frame then we'll see problems in future. IBM needs to underpromise and overdeliver.

The idea behind the economics is that if this 10% slushpuppy, or whatever it is, is made more accessible, then it will be used. If that drives new workloads and all the new acronyms and buzzwords to the box it will soon create an even bigger pie.

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)

Google bringing back the mainframe to render Microsoft obsolete

I thought that headline might get your attention.

Certainly such a notion seems like one we should consider on mainframe blog. For those of you that don't know, Om Malik is an astute, and very widely read, industry watcher. Anyhow he gave some of his blog real estate to a chap called Robert Young, to make an argument about where Google is heading, and what this direction means for Microsoft.

So what is the quote that caught my eye?

To some extent, Google is bringing back the architecture of the mainframe to render Microsoft obsolete. In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services. With the increasing price/performance of CPUs, memory, bandwidth, and storage, Google’s strategic edge will be based on their advantageous cost of processing bits.

The advantageous cost of processing bits - lovely phrase that. Sounds like a mainframe mantra. The kind of thing Peter Armstrong might say.

Of course Google doesn't actually use mainframes to achieve its incredible response times and data management capability. But then again, it doesn't need to do a lot of things mainframes do. There is no such thing as the transactional integrity  of a web search.

Google is very much a scale out architecture, based on clusters of low cost machines, rather than a scale up, slice and dice architecture. In that sense Young is somewhat off track when he makes the architectural comparison.

But the parallel is clear in the sense of a shared network resource which thin clients (browsers) access to manage information needs. Google increasingly is our memory, just as the mainframe for a long time was the undisputed corporate memory. Note also how much of Google's success so far is text-based;  its revenue stream is based on text-based adwords, and the google interface is incredibly simple. It might as well be a 3270 terminal.

What are the lessons for mainframe communities, developers and evangelists?

Well for one, don't worry about fancy client widgets and so on. If the business asks for a new fancy interface for a mainframe application you can ask why. Google is a great argument for the power of simplicity and constraint-based development.

How many of the features in Word or Lotus Notes do you actually use?

One of the important movements in IT at the movement is a drive to simplicity. Value lies in embracing constraints. The poster child for this approach is 37signals, a really interesting ISV that  actively  fights against adding every damned feature anyone ever thought of. They have a coherent philosophy and uniquely creative approach. The 37signals blog signal vs noise should be essential reading for anyone considering the trade-offs between new features and functions, and their actual value to end-users.

The argument is not that design is unimportant. On the contrary good UI and application design is essential to effective systems development.

Some mainframers might ask what does all this have to do with me? I would argue keeping abreast of new approaches, terminologies and trends, new languages for describing problems and how to solve them, will enable you to have more fruitful discussions with business owners and other technology groups.

Could you turn your mainframe into your corporate Google, taking advantage of all system of record stuff? Why should Microsoft, or even Java, be an essential element in displaying and presenting mainframe data? What data services could you present that would excite end users, given that Information is often far more important than cool whizzy features. Could you index and cache some relevant data, so queries don't chew up cycles, and offer this up as a service for consumption for application developers in other parts of the organization? Start driving grass roots service oriented development.

The mainframe is certainly graphically challenged but that is not necessarily a bad thing; its just a constraint. Most blogs aren't about whizzbang graphics, they are about text. So too wikis. XML is text.

Microsoft is not going to become obsolete, any more than the mainframe has, but it certainly makes for a good headline, and hopefully some bits for thought.

The Main Mainframe Blog

The folks at IBM tell me that readership at the Mainframe Blog is growing. This is not surprising. There are a lot of us "old timers" out there that have fond memories and many people around the world who are using, developing, extending, exploiting, and loving mainframes. You might say it is somewhat of a cult. The initial posts at the Mainframe Blog have been by current or formers IBMers, but knowing IBM's passion for collaborative innovation, it would not surprise me to see the blog opened up over time to a wide variety of points of view across the industry and customer base.





The Main Mainframe blog

Mainframes and the virtual datacenter

Other IBM related patrickWeb stories

Well if its good enough for Ed Brill

Its good enough for the mainframe blog. Ed points to ZDNet on mainframe for service oriented architecture.

Vendors are getting excited about the opportunity.

Neon Systems has a mainframe SOA pitch here.

Hostbridge too.

Joe McKendrick at SOA blog wants to know where generation z is. Right here man...

He asks:

"The question is, can we grow a Generation 'Z' (as in zSeries) that will be able to run these behemoths, as well as Unix and other back-end systems, and ensure the viability and scalability of future SOAs?"

A great great answer to the question came in comments on today's entry from new Mainframe blogger BMC's Peter Armstrong.

These are the words of 20 year old Kyle Horton:

"I’m new to the mainframe, only being exposed to it in the past 2 months as an intern at Kohls, but an avid user of distributed systems all my life, just like every young college student today. I myself see these systems striving to have the stability, availability, security, and virtualization found in mvs, most notably the availibility "The accessibility of a system resource in a timely manner; for example, the measurement of a system's uptime." and the powerful virtualization. These two aforementioned characteristics which i have noticed cannot be compared to any supplimentary utility product(VMware) in the distributed systmes world in their effectiveness."

Why don't toasters work properly?

I have just read an intriguing article in the Daily Telegraph. It would appear that despite the fact that the Romans (what did the Romans ever give us? – see below)  mastered toast, manufacturers are still struggling to create an effective electric toaster.

Now, I do wonder how they determined that the Romans made good toast – did they find a piece lying around somewhere? However, that’s not the point.

In the article it says “dazzling displays and design can’t hide the fact that most toasters aren’t very good at their core function – making toast.”

I would like to offer a slight change to that sentence: “dazzling displays and design can’t hide the fact that most distributed systems aren’t very good at their core function – supplying a production level operating system.”

Yes, I am a lot older than James and the others here, and I was brought up in a mainframe world. I was raised on an operating system that was designed to do multi-tasking, recover itself from errors, was secure, and did not have to be rebooted every ten minutes. For more boring details about my life, click here or here.

Do I want everyone to throw away their wondrous new pretty Unix, Linux and Wintel boxes? No. Do I want people to throw away 30 years of hard-earned experience in how to run production systems? Also no.

What I want people to do is to take the best pieces from each world and build truly useful systems, which are designed to make businesses run better.

Ah yes, the Romans

They knew which side of the road you should drive on – Napoleon ruined it all later