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.
| by Timothy Sipples | March 27, 2008 in Ecomonics, Innovation, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) |
IBM Announces the System z10 for the Next Generation Data Center
As Tuesday, February 26, 2008, begins in each timezone, IBM announces the new System z10 for all the world's next generation data centers. Here, for example, is the Japanese language press release:
http://www.ibm.com/jp/press/2008/02/2601.html
We mainframe bloggers will try to keep everyone informed as we hear more from IBM, so check back for updates. I suspect we'll also have some interesting thoughts and perspectives to offer.
I see that Wikipedia already has a short article. That's fast!
UPDATE #1: Released at 12:01 a.m. New York time, here's the English version of the press release along with a short video and some pictures:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=825324
UPDATE #2: And here's a picture of the new greenest of green machines:
UPDATE #3: IBM has posted a large number of official announcement letters. Here are the links to the PDFs. Let's read together, shall we?
- 108-154: IBM System z10 Enterprise Class -- The forward thinking mainframe for the 21st century
- 108-155: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine types 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments
- 108-156: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine type 2107) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments
- 208-038: IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager for Linux on System z, V3.1 is designed to enable optimization of energy consumption for heterogeneous IBM systems
- 208-039: IBM ISPF Productivity Tool V5.10 enhancements deliver increased efficiency for ISPF users
- 208-041: IBM DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition offers one-time-charge price metric for net new workloads on IBM System z
- 208-042: Preview: z/OS V1.10 -- Raising the bar and redefining scalability, performance, availability, and economics
- 308-001: IBM GDPS V3.5: Enterprise-wide infrastructure availability
UPDATE #4: Yowza! The System z10 EC announcement is 391 pages!
UPDATE #5: OK, not so much reading. Most of those 391 pages are model conversion tables. So I could skim the announcement quickly for the golden nuggets.
One of the most surprising facts is that the System z10 is available immediately. (Maybe you can send a truck to Poughkeepsie to pick one up today?) The new HiperDispatch feature looks very interesting. There's a bit of a caution in the announcement suggesting that workloads could vary more than usual in how they perform when moving up to the System z10. That makes sense, because there's an awful lot of new technology packed into this model that's way beyond the typical model upgrade. Going from a single core 1.7 GHz processor to a quad-core 4.4 GHz processor design is a big leap.
4.4 GHz per core! (I've got to start getting used to saying "cores" now.) And up to 1.5 TB of memory per machine. Many more capacity model choices to make the costs smoother. Uniprocessor performance increased up to 70% for z/OS mixed workloads -- quite a jump. I also like how IBM is fencing off the HSA. It's 16 GB, but you never see it, and you don't have to pay for it. The Capacity for Planned Events (CPE) looks like a great idea. You can get up to 3 days of capacity for activities like relocating data centers. There's a nice statement of direction concerning z/VM and LPARs. You'll be able to manage all processor types and all operating systems within a single z/VM LPAR. (At present you have to fence resources.) New and improved OSA networking. InfiniBand coupling for Parallel Sysplex, raising the local distance limit up to 150 meters. (Sort of a mini-GDPS distance! Definitely nice for campuses.) There's something about some new time of day capabilities in the base configuration which looks great. The processors now support 1 MB page sizes, and there's both Assembler and C/C++ support for them.
This is a major leap. Still reading.
| by Timothy Sipples | February 25, 2008 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
IBM CFO: "Next Generation Mainframe in February"
From CFO Mark Loughridge's prepared remarks discussing IBM's 4th quarter 2007 earnings:
...This marks the tenth quarter of a long and successful technology cycle for System z. In 2008 we’ll move to our next generation mainframe, with announcement and availability in late February. This next generation System z has 50 percent more capacity than the current z9, enables unprecedented levels of workload consolidation and extends mainframe’s leadership in energy efficiency, security and resiliency.
| by Timothy Sipples | January 25, 2008 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) |
Today's Potpourri
1. If you were lucky enough to visit Palo Alto, California, last week, Charles Webb delivered a presentation to the HOT CHIPS 19 technical conference at Stanford University. The title: "The Next-Generation Mainframe Microprocessor."
2. GUIDE SHARE Europe sponsors their first annual z/VSE, z/VM, and Linux on z conference at IBM's Boeblingen, Germany, labs, from October 15 to 17, 2007. [I need to go to Germany in October, boss....]
3. The IBM Software Group continues to acquire interesting capabilities for its fast moving and growing business. Of particular note to mainframers: Princeton Softech and DataMirror.
4. So how do you save power and minimize cooling in your data center? Stanford has a new study. The study's authors examined the issue carefully and arrived at the answer: get a server which has the best input/output performance. "Since the CPU is usually the highest power component, these results suggest that building a system with more I/O to complement the available processing capacity should provide better energy efficiencies." As one blogger noted, "Ah, the irony! 40 years after the minicomputer we're back to a batch mainframe I/O-centric architecture. All things old are new again."
Both batch and online, actually. The physics never changed.
5. IBM ships the new Integrated Removable Media Manager for System z next month. Why should you care? At long last IBM integrates tape management across multiple operating systems, including z/OS. You can now manage tape media across the enterprise from policies defined on your mainframe, the "hub of the universe."
About freakin' time, since so many businesses are struggling with data retention and archiving policies for regulatory compliance, privacy protection, etc.
| by Timothy Sipples | August 27, 2007 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
Can SOA heal Achromatopsia?
One of the theories I have formed is that among System Programmers, the rate of color blindness is exceptionally high. Why else would IBM augment green screens with Redbooks. Have you ever wondered about these Redbooks? If so, you don't want to miss to listen to this interview I conducted with Alex Louwe-Kooijmans, he is with the IBM System z Center and I asked him all about If you are not off to do the Ishihara color test you might want to tune in to the SOA demystified event.
| by Boas Betzler | October 9, 2006 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
V12N == Virtualization
I'm slow. Occasionally it takes several reads before I understand some new acronym. But I'm lazy, so I tolerate the acronym soup we live in. I don't recall how many years this "I18N" shorthand has been around, but it eventually dawned on me that it meant something important: internationalization. (Try ten times; tends to twist the tongue.) It's a biggie. I'll save those details for another soap box.
The new "important thing" is virtualization, and it's a hot button, even moreso (to me) than I18N. Maybe it's more like an obsession. But it can be a mouthful. And if you're not a touch typist (or even if you are!) you might have trouble with the long form. So let me recommend a contraction in the same vein as I18N: V12N.
(z/OS crowd, turn away for a moment.) I love VM! (Why some z/OS people find VM distasteful I do not understand.) Looking back to my first encounter with VM, I remember asking the guy demonstrating, "Every user gets his own System/370?". He assured me this was so. Imagine that! What flexibility! The potential for virtual machines was immediately obvious, with increasing uses as the years have passed. And now we've got VMware and other serious offerings for hardware other than Z.
Today, the idea of "virtual machine" has reached that ultimate goal any technology could want: commercial exploitation. The business world is beginning to grok V12N ... and want it. Sometimes it's virtualization in the metaphor sense, like Java. When techies talk "virtual", we usually mean in the same sense as virtual memory. Either way, V12N is hot!
So here's a helpful handle:
Call it V12N and tell the laymen what you mean.
Preach it, brother!
-- R;
| by sirsanta | November 4, 2005 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | 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) |
King Ferdinand & Queen Isabella would have asked Columbus for zLinux Skills
I just returned from Barcelona and while many banks continue to run legacy work loads on the mainframe some of these banks in Spain aren't implementing Linux and Java mainframe applications as quickly as they might want to because they report limited Linux & Java on zSeries/z9 skills available in the local market to support these new work loads.
While IBM has begun an academic computing initiative at Universudad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) and is working to create a special zSeries course one of the banks that I visited told me that they don't have the skills they need to support Linux and Java on the mainframe and that while they applaud the work at UPM it's insufficient to help them get the skills they need to run their shops.
The bank that I called on is a big supporter of the mainframe and wants to learn more about encryption of data on removable media and disk to better leverage the mainframe's enterprise security features but hasn't made the progress they want to moving Linux and Java work loads to this platform because they don't have the skills in house.
A place for customers to find people with new work load skills on the mainframe is the independent user group SHARE who is teaming up with IBM to provide support for students and young profressionals interested in mainframe computing. SHARE & IBM are teaming up to provide support for students and young professionals interested in mainframe computing by creating a community called "zNextGen".
IBM is working with over 150 colleges and unversities worldwide which offer educational resources on the IBM mainframe and has pledged to deliver 20,000 zSeries trained professionals by 2010 including 10,000 students in China in the next 5 years.
Companies looking for mainframe skills - - especially in Linux and Java - - should contact IBM, SHARE or one of the 150 colleges and universities worldwide educating students on this platform.
| by rjhoey | September 22, 2005 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0) |
Big Ben Liked the Security of the z9
I just returned from a trip to England in which I presented to about 75 zSeries users sharing the z9 Product Announcement.
The customers were very focused on the enterprise security features of the z9. They really liked hearing about the IBM road map to deliver a z/OS based encryption facility later this year which will enable customers to encrypt their tapes without driving z/OS MIPs and software stacks meaning an economical way to ensure privacy, audit and compliance for publically identifiable information. They also liked the news of using ICSF to provide secure key management for the enterprise in case they need to access any of this encrypted information 5-10 or more years from now.
The customers talked about the fact that they are concerned about all of the replicated data sets and temporary data files they have flying around their networked & distributed environments and whether their current privacy, audit and compliance procedures are providing bullet proof, industrial strength, protection of personally identifiable information. There was discussion about the new laws pending in the EU in which any disclosures of personal information might have to be reported to the people impacted and the fact this could result in litigation, liabilities and more importantly damage to their brands. On top of this, some of these customers are concerned about the implications for data synchronization and backup & recovery of these replicated date sets and temporary data files. Many of these customers see the benefits of moving their applications back to the data (instead of the distributed model of moving data to the applications) for mission critical core workloads. Moving the data to the applications in a distributed environment still makes complete sense for the commodity transactions.
Bottom line, tortured data sets and the increased focus on automating privacy, audit and compliance play to the z9 and it seems the enterprise wide security roles of this platform are of more interest to some companies than the fact the z9 is about twice the size of the z990.
I enjoyed my stay in England as the customers were a pleasure to talk to but I sure was glad to get home to some American food.
| by rjhoey | September 14, 2005 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) |
The Great Wall
In my last job as IBM VP of Sales responsible for Financial Services Sector accounts on Wall Street in New York City, I never gave much thought to that other Great Wall - - the one in China. Little did I know what to expect when I recently traveled to HuangShu, outside of Shanghai, China, to participate in the IBM System z9 Announcement. Although some of the banking customers that my team and I supported in New York were large as measured by the numbers of customers they served it was hard for me to get my head wrapped around the fact that a few of the state owned banks in China each had more customers than there are people living in the United States.
The customers at the announcement meeting represented some of the largest banks, manufacturers the public sector agencies. Not surprising, most of these customers were very focused on minimizing scheduled and unscheduled downtime because of the large number of customers these companies supported. These customers understood that the System z9 is more than a big server and that it's a holistic approach to system design. They liked the fact that this holistic approach is designed to bring together industry-leading technologies including: servers, operating systems & middleware, and storage and networking technologies. The appreciated the fact that the z9 can play a large role in the automation and control of the enterprise including security and systems management.
During this two day meeting, I was asked to do press interviews. While I assumed most questions would be about the new mainframe would be about its capacity, the reporters were more interested in the role of the System z9 plays in virtualization, open systems and collaboration in an OnDemand Environment. They wanted to better understand the virtualization capabilities of the z9 in optimizing resource use across a customer's I/T infrastructure, allocating enterprise-wide resources according to business priorities and the fact the z9 continues to build upon the high levels of resiliency offered by the z990 predecessor to the z9. Discussions ranged from business resiliency delivered via parallel sysplex, GDPS for z/OS, GDPS Multi Sysem support of z/VM supporting Linux and HyperSwap, intelligent workload management and business integration using IFLs and zAAPs for Linux and Java integration to back end z/OS database access.
What surprised me most was the fact that some of the companies in China don't include people costs in their total cost of computing analyses because the price of labor is low relative to the costs of hardware and software which is the opposite of what we see in other more mature economies. While it was explained by some of the customers that because of low labor rates in China that people costs are sometimes not considered in platform selection decision and total cost of computing analysis - - which could put the z9 (for which one can grow MIPs substantially with limited staff increases due to the advanced automation, systems management and virtualization of this centralized solution) at a disadvantage when compared to managing racks of less expensive Unix and .Net servers which can require large staffs to manage - - these same customers explained that when designing banking solutions to support 100 million or more customers the z9 is likely the only platform they will consider going forward because of it's high availability and quality of service.
These customers know that when their computer systems go down the lights go out in their businesses and as such they are willing to pay for the differentiated value this platform creates. It was clear these customers think that trying to support a bank consisting of 100 million accounts with racks of Unix computer is like trying to plow a field with hundreds of chickens harnessed together instead of a using a single ox; not a very smart approach and certainly one in which it's hard to get the desired results.
Other customers from smaller firms told me they too have mission critical applications so while not interested in our largest z9 models they are interested in smaller z9 models because they need the quality of service the z9 offers. The bottom line is that the customers were all telling me that if their computer systems go down and their companys' reputations for service is tarnished then they could lose their jobs. This isn't any more complex then the fact that these I/T profressionals need to buy a computer that works; all the time, because they need their jobs. They don't really care how the z9 computer works provided it works just dandy.
These customers reacted positively to IBM's continued investment in skills for the IBM Mainframe Community and IBM's advancing toward the goal of helping train an additional 20,000 skilled mainframe professionals in the marketplace by 2010. Some of these customers were aware that IBM recently built a high-availability center, as part of our Academic Initiative for z9, and that we shipped five mainframe systems which are shared by seven Chinese universities.
I left HuangShu heading back to Beijing with the belief that the customers at this announcement understood that the IBM System z9 wasn't just about the size or speed of the machine but that the enterprise role this machine serves in providing the next level in computing scalability, improved computing economics and security.
China is an amazing country and as it continues to grow as a global economic power I think that we'll see a lot of z9 machines being purchased to support this new economy.
| by rjhoey | September 14, 2005 in Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) |
Just Enough Is Good Enough
We used to say that with mainframes there was never a problem exchanging information between computers -- as long as each computer was a mainframe! The point was that IBM mainframe computers really excelled at compatibility. A customer could order a complete mainframe system for a new location. The central processor would arrive from Poughkeepsie, the tape drives from Boulder, the disk drives from San Jose, the card reader from Endicott, the network controller from Raleigh, and other components from IBM factories all over the world. After the IBM CE (customer engineer) got everything hooked up and tested, it would be turned over to the customer. Files could immediately be exchanged with other company locations. Everything worked because IBM assured 100% compatibility by controlling all the interfaces. This was good. Microsoft is trying to do the same thing with Windows. This is not good. What's the difference? The Internet.
The Internet has changed everything. It is built on open standards and increasingly systems and procedures and data which use the Internet are alos becoming open. I am quite excited about what OASIS is doing with the OpenDocument standard. Massachusetts may be just the first of governments around the world who are mandating OpenDocument. From my perspective it is a matter of "Just Enough Is Good Enough".
| by John Patrick | September 3, 2005 in History, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (2) | 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) |
Response times?
I have just been reading that the UK is one of the most advanced broadband countries in the world, and our next wave of broadband is due to get us to 10Mb per second. Gosh, does that mean that we might approach the response times we have been enjoying on mainframes for the last 20 years or more?
And, no, I am not the only who thinks this way!
| by pwarmstrong | August 9, 2005 in People, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) |
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
| by pwarmstrong | August 4, 2005 in History, Innovation, People, Systems Technology Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) |
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