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Verisign Needs a Mainframe

Versign, which Symantec partly acquired in 2010, was hacked. The extent of the data breach is unknown.

Verisign has admitted it was hacked repeatedly in 2010 and could not pin down what data was stolen.

by Timothy Sipples

February 2, 2012 in Security, Web Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Strange Happenings in the PC Market

Welcome to 2012, faithful Mainframe Blog readers. The year 2011 is history, and now the results are starting to trickle in. Late last year IBM made some predictions about the next five years. I'd like to spend a little more time analyzing prediction #4 and its relevance to mainframe computing. There are two additional pieces of information available to me after writing that post. One is Gartner's report on 4th quarter PC sales, and the other is some careful observation of my family, particularly my sister, during the Christmas holiday.

First let's consider Gartner's report: PC unit sales fell 1.4% globally in the fourth quarter, and U.S. sales dropped 5.9%. HP's PC sales fell 16.2%. Note that these figures do not include Apple's iPad. If you also take out sales of Apple's Macintosh desktops and laptops, total U.S. PC sales (of Windows PCs) fell by 8.6%. (Apple's Mac sales grew 20.7%.)

Those are startling figures, but they are in perfect agreement with IBM's prediction. If the PC were the only way (or at least the "best" way) to access our increasingly digital world, we would expect the so-called "digital divide" to persist for a generation or more. Instead what's happening is that smartphones and tablets are rapidly becoming the most prominent access devices, while the importance of (and sales of) the PC are diminishing.

And I also observed my sister. She has an iPad and an iPhone. I'm not sure if she has a PC, and I don't think she cares whether she does. And for most of the Christmas holiday period and no doubt beyond she was glued to that iPad. She had everything she needed and more to support both the business and fun aspects of her life. And clearly she found the iPad nearly effortless to operate and worry-free. It's hard to break an iPad, in either software or hardware terms. She, and millions of other people like her, across all countries and social strata, are finding non-PC mobile devices much more suited to their lifestyles and needs. And this change is occurring very quickly.

Thinking as an architect, I was also struck by how much she was able to do in such a short time. The intensity of her iPad use was quite impressive and not, it seemed, a temporary phenomenon. As I mentioned previously, the infrastructure required to support the information delivery and transactional requirements of all these cloud-managed mobile devices is going to be astonishing. And it'll be mainframes of one stripe or another that'll do most of the heavy lifting.

I'm very bullish on the future of the mainframe as we begin this new year and enter the post-PC world. Be sure to keep stopping by in the coming weeks and months as we continue to explore the growing world of mainframe computing.

Happy New Year!

by Timothy Sipples

January 13, 2012 in Systems Technology, Web Technology Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile

A large and growing percentage of mainframes run Java^TM code. Even when you license only z/OS, you get Java at no additional charge. CICS Transaction Server, IMS, DB2, WebSphere MQ, Linux on zEnterprise — the list goes on and on — all support Java. If you want to write or run Java on the mainframe, there's nothing stopping you. Go for it!

I'm quite pleased to see that IBM has announced its beta program for WebSphere Application Server Version 8.5. One major new innovation is the WAS Liberty Profile which supports both z/OS and Linux on zEnterprise. The Liberty Profile for z/OS is tiny (by today's and yesterday's standards): the download is only 32 MB. It starts quickly and consumes very little memory. And you can download the beta version now to try yourself. Of course, anything that can run on the Liberty Profile can also run on WebSphere Application Server if/when you're ready. That's because the Liberty Profile is WAS, but with as-needed/where-needed function delivery, depending on your application's requirements. And yes, of course, you can access all the helpful JZOS methods from the Liberty Profile for z/OS.

I expect this new WebSphere Liberty Profile will be extremely attractive to mainframe customers and to mainframe software developers. (Did I mention it's tiny?) Please go give it a try today and let IBM know what you think.

by Timothy Sipples

December 21, 2011 in Application Development, Innovation, Web Technology, z/OS Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Japan's NTT Data Is Rock Solid with zEnterprise

NTT Data is the largest system integrator in Japan. In this video a couple of NTT Data's professionals discuss the new banking solution they're building for the Bank of Japan and the exceptional attributes of zEnterprise, z/OS, and WebSphere middleware products on z/OS.

by Timothy Sipples

December 13, 2011 in Financial, Innovation, Web Technology, z/OS Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Not-So-Radical-Thought: Cloud Computing is Often More Secure

Over at the Smarter Planet Blog (which I don't read often enough, I confess), Steve Hamm and Harold Moss opine on whether cloud computing can be more secure than, well, non-cloud computing I guess.

Well, sure it can (and is), at least if we're talking about private clouds. Because that's what a mainframe is and has been for decades: a private cloud (typically), albeit one that's extremely efficient and integrated already, so you have a lot less work to do to assemble and manage the parts. I like to call the mainframe "a complete data center in a box." There's widespread agreement that mainframes offer numerous security-related advantages — assuming equivalent and reasonable operational competence. (Anybody can turn an inherently secure environment into an insecure one. Open the gates to Fort Knox without at least checking some IDs and don't be surprised if some gold disappears.)

It's a lot easier to secure one or a very few centralized...ahem, cloud...environments than 100 or more distributed environments. Security is both difficult and evolving, so "do it once and do it well." Because otherwise if you're doing it 100 times simultaneously you're bound to do it badly. Security, I mean.

by Timothy Sipples

February 27, 2011 in Web Technology Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)