VM and Linux Workshop 2012, University of Kentucky

VM Workshop lives!

For those who have not heard, the VM Workshop, that incredibly geeky even from last century, has been resurrected. Naturally, with Linux being such a big part of virtualization, and Linux on System z being an increasingly popular business platform, the party is now called "VM and Linux Workshop". But it's the same awesome gathering of system programmers with limitted adult supervision.

Last year, we gathered at the Ohio State University. This year, the University of Kentucky will be our host. In keeping with workshop tradition, dormitory residence is one of the options for accommodations. (Not mandatory. You can stay at a hotel. You can even bring your RV if you like, as long as you share your satellite internet service.) And the price can't be beat: $100 for the full conference.

If you are using Linux on System z, this conference is for you.

If you are using z/VM, this conference is for you.

For more information, and to register, see the workshop web site ...

http://www.vmworkshop.org/

That's right ... $100 for three days of high-tech hob-knobbing.

-- R; <><

NASDAQ Needs a Mainframe

NASDAQ needs a mainframe with mainframe software engineering.

Explosion of New Mainframe Software

I continue to marvel at how much new mainframe software is being introduced, and not just from IBM. Let's take a quick and necessarily incomplete tour:

• IBM Financial Transaction Manager: Provides new and enhanced, pre-built, ready-to-roll support for financial industry transactions and messaging via SWIFT, as one example.
• Tivoli System Automation Version 3.4: Extend automation throughout the zEnterprise and beyond, across many types of virtualized environments. A very important ingredient in successful cloud deployments now.
• WebSphere Operational Decision Management: Add business rules flexibility to your enterprise applications, regardless of programming language. Helps dramatically cut down on the amount of coding you need to do.
• WebSphere eXtreme Scale Version 8.5 and WebSphere Application Server Version 8.5: Exciting for their performance, support for the latest cutting edge Java Enterprise Edition standards, and the new lightweight Liberty Profile deployment option.
• Business Process Manager Version 8.0 and Business Monitor Version 8.0: New iPhone/iPad capabilities for viewing, managing, and participating in sophisticated, optimized business processes.
• CICS Transaction Server Version 5.1: Lots of improvements, including CICS's very own sophisticated, standards-based Web user interface environment (with JSPs, etc.), support for the WebSphere Liberty Profile, a big leap in Java performance and flexibility, pre-configured MQ DPL support for containers (no more 32K limit!), and lots more 64-bit support, among other features. A beta version of CICS TS 5.1 will be publicly available for download.
• CPLEX Optimizer: Lots of mathematical optimization routines, ready to use right from your core applications on your mainframe.
• Tivoli OMEGAMON XE Version 5.1: Wow, they dramatically enhanced the 3270 interface and made the graphical interface easier to deploy. I love the new interface!
• GT.M from FIS Global: This is a very high performance key-value "NoSQL" database, available as open source on PCs for developers but also now available on z/OS and Linux on z with full support from FIS. GT.M is the foundation for FIS PROFILE core banking applications (now available for z/OS as well), but it is also a very popular execution environment for applications written in the M programming language, also known as MUMPS. The healthcare industry is chock full of important MUMPS applications, including the open source VistA software created by the U.S. Veterans Administration. Thus GT.M provides a wonderful new option for consolidating and simplifying thousands of healthcare industry applications onto IBM zEnterprise, some of which are still running on old DEC VMS systems, many of which are mission-critical.

  by Timothy Sipples

  May 10, 2012 in Application Development, Cloud Computing, Innovation Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New Mainframe Thinking at Canada's Department of National Defence

John Palmer pens an interesting article about the Canadian military's approach to enterprise computing in a publication aimed at government purchasing departments. DND's new IBM mainframes are vital in reducing costs for taxpayers, and they're also extremely well suited to Canada's new shared services approach to computing. They also happen to be rock solid reliable and secure — rather important attributes to a military organization.

EMC VMware Needs a Mainframe

Somebody stole VMware's source code — the company's most valuable (really only) trade secret — and it showed up on the Internet. I guess that's one way to open source your product.

Oh, the irony!

For the record, I think VMware is a reasonably good product for what it does — although there are plenty of fine X86 virtualization solutions, like KVM — but mainframes are different and special. It's the combination of hardware and software, focused by design on the same goals and outcomes, that matters. (See also: Apple.)

STASH: A "Skunkworks" Project for Secure Clients?

Joe Clabby reports on a (formerly) secret project to use IBM mainframes for virtual hosting of secure desktop environments. It's a fascinating read.

Significant Changes in the z/OS Release Schedule

IBM is moving to a biennial release schedule for z/OS, a good move in my view. Here are some highlights:

• IBM plans to introduce new z/OS releases every two years. The idea is that z/OS users will have more time to exploit new z/OS functions and spend less time installing and testing release upgrades.
• IBM is increasing the standard support period for z/OS releases from 3 to 5 years.
• IBM is also increasing the fee-based extended support period from 2 to 3 years.
• The next release of z/OS will also be a new version: z/OS 2.1. This new version will require a System z9 or higher since it will exploit newer processor instructions.
• There are going to be more Web-delivered enhancements between releases, which isn't surprising.
• As another corollary, there will be more enhancements in each new z/OS release.

As long as z/OS users don't simply "slow down," I like this new release schedule. It should make life simpler for software vendors, too.

IBM PureSystems: Simple Is Good

IBM officially unveils its new PureSystems today. With it, simplification takes a big step forward.

Enterprise applications and their interdependencies have become extremely complicated: hard to deploy, hard to manage, hard to scale, and impossible to secure. IBM is really working overtime to tame that complexity. Do take a close look.

Keep in mind that if you've got a zEnterprise server, with its Unified Resource Manager, you're already taming complexity like nothing else. For instance, IBM PureSystems initially support 4 operating environments across 2 processor architectures in harmony, which is a tremendous accomplishment. With zEnterprise you've got 8+ across 3+. (I'm using plus symbols because it depends on how you count, but 8 and 3 are the minimum counts.) In other words, IBM PureSystems are part of a continuum, and your zEnterprise server leads the way. It's extremely likely you'll want some of both in your data center.

So that's my instant reaction, with more comments to follow no doubt. What do you think? What are your most urgent issues?

Utah Department of Health Needs a Mainframe

Hackers, perhaps from Eastern Europe, stole the personal details of over 24,000 of Utah's Medicaid beneficiaries from a "server" operated by the Utah Department of Technology Services.

DTS has an "interesting" perspective: "The health department uses 125 of the state’s 520 servers.... 'We pride ourselves on our lean government.'" Those numbers are certainly not "lean" if you have mainframes. Raise your hand if you have 520 or even 125 mainframes. Oh, and I seriously doubt the State of Utah has 520 servers. Those are only the ones DTS knows about, and maybe not even that. For example, I doubt it includes servers at Utah's public universities.

The Utah DTS spokesperson goes on to imply that the solution to secure all those "lean" servers is...to hire more IT staff.

Oracle's Hardware Sales Down Sharply Again

Three months ago, Oracle reported financial results for the company's second financial quarter. Its hardware sales declined 14% year over year, to $953 million. Oracle predicted that hardware sales would fall again anywhere from 4% to 14% in the next quarter (at constant currency).

Actually they fell 16% year over year, to $869 million. Quarter to quarter they fell about 9%.

For perspective, Oracle claims that their nascent Exadata/Exalogic/Exalytics business is fast growing, but that only means the far larger Oracle/Sun Solaris business is collapsing even faster. Also, the earnings report reveals that "hardware systems support" (a.k.a. hardware maintenance) declined only 3% (constant currency, year over year). So Oracle's remaining customers are caught in the perfect storm of a cratering Oracle/Sun Solaris business combined with escalating maintenance prices. Fabulous.

Of course I realize that hardware sales can be cyclical, but Oracle's hardware problems are deeply structural. Oracle introduced servers with the new SPARC T4 processors in September, 2011, which took the SPARC CPU up to 3.0 GHz. This past quarter should have been a terrific one, or at least a decent one, given that Oracle/Sun model cycle. Instead it was awful again.

I predict that Stuart Alsop now has the opportunity to correctly predict when the last Oracle/Sun Solaris server will be unplugged.

My Mainframe-Related Pet Peeves

In no particular order:

1. "Green screens" are good enough. No, they're not. Do you force your users to submit their input and receive their output via punched cards? User interfaces change and evolve, and appearance often matters. Stanford's IBM mainframe served the world's first interactive Web application. If you haven't provided Web user interfaces on your mainframe to serve users' demands, what on earth are you waiting for?
2. Everyone must use Web interfaces. Some users prefer to continue with their familiar, fast, and efficient 3270 terminal user interfaces. Let them coexist. One size does not fit all.
3. We haven't implemented encryption yet. Every mainframe has built-in encryption support. Why are sensitive account numbers, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, financial details, and passwords still flying around your network, internal or/and external, "in the clear"? Turn encryption on. Just do it.
4. FTP overuse. FTP is not an application integration solution! Connect two applications using FTP and you've automatically converted two or more business process steps into a "we might get around to it, eventually, if you're lucky" business process. Do you think your customers want that? And why are you copying all that sensitive data anyway? To make it easier for bad guys to get?
5. We don't allow TCP/IP connections to our mainframe "for security reasons." Congratulations, that "security" policy inevitably leads to the least possible secure environment you can imagine as the business finds every possible workaround to keep doing business — a true security nightmare. Let the z/OS Security Server and RACF do their jobs, please.
6. "Open" platforms and storage. If you connect exactly the same storage unit on your SAN (that you're already using for everything else) to a z/VSE system in exactly the same way, does that suddenly make your storage unit "closed"? If you're one of the people responsible for typing in activation keys to make sure Microsoft Windows can actually function, are you the same person who thinks that z/OS and Linux on z, both which eschew keys, are "closed"? Words should have consistent meanings. Many IT vendors have thoroughly debased the word "open," and some of us have fallen for that particular word game. It's past time they stop — and that all of us wise up.
7. "Mainframes are expensive." You know what's expensive? Not knowing the value of your financial holdings during a financial crisis because you've scattered bits of your portfolio records into little servers — that's expensive. Letting unreleased Michael Jackson records escape before you can monetize them. Billions of dollars of credit card fraud. Building yet another massive data center. Paying for 60 more licenses of Brand O middleware (this week). Adding another 20 staff to your payroll (this week) to support the IT mess you've implemented. You know what's not expensive? Mainframes. Stuff that works well isn't expensive.
8. "But that would require us to add MIPS...." So what? Business growth is never free, but it's darn inexpensive if it's a mainframe that's growing. And do you see MIPS listed as a currency, next to the yen, dollar, euro, and pound? It's not. IBM has different prices for different workloads.
9. Mainframe chargeback regimes. Everybody does them wrong. It's only a question of how wrong. Just because a mainframe, as a standard feature, lets you count and apportion various technical quantities like CPU-seconds doesn't mean they have much cost accounting significance. You certainly shouldn't be putting prices on those technical quantities while everything else in your data center (and beyond) remains uncounted, nor should those prices be different than true marginal costs (which can often be zero or near-zero).

Do you have any more I should add to the list?

Sony Still Needs a Mainframe

Hackers illegally accessed and downloaded 50,000 music tracks from Sony, including extremely valuable unreleased tracks performed by the late Michael Jackson. Sony has suffered multiple, serious, recurring security breaches.