January, 2009

zNextGen offering “dual perspective” session at SHARE

The SHARE user group will be holding its spring conference in Austin, Tex. in March, and zNextGen plans to be in on the action.

zNextGen is a sub-group within SHARE that caters toward young and new mainframers. Started a few years ago during SHARE’s conference in Boston, the group has expanded to the point of now leading and participating in sessions.

Kristin Neely (previously Kristine Harper) is the leader of the group, and gave us an idea of what sessions zNextGen will be involved in.

One is called “What does a DBA do anyway? A dual perspective,” and will have an experienced database administrator sitting alongside a new DBA and zNextGen member. The zNextGen member will be Eddie Prather Jr., a newly hired database administrator at Bank of America. Prather just graduated from college in December and has already landed the full-time gig at the bank.

Prather will be talking about what it’s like going from getting an education in database administration to working in the field. That will be countered by a more veteran DBA, who will tell Prather (and others) what they can expect to be doing as a DBA in 10 years.

“That’s something we’re doing, to try to incorporate zNextGen members into speaking,” Neely said. “You learn something better once you teach it.”

SHARE Austin will take place March 1-6.

Good mainframe performance comes from good database design

The following is a guest post from Bob Schmidt, a performance engineer for mainframe DB2 at State Farm Insurance. It is a response to a SearchDataCenter story on how tuning mainframe applications can cut software costs. Anyone interested in writing guest posts on Mainframe Propeller Head can email mfontecchio@techtarget.com.

The article on mainframe tuning was OK.  But it missed the real problem of mainframe cost.  DB2 is cost effective when used as a relational database.  It can also work as a hierarchical database, or as a flat file.  But it is not cost effective in those other modes.

The problem is improper application design due to designers and architects not thinking in relational terms, nor in sets, but rather in sequential, procedural processing.  Modern hardware and systems software, including DBMS, is intended for parallel processing which is best used with set processing and not with sequential processing.  Yet too often, the architect thinks that parallel processing is sequential processing n-wide.

The real solution is good design.

T3 Technologies pushes forward with complaint of IBM mainframe “monopoly”

According to ZDNet, T3 Technologies filed a complaint with the European Commission on Tuesday alleging that IBM was abusing its power in the European mainframe market.

T3 is an alternative mainframe company and one of the only ones out there. Last year, IBM and Platform Solutions Inc., another plug-compatible mainframe vendor, settled their legal battles when IBM announced it was buying PSI, essentially shutting it up.

Since late 2006, PSI had been in back-and-forth lawsuits with IBM in which IBM sued PSI for patent infringement on its z/OS mainframe operating system, and PSI firing back with a countersuit claiming that IBM was shutting out competition by coupling z/OS with its mainframe hardware. The fight was settled with the acquisition, and since then, PSI has vanished. PSI’s web address, www.platform-solutions.com, redirects automatically to IBM’s System z mainframe page. And in IBM’s SEC filing earlier this year that explained the acquisition, Big Blue wrote the following: “PSI’s technologies and skills, along with its intellectual capital, will be integrated into the company’s mainframe product engineering cycles and future product plans.” Which is kind of like saying, “Yes. PSI is pretty much disappearing.”

A Gartner report on the acquisition said that Itanium-based mainframes, which is what PSI was selling, would go the way of the dogs, but that some of its engineering know-how, such as virtualizing I/O across heterogenous environments, could get worked into the System z brand.

Needless to say, that acquisition did not rid IBM of T3. When PSI sued, T3 filed its own motion in support of PSI. T3 had a licensing agreement to resell PSI technology under its Liberty Server brand, and planned to continue to support its existing customer base. Upon the announcement of the IBM acquisition of PSI, T3 Technologies President Steve Friedman said T3 was “not affected by the acquisition of PSI by IBM.”

That may have changed, though, as indicated in the new legal complain that was detailed in the ZDNet story:

IBM is accused of engaging in a range of anti-competitive actions, including “preventing the sales of competing mainframe hardware products by tying the sale of its operating system to its mainframe hardware”. IBM is further accused of “withholding patent licenses and certain intellectual property to the detriment of mainframe customers”.

In its statement, T3 said it sold IBM mainframes but then moved into selling its own products, the Liberty line of mainframes, first developed by Amdahl Corporation, which itself is now part of Fujitsu.

Will T3 go the way of PSI? When I asked Friedman this back in July, he said only that “at the moment, we’re continuing on as we have been and supporting our existing customer base.”

IRS mainframe not secure enough, government report says

The federal Government Accountability Office has released a report detailing information security issues at the Internal Revenue Service, and among them are lax mainframe management monitoring.

This isn’t the first time the GAO has found issues with the IRS’ data centers and mainframes. Last year the GAO found 115 weaknesses in information security at the IRS. To the agency’s credit, 49 of them have been fixed. But this isn’t a two-year thing. There have been information security problems at the IRS for years.

According to the 30-page GAO report this year, the IRS”implemented controls for unauthenticated network access and user IDs on the mainframe,” “further limited access to its mainframe environment by limiting access to system management utility functions and mainframe console commands,” and “enhanced periodic reviews of mainframe configurations,” all of which were issues from last year’s report. Yet it’s not monitoring changes at one of its data centers’ mainframes:

IRS did not always effectively monitor its systems. For example, IRS had not configured security software controls to log changes to datasets that would support effective monitoring of the mainframe at one of its data centers.

More detail:

IRS did not fully implement its policies for managing changes to its systems. Specifically, IRS did not maintain or enforce a baseline configuration for one data center’s mainframe system, which supports the revenue accounting system of record and other applications. In addition, IRS used an unsupported software package that was not current and thus vulnerable to attack. Specifically, certain IRS servers were running an outdated version of software that was no longer supported by the vendor and, therefore, could not be patched against a known vulnerability. As a result, IRS has limited assurance that system changes are being properly monitored and that its systems are protected against new vulnerabilities.

I was going to try to come up with a joke here combining Benjamin Franklin’s quote about the only thing certain in life are death and taxes, and the phrase “no taxation without representation,” but I couldn’t seem to make it gel. If you have any ideas, let me know. I’ll put it in and throw an attaboy your way.

SAP and .Net skills are big now…because it’s hard to find anyone doing Cobol?

Computerworld recently wrote a story on the “9 hottest skills for ‘09.” Included among them are help desk support, networking and business intelligence. Topping the list, however, is programming and application development. That is a broad category, but the author narrows it down pretty quickly:

Ask any recruiter what the single most sought-after IT skill is at the moment, and the universal response is a three-letter word: SAP.

“The little joke in our industry right now is that if you have ‘SAP’ on your résumé right now, you have zero unemployment,” says Bruce Culbert, CEO of iSymmetry Inc., an IT consulting and recruitment firm with offices in Washington and Alpharetta, Ga.

That in itself is interesting and would probably make a good story over at SearchSAP. The author also mentions the strong need for .Net programmers as well. But what caught my eye was the end of the section, when the author describes one particular user’s situation. A senior IT director named Rich Schappert at Casey’s General Stores Inc., based in Ankeny, Iowa, said he’s been working the past five years to fill the company’s need for .Net and SQL Server programmers, and has found them in the local colleges’ student body.

The company, which operates 1,500-plus stores across the Midwest, has been moving its Cobol-based financial applications into the .Net environment to reduce its mainframe costs. “[It's also] getting tougher to find people who know Cobol,” notes Schappert.

Hmm. So it seems to me that maybe knowing mainframe Cobol might trump all of those other skills, or at least be on par. The reason many of these companies are moving off the mainframe is because there aren’t enough people out there who know how to program on them. Or, at least, that’s the perception.