February, 2009

Feb 26 2009   2:43PM GMT

550 schools now part of System z Academic Initiative, Yale not included

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Mainframe education

IBM announced today that its System z mainframe Academic Initiative program is now in 500 schools. The list of participating schools includes colleges and universities in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

IBM also announced the winners of its annual Master the Mainframe program, in which about 1,800 students participated. Congratulations to the winnters: Bryan Weaver, Yeming Hu, David Jones, Bin Sun and Jinhu Huang.

I decided to come up with an imaginary discussion with a pro-mainframer and an anti-mainframer regarding the IBM announcement and the academic program in general. Though not word-for-word, I have heard similar arguments in private conversations.

Pro-mainframer: Wow, the System z academic program is now in 550 schools across the world.

Anti-mainframer (in nasally voice): Is it in any of the Ivys?

PM: Yes, actually. It’s in Columbia University.

AM (points index finger in the air): Oxford? Cambridge?

PM: No.

AM (while smoking a pipe and sitting in an armchair wearing a silk robe): Hmm, hmm, yes, I didn’t think so.

PM: 550 is still a lot of schools.

AM (while cleaning his monocle): Only one of the Ivys, you say? Not impressed. Not impressed at all.

Feb 18 2009   2:50PM GMT

Thrift Savings Plan moving off mainframe

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio

Thrift Savings Plan, a retirement savings plan for government employees, is moving off the mainframe, according to Government Executive:

Mark Hagerty, chief information officer for the TSP, noted that a two-year plan to upgrade technology capabilities is on track. Officials struck an agreement with Switch & Data of Tampa, Fla., in December 2008 to expand operations to a new data facility in Northern Virginia. The plan involves replacing mainframe computers with newer technology offering more memory and faster processors, consolidating and replacing servers, modernizing IT networks, and improving storage capacity.

Officials began moving equipment into the new center last month, Hagerty said. The new data center is expected to be fully operational by September.

I wonder if TSP seriously considered replacing old mainframes with new mainframes, or if the push was for x86 (or Unix) from the start.

Feb 5 2009   11:20AM GMT

OpenSolaris on IBM System z: Reality or hype?

Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
Mainframe specialty engine, Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), OpenSolaris on System z mainframe

A reader, Chris, wrote in with the following question: I saw this article in December 2008 (on OpenSolaris on IBM System z) but it appears to be from December 2007. Is this reality or hype?

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Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris on the IBM System z mainframe is a reality, although time will tell whether actual use of it in production will grow to a sustainable level. A company called Sine Nomine Associates did most of the work in getting OpenSolaris working on the mainframe, but had help both from Sun Microsystems and IBM. After working on and testing it for three years, Sine Nomine Associates announced in October that OpenSolaris on the IBM System z mainframe was ready and available. The project has support from Sun on its OpenSolaris site, as well as IBM, which announced in November that OpenSolaris could start running on a mainframe specialty processor called the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), which was originally designed to just run Linux applications.

It’s still early in the game, and whether anyone is actually using OpenSolaris on the IBM System z mainframe in production is in question, and not likely. Whether it can grow in popularity like Linux on the IBM System z mainframe is also in question, although it took zLinux quite a few years to catch on with the mainframe crowd.

Feb 3 2009   5:37PM GMT

Mainframe software pricing — readers sound off

Posted by: Matt Stansberry

Mainframe columnist Robert Crawford addressed the high cost of third party mainframe software in a recent article. Here is a sampling of reader responses:

The dwindling cycle
Robert, I totally agree with you. This has been going on years. Cost is often sited as a prime reason for getting off the mainframe.

I believe their are two main drivers that tend to feed one another.

There are large mainframe shops out there but I don’t believe there are as many mainframe shops since the client-server movement. Corporate mergers and acquisitions have reduced the number of traditional mainframe shops too; in some cases maybe even more so than the so called demise of the mainframe.

Meanwhile we have seen much consolidation amongst the mainframe software vendors themselves.

So what we now face is fewer vendors (thus less competition) selling fewer copies (due to fewer shops) while attempting to grow their bottom line. Unfortunately it can tend to drive more customers to alternative platforms which sustain the downward spiral of fewer customers to cover the vendor’s costs of maintaining the software plus whatever greed factor may or may or not come into play.

-JH

Poorly designed mainframe applications the real culprit
This debate over mainframe costs seems irrelevant to the real world.

In the 30+ mainframe shops I’ve been in, the real cost is in poorly designed applications.
Modern busienss class hardware and systems software is intended to use relational
databases in a set processing relational way. Parallelism and other modern features
are expected to be exploited by the application design. zIIPs and zAAPs are now
expected to be exploited by the application design.

But, in reality, much processing uses the relational database in a hierarchical design
with the low cardinality keys at the top of the hierarchy controlling the processing.
Or even worse, the application design is a sequential flat file design. Read one record
from Table A; Take a column in that record and use it as a host variable to read a
record in Table B; and on and on down the chain of sequential processing.

The poor design of business applications is the single biggest cost in any large shop.
Discussions of hardware cost and vendor/systems software cost tied to peak CPU usage
is really quite irrelevant to reality.

In short:
A well designed application on an average platform will beat a poorly designed application
on the best platform.

-BS

What’s your take on mainframe software costs? Leave us your feedback in the comments section.