August, 2009

Follow the IBM Mainframe SHARE conference on Twitter

For those of you familiar with the social networking platform Twitter, you can follow along with connected attendees at the IBM Mainframe SHARE user group conference by searching for the hashtags #SHARE2009 and #D09. These links will allow you to follow along real-time with the events in Denver this week.

Join the conversation with IBM, SHARE board members, and fellow mainframers.

Mainframe managers have higher salaries than Linux, Unix or Windows

If you want to earn the big bucks, you’d better get onboard with a mainframe shop, ccording to Enterprise Systems Journal’s salary survey.

According to ESJ, CIOs, VPs, IT directors and managers that oversee mainframes: Have average base salaries of more than $230,000 a year. Those at Unix-based sites followed with $173,000, and midrange systems sites at close to $150,000. By contrast, IT executives overseeing distributed computing sites (with no mainframes present) had the lowest salary ranges. Those overseeing Windows environments averaged $115,000 a year. Top-level executives at Linux-centric sites (with no mainframes) had the lowest annual rate, at about $60,000 a year.

IBM announces System z “solution editions”

IBM has announced seven different hardware and software packages that include the System z mainframe and target specific application workloads such as disaster recovery and data warehousing.

The move is an effort by Big Blue to keep the mainframe relevant and attractive for whose who might otherwise select a distributed server infrastructure in difficult economic times. It also piggybacks off a similar package IBM put together last year for SAP applications, an offering that has helped cause 20% growth in SAP applications on the mainframe, according to IBM.

The packages are for data warehousing, application development, disaster recovery, security, risk mitigation and WebSphere; and include mainframe hardware, middleware and maintenance applications. More details here.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is the news that IBM is slashing the cost of the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), the mainframe specialty engine designed to run Linux applications. Once around $100,000, they will now cost less than $50,000.

Linux has certainly been a bright spot for IBM on the mainframe. According to the company, more than half of the unique applications on the platform are now for Linux, and more than 40% of new System z customers installed Linux last year. It seems as if the mainframe has largely become a box that hosts old z/OS applications too costly/burdensome to migrate off, and consolidated Linux servers. Halving the cost of the processor that runs them is a clear move by IBM to try to stay cost competitive with distributed servers on the Linux front, especially considering the proliferation of chip cores that is flowing out of Intel and AMD chip labs these days.

One end user’s comments on the mainframe dilemma

Last week I spoke with Chris O’Malley, the head of CA’s mainframe business unit and a keynote speaker at the upcoming Share conference in Denver, about some of the challenges facing mainframers today. Jim Hood, a mainframer at Siemens Healthcare, wrote to me and had this to say in reply:

“Cost, I think, is primarily at the heart of the mainframe dilemma:  hardware, software and people.   Skills, or the concern of those disappearing over time, is secondary.  Hardware and software costs, and the perception that these are so much higher than a compatible server based operation, helps fuel the urge to displace this platform.  I still cannot be convinced that the TCO is significantly higher than that of running thousands of servers when you add license costs, all the replaceable components and ongoing support (manpower) for upgrades, maintenance, asset management, etc.  Even so the movement continues.

The related costs for the skill sets needed to run a mainframe operation is the other fly in the ointment.    Older mainframe programmers/analysts get a bad rap from a cost standpoint even though their long tenure at many organizations has made them successful (the business and themselves) while their long, loyal labor yielded advancement and increased salaries.  That isn’t a good mix in today’s marketplace where low costs rule.  I wonder what happens when the same scenario plays out 20 years from now when the current younger, lower cost workers are not so young or low cost anymore.

I’m not sure if there are any real replacement plans from a talent standpoint.  That would mean acquiring “young” labor while keeping “older” labor which means increasing costs even more.  In today’s world cost reductions don’t have the luxury of time on their side — immediacy rules — so while there might be a concern about keeping talent the reality, I think, largely depends upon a balance sheet.   Even for those who could stay (to mentor) many mainframers have already been in the business 30-40 years.   It is going to take a lot of activity to get the twentysomethings thinking that zOS is cool.  By the time that happens (if ever) there won’t be many mentors left — whether by choice or not.”

BMC and CA update mainframe systems management tools

BMC acquires MQSoftware
This week, BMC software acquired message queuing software firm, MQSoftware. BMC is touting the acquisition as a boon for mainframe shops that need to manage the middleware for applications that span both distributed and mainframe platforms.

For certain kinds of big applications, message queuing software is a necessary glue for distributed applications because sometimes servers are down or systems are just running slowly, and you don’t want a transaction to stall just because a backend system is not performing well. So instead of hard-coding the transactions pieces to not continue unless each stage of the transaction is completed, you carve up the transaction into messages and then queue them up on different parts of the application’s servers, explained Timothy Prickett Morgan in his writeup of the BMC-MQSoftware news.

CA adds Eclipse support to CICS application testing
In other mainframe systems management news, CA added a new GUI based on Eclipse for its testing and debugging tools, CA InterTest Batch and CA InterTest for CICS. CA said this new GUI will make it easier for novice mainframe staff to execute core testing, and debugging tasks. CA also released a new version of CA SymDump for CICS, its advanced abend analysis solution.

The impact of IBM’s SPSS acquisition on the mainframe

On July 28, IBM announced it would acquire business intelligence software company, SPSS. The merger may have a big impact on the mainframe’s business intelligence abilities in the future.

James Governor on the impact of IBM’s SPSS acquisition, via The Mainframe Blog:

IBM has done a lot of really solid work making the mainframe less expensive for non-CICS and IMS workloads like Linux (IFL), DB2 (zIP) or WebSphere (zAAP). IBM is determined to drive datawarehousing workloads to the mainframe. But SAS Institute was a “stick in the mud”, effectively forcing users to pay capacity-based mainframe charges, and so making it less likely customers would run Big Data analytics on z. Well now IBM is in a great position to offer specialist offload processors for data analytics workloads, but also push SAS Institute into a price war that can only benefit customers interested in mainframe consolidation- and don’t think that’s an isolated group.

Cisco boosts backup speeds for IBM mainframe disaster recovery

Cisco XRC Acceleration, a WAN acceleration tool Jointly developed by Cisco and IBM was designed for customers deploying IBM’s mainframe disaster recovery offering, z/OS Global Mirror. The Cisco XRC Acceleraton tool accelerates data traffic traveling very long distances over the wide-area network (WAN) reducing bandwidth consumption and shrinking update windows.

There are a slew of other Cisco announcements attached to the press release.