Beleaguered IBM server hardware chief Moffat replaced by Rod Adkins

According to the Wall Street Journal, Robert Moffat, former senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group has been replaced by Rod Adkins, who had previously been in charge of systems development.

Moffat was accused in October of insider trading, passing along confidential information that benefited hedge funds Galleon Group and New Castle Partners.

Moffat, once regarded as a possible future IBM chief executive, may have had plans to start selling off pieces of IBM’s server business according to IT Jungle’s Timothy Prickett Morgan. “This seemed like an exec whose job it was to shut down businesses or offshore them.”

Bad numbers: another prediction of the mainframe’s downfall

A recent survey from data center user group AFCOM reports a drop in mainframe use among 436 respondents, but analysts aren’t so sure, and if you add up the numbers, neither do the statistics.

Let’s take a look at the release:

“Only 39.6 percent of all data centers worldwide still operate mainframe computer systems today. In data centers that have mainframes installed, the median number in residence is two. And of all the data centers that have mainframes installed, 45.7 percent expect to replace one or more of them in the next two years. Of those that are expecting to replace their mainframes during the next two years, more than two out of three, or 67.1 percent will be replacing them with new mainframes, and 32.9 percent will be replacing them with high-end servers or other alternatives.”

That’s a mind-bendingly number of percentages so let’s break it down assuming a sample of 1,000 data centers:

• According to the survey, 39.6%, or 396 out of 1,000 data centers, are running a mainframe.
• Of the data centers with mainframes, 45.7% expect to replace one or more in the next two years. So 45.7% of 396 is 181. I will forget, for now, that there’s a chance a data center could replace one or more of its mainframes but still be able to keep the others it might have.
• Then the survey says that only 32.9% of those replacing their mainframes will actually be replacing them with machines other than another mainframe. So 32.9% of 181 is 60.
• So out of 396 data centers that are running a mainframe, 60 of them plan to replace one or more mainframes with a different platform in the next two years. That is 15%.

As you can see, when you take a percentage of a percentage of a percentage, the end percentage ends up being not as alarming as one might think. Especially if you consider that at least some percentage of non-mainframe users — even if it’s a small percentage — might consider moving to a mainframe platform in the next two years. That would cancel out some of the 15% leaving the platform completely, and lead to an even smaller number.

Is the mainframe in decline? I think that’s a good question. Two analysts give their take:

“Does the mainframe decline in the long run? Yeah, probably, but one of the big surprises of the last 10 years to most people outside of IBM is how strong the mainframe has remained,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.

“The numbers in this survey strike me as unbelievably high,” he said. “To have almost half of data centers saying they’ll replace one or more of their mainframes over the next two years, that’s a strikingly high number. High-end systems in general don’t turn over that quickly.”

Analyst Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting agreed. “To find that almost half the sample plans to replace their mainframe in the next year or two just doesn’t seem to jibe with reality,” he said.

There are other opinions out there that the mainframe market will actually grow in the next few years, not decline. Just last month research firm IDC released a survey reporting increased investments in mainframe hardware and software in the next five years. In that survey, almost 50% of 300 end users — all of whom were mainframe users — surveyed said they plan to increase annual spending on the mainframe.

The study identifies the emergence of a blended, or hybrid, approach to computing on the IBM System z platform. “Customers are finding that new workloads, including Linux-based and Java-based workloads, can leverage the mainframe’s built-in security and high levels of availability, by running them on mainframe specialty processors, such as the IFL, zIIP and zAAP processors,” said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president with IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group. “This pattern of adoption is placing software licensing costs on a lower price schedule for these new workloads than if they were running natively on the IBM System z hardware platform. In this way, customers are seeing a blended approach to deploying and maintaining workloads – carrying longtime workloads forward on System z, even as they bring new workloads onto the mainframe.”

In addition, a SearchDataCenter.com survey we did this year found that 74% of 352 data centers running mainframes were planning no change in mainframe spending this year. Meanwhile, 15% were anticipating some kind of increase, and 11% were anticipating some kind of decrease.

What do these seemingly contradictory reports tell us about the future of the mainframe? At worst, the mainframe is in a slow decline. At best, it’s growing. That seems to be pretty middle-of-the-road, vanilla results to me.

IBM’s VMControl and the single pane of glass

IBM today announced VMControl Enterprise Edition, a plug-in to its Tivoli Systems Director software that allows end users to view all their physical and virtual servers under one pane of glass including, eventually, mainframe assets.

The software can provide systems management on the IBM mainframe and Power systems, as well as IBM- and non-IBM x86 hardware. On the x86 hardware, it will be able to handle VMware, Hyper-V, Xen and Linux KVM virtualization software. The initial enterprise version, to ship in December, will support only Power-based systems running AIX, with later versions next year adding support for z/VM on the mainframe and x86 servers.

Prices will start at around $2,500 for lower-end Power blades up to more than $20,000 for the bigger Power Systems.

Server virtualization certainly has had its benefits, but the explosion in virtual machines has led to VM sprawl and management issues, said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata:

Virtualization is no longer just about server consolidation. It does that, sure, and thereby reduces the number of physical servers that an organization needs to purchase. But, especially in enterprises, it’s increasingly as much about resource pools and services (such as disaster recovery) enabled by virtualization as it is about consolidation. And that makes the need for management more rather than less.

There are also Express and Standard versions that will be cheaper and made available as well. According to Ian Robinson, IBM’s PowerVM platform manager, the enterprise edition is geared toward those businesses that are “close to 100% virtualized and want help in managing their infrastructure.”

“You can define a collection of physical resources as a pool,” he said. “You are managing physical and virtual aspects as if you were managing a single virtual machine. That is the key point of the enterprise edition.”

U.S. House ditches mainframe

There’s been some news this week that the U.S. House of Representatives has gotten rid of its last mainframe. From the story:

“It’s a symbolic transition into the latest and greatest in terms of green technology, virtualization, consolidation and all those things,” says Jack Nichols, director of enterprise operations at the House of Representatives. “The mainframe plug was pulled, but it was pulled in favor of something that was started in the mainframe world.”

The House had been using mainframes since at least the early 1970s, and at one time had a 13,000-square-foot data center dedicated to mainframe and mainframe operations. As mainframes grew stronger, the House moved down to just one machine, in addition to other types of servers.

The mainframe had apparently been there since 1997. According to the story, the House spent $700,000 per year to maintain it, and another $30,000 to power it. They’re holding those numbers up as potential savings, but haven’t actually said how much the new infrastructure — including x86 and Unix servers — will cost for power and maintenance.

“It wasn’t the fastest box in the world,” says Rich Zanatta, director of facilities for the House. “Some of our blades and some of our standard servers have more capability than that entire 8-cubic-foot box has. Technology-wise, it’s obviously been surpassed.”

No kidding, Rich. The mainframe was there for 12 years. You do know that mainframe technology has advanced since then, too, right? Another paragraph in the story says:

Turning off the mainframe is a big step in reducing the House’s server footprint. Already, the House consolidated about 150 test servers down to 20 through virtualization, and consolidated about 120 production servers onto 15 or 20.

Um, what? The mainframe does not consist of 270 production and test servers. Those can be consolidated down and still continue to communicate with a mainframe.

Anyway, the best responses came from the IBM-Main listserv, which is full of mainframers. Some tidbits from posters:

“If the US government is migrating away from IBM mainframes, they must have found something more expensive”

“If Congress is getting rid of their last mainframe, this only proves the VALUE of a mainframe.  Lord knows they get everything ELSE wrong up there…”

“is this one of those “great savings” from someplace that hadn’t upgraded their mainframe system in 20 years? and I love this part: The last mainframe was an IBM model in place since 1997…1997, let’s see, so we’re talking either the 9021 family or the early generation cmos…yea, okay, I just answered the q”

By the way, Congress’ job approval rating in August was 31%, according to Gallup.

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.