DataCenter

z/VM 6.1 is out and running

IBM released z/VM 6.1 at the end of October. They had previewed it back in the spring and said it would be ready to go by the end of the year. Well, it’s ready to go. The announcement letter sums up some of the new features:

• Enhanced performance of virtual networking environments running heavy guest-to-guest streaming workloads
• Faster access to data when utilizing FICON Express8
• Closer integration with IBM Systems Director to eliminate the need to download agents and help simplify the installation of those agents
• Significantly better and more highly secure guest transactions when using Crypto Express3 as compared to Crypto Express2
• Guest support for IBM System Storage DS8000 Extended Address Volumes (EAVs) to help simplify storage management and relieve address constraints

z/VM has become a truly important technology for IBM and mainframers alike, as the influx of people using it as the foundation to run zLinux has increased sharply over the past couple years.

And since it has been around for decades, z/VM has a lot of advanced virtualization features that other virtualization platforms don’t have, according to Clabby Analytics President Joe Clabby.

“It is the best virtualization platform,” he said. “It’s constantly raising the bar. Virtualization capabilities on the mainframe are a decade ahead of where x86 is right now, and a few years ahead of Power.”

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Journal, Robert Moffat, former senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group has been replaced by Rod Adkins, who had previously been in charge of systems development.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

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.

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.

Report: IBM, Novell to cut SUSE Linux price on mainframe

Timothy Prickett Morgan apparently got his hands on a Novell presentation about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), its iteration of Linux that is the most popular distribution running on the mainframe on top of z/VM.

Morgan reports that IBM and Novell are close to announcing a limited time slicing and dicing of support license costs for SLES, to the tune of as much as 50%. Here are the details:

The basic license cost for SLES 11 (and any SLES release for that matter) on IBM mainframes is $11,999 per engine for a one-year contract. That gets you installation support and Web support thereafter. A standard 9×5 business hour contract with human beings providing support for a year costs $15,000 per engine, and for premium 24×7 support, it costs $18,000. With this impending promotion, basic SLES 11 support prices per mainframe engine are being cut 40 per cent to $7,199, standard support is being cut 32 per cent to $10,200, and premium support is being cut 27 per cent to $13,200.

There is also another, seemingly separate promotion (it doesn’t look like the two can be combined):

If mainframe shops want to save some additional bucks after that, they can get a three-year support contract at 35 per cent of list and a five-year contract at 47 per cent off list. This can be some pretty substantial savings. A five-year SLES 11 premium support contract runs $44,999 per engine after the discount, which works out to $9,000 per engine. This promotion will be offered on the midrange System z10 BC mainframes (that’s short for Business Class, and offering from 1 to 5 mainframe engines), not the full-blown z10 EC machines (short for Enterprise Class, and spanning from 12 to 64 engines). This promotion will run until December 31, apparently. It is not clear when it will be launched, but probably this week or next.

In the presentation, Novell claims that it has 1,300 customers running Linux on 4,000 Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs), which is the mainframe specialty engine built to run Linux.

Texas-sized IT security breach: Mainframe stolen

According to the Palestine Herald, thieves recently stole a mainframe computer from the Trinity Valley Community College campus. The mainframe contained students’ sensitive personal information. Anderson County Sheriff Greg Taylor said “Of course, they cut a lot of wires (to take the mainframe computer). There will be a lot of damage.”