mainframe

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Journal, Robert Moffat, former senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group has been replaced by Rod Adkins, who had previously been in charge of systems development.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

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.

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.”

Move CICS, DB2, IMS, TSO/ISPF and batch to specialty processors

According to a recent analyst report on Neon Software’s zPrime, mainframe users may soon be able to run traditional mainframe workloads like CICS, DB2, IMS, TSO/ISPF and batch on the IBM mainframe zIIP and zAAP specialty processors, lowering billable MIPs on the central processor.

According to the report from Ptak, Noel & Associates (PNA), one Fortune 500 mainframe customer said he’d save $1.5 million in three months by shifting workloads. PNA suggests mainframe users can expect to drastically cut software licensing costs by implementing this new software, but their are risks — including the reaction from vendors like IBM, which could buy Neon and shut this technology down.

Mainframe rivals press for anti-trust action against IBM under Obama

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has pursued Big Blue for decades in an effort to rein in the technology giant’s allegedly unfair behavior.

The CCIA now has added encouragement from a tiny firm backed by IBM rival Microsoft Corp., which has lodged an antitrust complaint in Europe, while pressing a related lawsuit in federal court in New York and sounding out U.S. regulators. T3 Technologies Inc. argues that IBM unfairly has sewn up the market for mainframes, the powerful machines relied upon by virtually every Fortune 500 company to crunch data.

The CCIA is also responsible for promoting antitrust action against Intel for trying to push AMD out of the x86 server market.

You can read more about CCIA’s position on the mainframe here.