mainframe

The current and future state of mainframe compliance

I recently spoke to Scott Crawford, managing research director for Boulder, Colo.-based analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, about compliance on the mainframe. Here’s what he had to say.

Is compliance on the mainframe more of a challenge today than it has been in the past? Why?

I think it’s a question of perception more than anything else. The reason I say that is there has long been the perception that the mainframe is inherently secure. But security professionals shouldn’t think anything is inherently secure. A lot of benefits are based on how the mainframe is managed and administered. Now there’s the challenge of bringing in a new generation of professionals to manage the mainframe. What do they understand about mainframe security and access? How far is the mainframe really extended? How much mainframe functionality is integrated with applications that have high exposure?

Do you see mainframe applications being integrated with non-mainframe apps more frequently now, and maybe more haphazardly?

We have seen a number of system integrators whose primary business focus was integrating mainframe functionality through Web services. LPARs make is possible to host a Linux environment and a z/OS environment side-by-side. It’s also possible to host many common applications in that environment whose exposures are fairly well known. What the mainframe has going for it is a culture of disciplined control and disciplined management. Centralized control gives you benefits, but the risk has to be managed in such a way to get those benefits.

Is there a certain danger around people just assuming that the mainframe is secure?

There are a lot of assumptions around inherent reliability on the mainframe. A lot of security pros come from networking and distributed computing and not as much from the mainframe. They’re not as educated about the mainframe. Even a lot of the people trained as auditors might not have the skills to recognize risks in certain areas. In some case they might not know what they’re looking for, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the mainframe environment.

Is compliance on the mainframe harder than on distributed platforms? Why or why not?

Aspects of it are different as far as the underlying platform. You have to be knowledgeable of things like z/OS, RACF, and other products like (CA’s) Top Secret. You need to know things such as console operations and securing the console itself. But there is a lot that is alike. Securing a Linux host, for example. Those things are likely to be very similar. But the differences require special expertise.

Should IT shops with mainframe look to do compliance internally or just hire someone to do it for them?

Internally, companies need to realize that they need to make the generational transfer of knowledge and expertise. You need to manage the environment. This isn’t going to happen overnight. For external resources, you can turn to those providing tools, companies like IBM, CA and BMC, who have expertise.

IBM to stop selling z9 mainframe next June, “z11″ out 3Q 2010

In an announcement letter it put out today, IBM said it would withdraw the System z9 Business Class and Enterprise Class mainframe from marketing effective June 30.

The boilerplate:

On or after the effective dates for the withdrawal of these offerings, you can no longer order this product directly from IBM. However, IBM will continue to honor contracts until expiration or termination of the current contract.

As one mainframe listserv poster put it: “I thought June 2010 was a little early if the z11 isn’t going to be
available until Q4 2010, but to be honest I haven’t (paid) attention to the exact timing of past withdrawal announcements.”

Ian Bramley, managing director of IT analyst firm Software Strategies, said we can expect to see the z11 mainframes near the end of the third quarter of next year. Perhaps we’ll see them early in the third quarter, or maybe even the end of the second quarter, if IBM plans to pull the z9 off the market on June 30.

Bramley talked about some of the potential forthcoming details of the z11 mainframe, including the move from 65nm to 45nm processors that will run around 5GHz and have simultaneous multithreading, dual-threading and result in a 20-25% performance improvement.

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.

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.”