zLinux

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.

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.

z/VM 6.1 out by end of year

IBM announced yesterday that z/VM 6.1, the newest version of its mainframe virtualization operating system, will be out by year’s end.

The z/VM operating system has become more and more relevant over the past few years as companies have taken advantage of the virtualization appeal of the mainframe to run hundreds, or even thousands, of virtual Linux servers on big iron. There have been estimates that more than half of new mainframe MIPS are on zLinux.

The last version of z/VM, version 5.4, was released in June 2007, so this new version has been a while coming compared to the operating system’s previous release schedule.

The new version, 6.1, will be the first built on a new architectural level set (ALS), which is a fancy way of saying it will only run on the System z10 mainframes and future models. The expected end-of-life IBM support date for z/VM 5.4 is September 2013, so those running z9 mainframes and earlier have a few years to upgrade, find support from a third party, or go without support.

Some highlights from the new release:

• Guest LAN and Virtual Switch (VSWITCH) exploitation of the Prefetch Data instruction to use new IBM System z10 server cache prefetch capabilities to help improve the performance of guest-to-guest streaming network workloads
• Closer integration with IBM Systems Director by shipping the Manageability Access Point Agent for z/VM to help simplify installation of the agent
• Inclusion of post-z/VM V5.4 enhancements delivered in the IBM service stream.

Perhaps just as importantly, IBM says that z/VM 6.1 provides a formation for future z/VM enhancements, including the ability to allow multiple z/VM systems to act as one server image, and to allow live guest relocation from one system to another.

Some links to check out: the IBM announcement letter, preview summary, and z/VM 6.1 FAQ.

Linux on z/VM a big topic at Share this week

There are more than a dozen sessions here at Share in Austin this week on running Linux on the IBM System z within z/VM, big iron’s virtualization operating system. Nationwide, John Deere, the list goes on and on.

Yesterday I sat in on one of those sessions, where a systems engineer for a large financial institution (she declined to be named due to corporate policy) echoed the sentiments that Bhanu Rai from BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina told me in an interview the day before: Executive buy-in is crucial.

“Upper management buy-in is way easier than grassroots efforts,” the engineer said, adding that you need to “realize that success won’t happen until upper management buys in.”

This company started testing Linux on System z back in 2001, so they were early adopters. They run Novell SuSE 9 on top of z/VM 5.4 on their mainframes in two data centers, the primary in Minnesota and a disaster recovery site in Arizona. One of the major applications they moved to the mainframe handles ATM transactions, and the engineer said they shrunk response time at the ATM machines from “in the seconds” down to 156 milliseconds by putting it on zLinux and tuning it there.

Among a bunch of other applications, they also run a Web application on the mainframe that records secondary mortgages, which the engineer joked was “probably very low utilization right now.” Now, she says, Linux on the mainframe is the default, and if you want to do something else, you need to make a good business case for it.

At least part of that has to do with the increasing energy costs of continuing to build out a server farm, something they can stall with zLinux.

“We even have a power committee now,” she said. “If you want to put in a new piece of hardware, you have to go to the power committee to get it approved.”

Installing a new Linux image on z/VM requires no such visit.

Blue Cross Blue Shield wins Share’s 2009 excellence award

Mainframe user group Share just announced that Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina has won the group’s 2009 Award for Excellence in Technology, mainly for its large-scale server consolidation onto big iron.

The company consolidated 250 distributed servers onto two IBM System z servers running Linux on z/VM, the mainframe’s virtualization operating system. The move helped the company delay having to build out more data center floorspace, and as a result saved millions of dollars.

Blue Cross Blue Shield also had various application server middleware, and so it took the server consolidation as an opportunity to standardize on WebSphere Application Server on zLinux.

In addition to its consolidation project, last year the company also created the Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management, designed to help local high school and college students get access to enterprise systems like System z.

Previous winners of the Share award include The University of Georgia, Nationwide Insurance, and Caterpillar.

A mainframe on layaway, and other IBM incentives

In a move taken from auto dealerships and furniture companies, IBM is offering a way for mainframe users — or wannabe mainframe users — to get big iron now without having to pay for it until later.

Last week IBM announced the z10 Business Class, a smaller counterpart to its big honcho, the z10 Enterprise Class. The z10 BC starts at about $100,000. It’s far less than a seven- or eight-figure EC, but still, it’s not pocket change in this current economic climate. As part of the announcement, IBM is offering a financing deal. Order one now, and you don’t have to make a payment for 90 days.

Can you see the commercial now? Can you see the different color balloons floating around the mainframe retail store, luring unknowing customers into buying a mainframe? Actually, though, financing deals in the IT world are nothing new, said Mike Kahn of The Clipper Group.

“It’s an incentive to bring business in this year,” he said. “They’re ramping up product and getting it ready to ship. A lot of people would say they don’t have any budget left. The economy is down and they’ve blown their budget for this quarter. They might not have any money this quarter but they might have it next quarter.”

Kahn added that IT vendors often have end-of-the-year deals, where they might throw in extra memory at no cost to try to get product out the door by the end of the quarter. IBM’s move is just another end-of-year deal.

Specialty engines cut in half

The other big financial incentive that IBM announced at the same time was that the specialty engines for the z10 BC would be half price — so about $45,000 instead of almost $100,000.

The specialty engines include the zIIP, zAAP and IFL, which are geared toward running database, Java and Linux applications, respectively. Those less fond of IBM and its mainframe have called them stripped-down z/OS engines, and to an extent, that’s true. Either way, the specialty engines have offered a way to get traditionally non-mainframe applications — Linux and Java especially — running on big iron in a consolidated fashion on top of z/VM, big iron’s virtualization operating system.

During the announcement, IBM officials said they are gearing the z10 BC to be a big consolidation play, where users take a bunch of their x86 Linux servers and stuff them onto the mainframe. Reducing the cost of the specialty engines could help it work.

 ”They believe this is a real opportunity for them and customers to rethink what they’re doing with these more open applications,” Kahn said.

Kahn added that if you’re running a z9 Business Class with specialty engines, and you decide to upgrade to the z10 Business Class, IBM will give you the upgraded specialty engine at no charge.

“That’s like if somebody says they’ll take old used tires off my car and give me better tires,” he said. “I could use a few of those deals in my life.”

More than half the mainframe MIPS IBM sells are Linux?

By some estimates, since this past February when the z10 was introduced, Linux has accounted for more than half the total mainframe MIPS IBM has sold since the z10 was introduced last February. I asked a few experts to react to that statement:

Charles King of Pund-IT Research Hayward, Calif. is not surprised. “Linux has been on the mainframe for almost a decade,” King said. “For customers that already have mainframes — leveraging z/vm rather than buying mountains of x86 servers on a year over year basis been getting a lot of play and that’s where a lot of the additional numbers have been coming from.”

“IBM doesn’t make a lot of money selling Linux operating environments, but they do sell a lot of hardware and support services. Linux has been a boon for IBM and for the mainframe. I wonder if the IBM mainframe would continue to have the presence today if Linux wasn’t around.”

David Boyes of Sine Nomine Associates (the company responsible for porting Linux to Big Iron ten years ago) agreed, in email response:

Consider that [IBM] pretty much hands out IFLs like acid drops, and if you plan to do any serious DB/2 or Java work with z/OS, you pretty much have to have a zIIP or a zAAP in order to not drive your CA and IBM software bills through the roof. Since those specialty processors always run at full rated speed (as opposed to an increasing percentage of sub-capacity standard engines due to the loss of the Flex-ES machines for the low-end market and the high cost of z/OS software), the proportion of new IFL and zIIP/zAAP mips being sold dramatically outstrips the percentage of standard CPs being sold.

My take is that the amount of traditional z/OS processing (which is the critical demand driver for traditional mainframe MIPS) continues to decrease, but is being offset by new workload on z/VM and Linux, and additional MIPS on z/OS to handle processor intensive workload like Java, which is exactly where the zIIP and zAAP come into play. Now, the fact that we NEED that many MIPS for Java apps says more about the quality of the software and the tooling than the system it’s running on — there’s a lot of genuinely rotten Java code out there that simply assumes that processor resource is infinite, and you’ll just buy a bigger box if it doesn’t run efficiently — but a $400K price tag vs a $125K price tag for the specialty engines is a compelling argument to absorb new workload.

We contacted IBM for confirmation, but no comment so far.

IBM vs. Sun: The mainframe cage match

I must admit. As a tech journalist, it’s always fun to watch two vendors go at each other’s throats. That is what has been happening recently between IBM and Sun employees, as they argue over the virtualization benefits of the new System z10.

It all started with a column that Jon Toigo wrote in the Mainframe Executive magazine called “Enterprise Manager: Virtualize This!” Now, let’s be clear about one thing: Toigo is not fond of x86 virtualization using VMware. That was made clear in the article, and is something he’s made clear before. Last fall, he said during a Data Center Decisions conference session (TechTarget runs Data Center Decisions) that VMware is “shoddy” and full of bugs. He recommended running a mainframe instead. Not everyone at the conference agreed with Toigo’s assessment, including other speakers.

Needless to say, Jeff Savit was not impressed. A principal engineer at Sun Microsystems, Savit wasn’t convinced by Toigo’s article. In fact, he said Toigo got a lot wrong:

If you stipulate that another platform can run only 1/4 the work that it can actually run, and omit the very substantial costs on the other platform - z, and believe grossly exaggerated claims about its capabilities, and fail to mention features of other platforms that provide comparable or superior features that z cannot do (VMotion anyone?), well, you’re going to be a few orders of magnitude off.

That set off people in the comments space, one of which was Toigo, who said he would get to the bottom of some of the claims he made in the article, such as being able to virtualize up to 1,500 x86 servers using the mainframe’s LPAR technology. The mainframe can host thousands of virtual servers, but within z/VM, not LPARs, as Mark Post wrote in the comment section of Toigo’s article. Post is an engineer at Novell who focuses on zLinux.

In addition to reading the comments to Savit’s post, you’ll also want to read a post by Tony Pearson, an IBM storage consultant, and the comments that went with that, as well as the most recent addition to the literature, a post by IBM senior IT architect Joe Temple, over at the Typepad Mainframe blog.

And don’t forget the popcorn.

I suspect that readers of this blog will tend to side with the IBMers, but Savit’s post is well thought out, and it’s not like he’s unfamiliar with mainframes, either. Before coming to Sun, he was a VP at Merrill Lynch overseeing their mainframe virtualization.

I think all parties provide a good example of how to properly argue over the Internet. None of them resorted to “your mother” jokes, or asking one another what they’re going to do when the 24″ pythons run wild on you. I kind of wish they did, though. But that’s just me being greedy.