The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2008 Out Soon

This is a quick reminder that the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2008 is due for release at the end of the month. It is the independent annual guide for users of IBM mainframe systems and no doubt it will be packed with the usual mix of in-depth mainframe related articles, mainframe survey results, and technical information, resources, links, advice and more.

It's free and comes in the form of a PDF - do not miss it - it'll be interesting to see the results of their latest mainframers survey - I'll post a review in February,

Software Directory Keeps Expanding

The Mainframe-Upgrade.com Software Directory is turning into a big beast with now 150 software companies listed with a combined total of 1750 mainframe software products. Of course the giants of the industry such as CA and IBM are strongly represented, but its great to see also a rich diversity of smaller specialist companies, producing some excellent widely used products like SELCOPY by CBL, the awesome performance management tool MXG by Merril Consultants and increasingly popular Ab Initio.

The Software directory is also categorised, and there are now over 50 categories to help you find the software you are after. They range from the obvious like DASD/Dataset Management and Application Development to the more specialist, such as License Management and Disaster Recovery.

The latest additions - added into the directory in September were:
Axios, jme software, World Programming, Macro 4 and Merrill Consultants

If you know of any Mainframe Software Companies that have not been included then please e-mail me with the information and I will arrange for them to be added to the directory.

MICRO FOCUS Launches SOA EXPRESS

Micro Focus today announced a new product, SOA Express that is well worth a serious look. They are well aware that getting quickly at our core mainframe systems without having to change them, and opening them up as SOA services is what our Businesses want and their focus looks spot on, with an emphasis on compliance standards, speed, simplicity, low-cost and low-risk.

A free webcast demonstrating how SOA Express works is scheduled for next week:

Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Time: 8:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM ET / 4:00 PM BST / 5:00 PM CET

Registration Link: www.microfocus.com/SOAexpressWebcast

Here is the press release in full

NEWBURY, England, July 17, 2007 - Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today unveiled the latest in its mainframe modernization solutions with the launch of Micro Focus SOA Express. The new solution provides customers with a high-performing business tool for mainframe-based applications and offers a seamless and open approach to Service Oriented Architecture.

SOA Express enables customers to rapidly build and deploy new 'services' by modernizing core business applications using proven methodology and standards-based technology (SOA Certified - "Ready for IBM"). Enterprise systems need to evolve at increasing pace to meet business demands, such as regulatory compliance, aligning IT and business after M&A activity, or improving time to market of new products and services. With Micro Focus SOA Express, customers are able to respond to market conditions and opportunities more efficiently, without the need to overhaul existing IT infrastructure or retrain existing staff.

Stuart McGill, Chief Technology Officer, Micro Focus, said: "SOA Express truly enables CIOs and IT directors to fully exploit their existing enterprise architecture, providing a platform for delivery of competitive advantage by exploiting the benefits of SOA. Everything is delivered in a predictable and repeatable fashion with a fast and low-risk option to extend legacy business applications from the mainframe to Web Services."

SOA Express dramatically reduces the risks associated with moving to SOA, by ensuring that new services do not impact the existing architecture or applications, retaining historical investments and intellectual property. In addition, the new solution allows existing application experts to focus on business priorities rather than building IT infrastructure, so the associated costs are also dramatically reduced.

Hal Peters, President, Pinebrook Consulting Inc. said: "For our large financial clients, adapting their core mission-critical mainframe systems to new business requirements is a crucial challenge for IT. With SOA Express we can leave what's already running unchanged and exploit legacy interfaces to build services from existing systems to meet new business requests faster and more effectively."

SOA Express highlights

· A fast path to WebSphere deployment

· Ability to build industry-standard Web Services, J2EE or .NET objects

· Rapid aggregation of mainframe business applications into reusable Services

· Automatic service deployment to WebSphere or your application server environment of choice

· Rapid time to market of new products and services with no business risk and no application changes

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

The Mainframe Virtual Universe is Expanding

This Mainframe Virtual World is becoming a reality and it reinforces how modern the old dinosaur is becoming ! In this market the mainframe's strength is its ability to service millions of simultaneous users efficiently, which is what you need if we are all going to forget global warming and disappear into our "second life" and ditch the first!

In a hookup with the Brazilian software developer Hoplon Infotainment, IBM is conjuring up a "Cell Broadband Engine" for the mainframe to better position itself for serving up the huge online virtual worlds and online games that are proving so popular.

Read more


William Hoffman

New IDUG Google search Facility

IDUG has added a particularly useful search tool to their DB2 Resources section. It is a Google search facility that restricts searches to a choice of either the IBM DB2 9 Information Center, or the IBM DB2 UDB V8 Information Center. This should help speed up the retrieval of relevant DB2 information, and help those wanting to quickly resolve DB2 conundrums and aid general DB2 fact finding queries. To access the search facility go to the main IDUG page at http://www.idug.org and click on the DB2 Resources link - the search box is at the bottom of the page.

About IDUG
IDUG is the International DB2 Users Group and it has thousands of members from all over the world. IDUG functions as a DB2 networking and information portal with excellent educational, technical and networking resources.

You can use the IDUG site without being member but joining opens up access to other resources such as discussion forums, the technical library, the e-Tip of the week, the Solutions Provider Directory and the Code Place

Here is its mission statement

The International DB2 Users Group (IDUG®) is an independent, not-for-profit, user-run organization whose mission is to support and strengthen the information services community by providing the highest quality education and services designed to promote the effective utilization of the DB2 family of products.

Mainframe Software Directory

There is a now a comprehensive mainframe software directory at mainframe-upgrade.com
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/software-directory.php

You can find mainframe software by company and software category. This is a very useful resource to know about when you are trying to navigate through the huge quantity of choices, or attempting to locate just exactly the right piece of software to meet your requirements.

The Green Machine - Mainframe is more Eco-Friendly

Nowadays the environment and global warming are topics of conversation not just in the coffee shop and bars, but also in the boardrooms of every comapny. Not addressing our over consumption of energy is not an option, from both moral and hard economic standpoints. Given that, then it is interesting to see the facts on Mainframe energy consumption against its competitors i.e distributed systems. Mark Anzani, vice president of System z hardware products at IBM is puts forward a compelling Green argument for mainframes in the article Are Mainframes Going Green (from IT Week Green Business News)

To quote one part of that article:
When you hit a certain workload the larger servers or mainframe environments are more energy efficient on an [energy used per] unit of work basis than multiple servers working together. We took a look at the energy used for the same workload when run on distributed four-way Unix servers and on a z9 mainframe machine. The energy consumption of the z9 was ten times less.

Now this is big talk - a 90% reduction in energy consumption ! this could become an increasingly big persuader in the mainframe versus distributed fight, and with mainframe virtualisation becoming a realistic strategy for many it could be the extra incentive to go way.

Remember - Ethical and Envronmental concerns are now big factors in share price and profitablity. Consumers are more and more aware of the issues and voting with their pocket. If you have followed Ethical Managed Funds, as I have, in the past few years you will have seen that many have outperformed the main indexes. They are no longer the marginal haven for the moral minority but are mainstream big hitters. I came across this Ethical Investment site the other day, and it'll point you in the right dfirection if you want more on this key subject

Mainframe Simplification in 5 Years

IBM has announced recently a five-year $100 million project to simply the mainframe with graphical user interfaces and more automation. Many would say that its about time Big Iron brought up their flagship z-series machines into the 21st century and if they are serious about making the mainframe the centre of the new virtualised world then, even if they continue to carry the burden of the old legacy systems, they must be modernised. I think that this is key to IBMs strategy and in many ways they have to make working on the mainframe as user friendly as a networked home PC, and then avoid some of this youth anti-mainframe problem.

The key areas IBM have identified for improvemnet are :

1) Automated configuration checking: make it far easier for IT administrators and computer programmers to predict and avoid technical issues.

2) Modernise the mainframe user interface: including network configuration, systems management, and data center hardware configurationdesigned with both existing IT staff and the new generation of IT workers in mind.

3) Improve software asset management technologies: make it easier for users to control software costs and simplify/automate the acquisition of software services.

4) Modernise the mainframe development environment with visual/graphical tools that enable beginners to learn quickly how to program for the mainframe.

William Hoffman - www.mainframe-upgrade.com

Mainframe Battle

Is there battle going on in your organisation over whether you should ditch the mainframe or not ? There could be some big mistakes made in the future if the arguments are not clearly understood.

Cost of migration

Think of you worst case figure and double it. May be an exaggeration, but big systems migrations nearly always hit trouble and cost escalation. There will be whole areas of legacy code that no-one understands, or maybe worse, people think they understand it but in fact have got it totally wrong !


Security and processing speed

So you’ll maybe save some operational costs, but that may be at the expense of reduced processing speed and lower levels of security. The mainframe is the mother of security and speed and you need to think carefully and clearly before moving away from all that.

Skills

COBOL is just a programming language – it does not take too long to train people up to code in COBOL. It’s the individual system functionality that tends to be the complex area that takes time to understand before being competent to design, make and test changes. This system complexity remains whatever the language it is written in so migration to snazzy new application operational and development environments can in the end be disappointing from a developmental point of view. Let’s face it you’ll have a new legacy system in a year or two whatever you do !
The COBOL skills shortage is a myth, rates are down, and if demand goes up substantially due to mass baby boomer retirement then more people will quickly train up in what is essentially an easy to learn discipline. What we may be short of is computing skills in general, as the youth seem to be staying away in droves.


Conclusions

Think seriously of making a mainframe upgrade rather than throwing it out. Look at IFLs zLinux, zAAPs and ZIIPS , hypersockets and Capacity on demand. Then try to make a comparison between the two.

Capacity On Demand - take it seriously

I have been banging on about IBM's Capacity On Demand offering on system z9 for some time now. So it is good to hear that around the place there are some stories coming out of intelligent use of this pricing structure. The computerworld article Capacity on Demand Retains Mainframe Users reports on The Charles Schwab Corp and their apparently highly successful use of Capacity On Demand.

There are sensible words of caution there also. With IBMs notoriously secretive deals its difficult to guage whether you have struck up the best contract you could have, as having the right level of toughness in negotiations with IBM is desirable.

Temporary scheduled or unplanned rises in capacity are something IT managers and planners have long struggled to deal with on mainframes. The need to avoid expensive mainframe upgrades for what may be just a mere passing peak, conflicts with the urgent business need to keep going, meeting the demands that will fuel profit and growth. Failure to cope with these peaks can be costly, both in terms of current business but also in terms of potential future business. IBMs On/Off Capacity on Demand is designed to deal with this, read more >>>

Hipersockets

Ever wondered what a Hipersocket was - ever needed to sit down quietly with a cup of tea and forget about work while staring at a blank wall ?... well anyay here is some info on Hipersockets:

f you have gone for the zLinux virtual server option as an alternative to multiple external servers then its my guess you will want to maximise the advantage by utilising the superfast speeds of the mainframe.
Putting in Hipersockets gives you high speed network connections between all your virtual Linux servers and LPARs running z/OS or S/390, that looks and feels just like TCP/IP. Of course it is not TCP/IP - the connections move data around from one memory location to another, there is no physical cabling involved. IBM quotes the following improvements in speeds "Benchmarks using two LPARs each with four CPUs, each running 31-bit Linux kernal 2.4.7 on a zSeries 900 HiperSockets demonstrated up to four to six times more throughput than a single Gigabit Ethernet for batch streaming traffic,and up to between two and five times more throughput for interactive traffic. This can translate into shorter batch windows and faster response times".
For access to all the IBM documentation on Hipersockets click here
For information on an upgrade to Hipersockets called Hipersockets accelerator - click here
For an IBM performance evaluation - click here

WH
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

Learn more about the zIIP Chip

I Recently stumbled on this blog entry by Willie Favero - Want to know more about the zIIP specialty engine?. Its good, and will give you a good run through zIIP fundamentals. Enjoy at your leisure...

William Hoffman http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

New IBM System z9 Business Class mainframe for SMB, time to upgrade ?

Small to medium businesses (SMBs) have often shied away from IBM Mainframe solutions because of cost. IBM have now made a considered move into this market by addressing this big concern. The System z9 Business Class (z9 BC) platform was announced this April and, with an entry-level price set at about $100,000, this brings the processing power of a System z9 within reach of the SMB segment.

Read More >>

William Hoffman http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

SOLA power - energise your legacy CICS

The SOA gurus keep on shouting at us to expose our legacy applications as web services, telling us that this is the only way to gain the flexibility needed in our ever more fluid Business world. This is sound advice, but easier said than done. However, there are people who have been plugging away at this for some time, including a team, at Merrill Lynch who set out to answer some audacious questions - "Why not open up our legacy CICS applications as Web Services?, do it without using a Middle Tier?, and improve performance at the same time?"

Read more >>

William Hoffman www.mainframe-upgrade.com

Mainframe Skills Shortage: It's not just a technical problem.

The imminent retirement of the mainframe old timers and the lack of fresh young blood coming through is testing the IT departments of Enterprises all over the world. What they are realising is that it is not just a technical expertise problem. Many of these mainframe specialists, particularly those working in application development, will have built up a huge functional knowledge. This functional system knowledge will have built up from all the estimating, writing of High Level and Technical designs, fixing problems, component Integration testing and all the other tasks they have been involved with in their mainframe career.

If you stop and think about it, it could be this knowledge that is more important than the technical expertise. Mainframe technical expertise can be bought, it may cost more in the future, but if you pay the right price you will probably get it. It is the disappearance of the functional knowledge of your mainframe business systems that will give you the biggest headaches.

What becomes clear is that it must be addressed now, before its too late. A coordinated approach to knowledge transfer must be developed which may require changes to the current documentation regime. It may be necessary, if it does not exist currently, to get a new swathe of functional knowledge documentation written up, that will be suitable for new starters to get a grip of the system fundamentals. A strategy for keeping it up to date must be devised as well. Updates to this extra layer of knowledge documentation may have to become a deliverable when implementing system changes. Some Companies have introduced knowledge Intranets and certainly a web based solution to knowledge transfer is worth considering with powerful search capabilities and possibilities for interaction.

Other ideas businesses are trying, other than overhauling their KT documentation, include:
Rehiring newly retired mainframers as part time home based consultants
Giving younger staff more work outside of their immediate functional comfort zone. This can bring a number of benefits if done carefully with adequate support, including, increased job satisfaction with more challenges, a culture of ‘can do’ and mutual support, prevention of pigeon holing staff and over reliance on key ‘experts’.

If you have not started taking a serious look at this problem yet then get onto it quick ! The mainframe is not going away, and the advent of the new architectures – particularly Service Oriented Architecture, and the new technical innovations such as Virtualisation, Hipersockets, Ziip chips, zAAP, Integrated Facilities for Linux (zLinux), really mean the mainframe has a solid future in Enterprise IT strategies.

For more on the mainframe skills shortage read :
Mainframe Skills Shortage – Train Your Way Out
The Dinosaur Myth: Mainframe Behemoths Aren't Dead Yet
Shortage of mainframe skills may give IT execs gray hairs
IBM Scholars zSeries Program
IT skills crisis looms - and outsourcing won't help

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

SOA Fundamentals

This article introduces the basic principles of Service Oriented Architecture and has many links to useful resources on the web that will give the reader a good start in this exciting area. For those wanting to learn in more depth then see my book recommendations at the end of the article.

Introduction
Enterprises are made up of a set of Business Processes. That is what makes a company tick, it's the day to day, week to week, year to year stuff that the corporation does to make a profit - provide a service, make something, sell something, receive money, issue invoices, bank money, pay staff and so on. Most of these processes can be broken down into more fundamental discrete building blocks known as services. SOA dictates that all services that can be automated be built in such a way that no calling client needs to worry about how it is implemented - the service is truly an abstract black box with a formal contract of engagement , the services can easily be reused and assembled into Business processes and the relationship between services and clients is one of limited dependency.

Read More >>

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

The Wachovia SOA adventure

The 4th largest bank in the US, Wachovia, has started implementing a full on, end to end, IBM mainframe SOA with zAAP and Websphere. The results so far are good. Read more at this mainframe blog . Everyone is going to be watching this one very carefully – their plan takes them through to 2008 and their expectations are high – they hope to cut costs by a massive 40%
Read the Internetnews article

Wachovia are also being innovative in their use of bonus payments to developers who adopt enthusiastically the new skillsets and get involved in the forging the new SOA solutions. Read more on this at aspnews

Read More >>

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2006

I heartily recommend the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2006 - it is in pdf format and free. It runs this year to 124 pages and is a must read for mainframe professionals. Contents include articles on the years trends including of course SOA and Virtualisation. There is a comprehensive list of vendors, top mainframe links and an excellent mainframe glossary as well as the user survey results and hardware tables. Definitely worth a look.

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

UK Mainframe Contractor Rates

For those of you interested in working in the UK at Mainframe sites the following links may be useful to get an idea of the kind of rate you are likely to get -

To get an idea of what UK mainframe contractors are being paid go to http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/mainframe.do - there is also a tab at the top for permanent mainframe jobs. This is very useful stuff with comparisons and regional splits.

MQseries rates are at http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/mqseries.do

For a good picture of Irish IT contractor rates (including Mainframe) go to http://www.finfacts.com/Private/isl/it.htm

William Hoffman - Mainframe-Upgrade.Com

COBOL thoughts

About 3/4 of all Enterprise data is processed by COBOL applications.

Have you moved yet to the consolidated run-time environment LE (Language Environment), which hikes up performance, connectivity and functionality for applications written in COBOL (and PL/1, FORTRAN, Assembler and C) and is now a prerequisite for z/OS. If the answer is no then you are a bit behind the times and if you want some help then one company worth a look at is Blue Pheonix who have COBOL/LE-Enabler.

Recommended: Mainframe COBOL programing book Murach's Mainframe COBOL. Focuses on IBM Mainframe COBOL - well structured, excellent manual. Also worth a read is an article by Mike Murach on The Future of COBOL

I recently re-read an interesting 2003 article at eweek - Peter Coffee's Is COBOL the 18-Wheeler of the Web? with some statistics of note: 15% of new applications are COBOL , "The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers who know the Internet" (GIGA). I'm not sure this entirely fits in with todays SOA world - I'd be interested in views on this.

More COBOL musings soon

WH May 2006

DB2 Viper really will have Venom!

There will be new data-compression technology, named VENOM, available in DB2 Viper that IBM believes could cut disk space requirements by over 50%.
It will work in a similar way to most compression software, by applying algorithms that will index repetitive duplicate data entries in new "dictionaries"

Clearly some DB2 tables will benefit substantially more than others, and the Venom compression Software will be available to be applied at table level.

IBM has tried DB2 compression before but the rumblings are that they have cracked it this time - so maybe we can look forward to some freed up IT budgets !!

More at:
http://www.managinginformation.com/news/content_show_full.php?id=4840

Early DB2 Viper community

More on DB2 Viper XML and XQUERY

IBM's next DB2 release (some time later this year) is code-named DB2 Viper and there are a number of significant advances. But here I am going to concentrate on the one I think is the most revolutionary – the support for XML data. This is something worth getting your teeth into, so read on and then browse through the extensive link list at the end of this article to get fully up to speed – included is the link straight through toIBM's Viper Test Drive page. XML data is the lifeblood of Service Orientated Architectures (SOA). It facilitates accesses to varied data formats across multiple platforms – and that is why IBM is pushing in this direction, SOA is their number one strategic direction and they know that enhanced XML support could (and probably will !) steal them a significant lead. ORACLE's response will be interesting. Current estimates suggest that only 20% of Enterprise data is stored in relational databases while 35-40% and rising is held in unstructured XML...

Read More >>

WH
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

IBM Mainframe On/Off Capacity on Demand

Temporary scheduled or unplanned increases in capacity are a headache IT managers and planners have long struggled to deal with. The need to avoid expensive mainframe upgrades for what may be a passing peak conflicts with the urgent business need to keep up and running, meeting the demands that will fuel profit and growth. Failure to cope with these peaks can be costly, both in terms of current business but also in terms of potential future business.

Don't rely on the Paracetomol or Ibubofren to see you through - especially if you have resorted to Jim Beam chasers !
Instead - read about IBMs Mainframe On/Off Capacity on Demand offering

WH
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

More on .NET and the mainframe

Further to my .NET on the mainframe post on 5th April - those of you interested more in using .NET as a development enviroment to create Mainframe based web services (SOA) , rather than actually run .NET on the mainframe, should have a quick read of Bernie Domanski's zJournal article from June 2005 which explores this in some detail. He looks at .NET and other vendors offerings - including of course IBM Websphere.

Bernie is a man who talks sense! here is the article's conclusion -

"The mainframe remains vibrant. What’s changing are the development environments and the variety of robust integration strategies. Today, these are centralizing around Web Services technologies. Gradually, developers and vendors alike will be forced to adopt a more fluid SOA approach. What won’t change is the pivotal role of the mainframe. " Bernie Domanski - zJournal June 2005

Common sense in spades!

Learn more at Mainframe-Upgrade.com

Also - Read my full article on SOA and the Mainframe

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

DB2 Viper is imminent, so have a look at XQUERY !

DB2 Viper is round the corner and you now can even test drive it - see information at the IBM site http://www-306.ibm.com/db2/viper/ . So now may be the time to teach some old dogs some new tricks - because DB2 Viper will manage XML as well as conventional relational data - and you will be able to query the XML with XQUERY or SQL.

For a good introduction to XQUERY go to http://www.w3schools.com/xquery/default.asp for an informative tutorial. And IBM has written and SQL/XML article on how to query XML Data with SQL at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0603saracco2/

The native XML support in DB2 Viper looks good for the SOA and Business Integration bandwagon and things will start to pick up pace once its out of beta. I for one feel this is a major development and will reposition IBM favourably against its major rivals - particularly ORACLE. Watch this space.

Bill H 2006
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/