IBM Commits $100 Million to Make Mainframes Easier to Use

Published: October 4, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

General purpose computers are, by their very nature, complex machines, but some are more complex than others. With over four decades of creeping featurism and some of the most complicated workloads in the world running on them, mainframes can be a bit of a pain in the neck to keep humming. With the z/OS Version 1.8 operating system that IBM started shipping this week, Big Blue is claiming that is has made its flagship mainframe platform a lot easier to use. And IBM has also committed $100 million to make the whole mainframe stack more manageable.

Ease of use is something that all operating systems claim, of course. But ease of use is not usually an imperative for server operating system providers. But with the community of mainframe programmers and system administrators aging, and the mainframe not exactly being a hot topic at the colleges and universities around the globe that train future IT professionals, the mainframe is in a bit of a squeeze. A tremendous amount of skill that goes into making mainframes run extremely efficiently--which is necessary because mainframes are so much more expensive than Windows or Unix iron--is set to leave the market in the next 5 to 10 years as mainframers retire. And there is no easy or quick way to transfer these skills to newbie mainframers.

IBM has been well aware of these trends. That is why the company is today launching a five-year, $100 million initiative that spans the company's entire line of mainframe products. The goal is to make it easier for seasoned mainframe administrators as well as those who are new to the platform to manage the machines. In fact, some of the tools that IBM is touting this week made their debut with z/OS V1.7, which was launched in July 2005 with the "Danu" System z9 EC mainframes and which began shipping at the end of September last year.

Bob Hoey, worldwide vice president of sales for IBM's System z9 line, explained that this is additional investment from IBM, above and beyond the approximately $1 billion that Big Blue spends each year to develop mainframe-related hardware and software technologies.

The $100 million investment came about, says Hoey, when IBM decided to do the System z9 BC and z/OS V1.8 announcements in Bejing, China, instead of back on its home turf in New York City. As part of its sales pitch to the burgeoning Chinese market, IBM's mainframe executives explained that the 8 million small and mid size businesses in China--many without computerization or that have Windows or Unix iron--would do better if they consolidated their workloads onto mainframes. This is a sales pitch companies in North America and Europe, which have been using mainframes for four decades, are used to hearing.

Chinese customers, of course, do not have very much experience with mainframes, or IBM for that matter. "We had a cynical response, as you might imagine," says Hoey.

IBM explained that a Windows or Unix administrator could be trained in perhaps two to three years to become expert enough to run mainframe applications efficiently. Since time is money, and mainframes are very expensive compared to Windows and Unix boxes, the time to train mainframers and the cost of running mainframes inefficiently is very high. Moreover, with various industry analysts saying that about half of the current employee base of mainframe system administrators will be eligible for retirement starting in 2007, companies in North America and Europe are also facing a looming administration crisis.

So, the System z division got approval to invest another $100 million to make it easier for mainframes and the systems, middleware, and application development software that runs on them more like Windows and Unix systems, which have all manner of wizards to help admins. Easier to operate makes them less expensive because it will take fewer people to manage a mainframe and less time to train them to be good at it.

Hoey says IBM's goal over the five years is to reduce the time it takes to train a skilled mainframe admin from two to three years down to six months. Some of this reduction will be accomplished by unifying interfaces in its software stack--using Eclipse tools that can run across all major operating systems--but a lot of the reduction will come from new tools that take a lot of the guesswork out of setting up and running a mainframe and its complex workloads.

Hoey says even experienced mainframe customers are worried that they are not squeezing every last MIPS of performance out of their boxes, and that is why IBM has created the Health Checker for z/OS. This is being billed as a "personal trainer" that monitors z/OS and recommends configuration tunings for performance, scalability, and security.

IBM is also releasing the Tivoli Omegamon z/OS management console, which is system management tool with a graphical user interface for managing mainframes, which are typically managed from a green screen using a command line interface. While the green screen is fine for old-time mainframers and even many Linux or Unix admins, Windows admins can't do anything without a mouse. This graphical tool interfaces with the Health Checker, too.

The company also announced the Hardware Configuration Manager for z/OS V1.8, which is a collection of auto-configuration wizards that help admins set up a mainframe. The software also has the capability of monitoring the performance of workloads and make suggestions to get around performance bottlenecks and, if admins feel like trusting the tool, actually make the changes to the system to fix the problem. (No, it does not have an annoying paperclip icon.)

Because setting up networks and adapters is such a pain in the neck on any system, IBM has also updated the z/OS Communications Server, which made its debut in z/OS V1.7, with the z/OS V1.8 release. Communications Server can now interface with the intrusion detection system that IBM built into the z/OS V1.8 operating system, and generally helps those setting up networks or changing them on running systems from making errors that take time and money to find and then correct.

Other Interesting z/OS Developments

As was the case with z/OS V1.7, IBM has done some other things to extend the scalability of the z/OS operating system. (formerly known as OS/390 and before that MVS). z/OS V1.8 can support up to 4 TB of real memory in a single z/OS image, which is the largest memory space that any operating system is able to address, including Windows and Unix. However, because of limits in the hardware, a System z9 EC server tops out at 512 GB of memory and the earlier "T-Rex" generation of machines, known as the zSeries 990, can support a maximum of 256 GB of main memory. As IBM's hardware progresses and more physical main memory is added to the boxes, z/OS V1.8 will be able to see it. Incidentally, z/OS V1.8 supports twice the amount of physical main memory as z/OS V1.7 did. The amount of real main memory that a z/OS V1.7 image could address was capped at 128 GB, even though the System z9 EC machines could, for instance, have four times as much physical memory in the box.

The other interesting aspect of z/OS V1.8 is that it will be the last mainframe operating system release to include the APPC Application Suite, a set of tools for SNA mainframe applications. The Advanced Peer to Peer Communications (APPC) application linking protocol is a part of IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) networking software, which was developed in parallel to TCP/IP networks and which has been essentially knocked out of networking by the advent of the commercialized Internet. IBM will no longer be shipping the APPC Application Suite tools inside z/OS V1.8. But make no mistake--IBM is not removing APPC support from z/OS. All applications that use the APPC protocol will continue to work in future z/OS releases. IBM just doesn't want to make it easy to keep from switching to TCP/IP networks and service oriented architecture software development.

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