August 27, 2009

Random Thoughts from SHARE – Denver

by Tom Lehmann
Co-founder of TurboHercules

This week the IBM faithful are gathered in Denver at the semi-annual SHARE Conference.  I have been attending a cross section of sessions to get an overall idea of the state of the mainframe world today.  What follows are some of the bits of information that I have gathered so far.

The zNextGen project

This is a volunteer project aimed at making it easier to enter the mainframe world.  It is comprised of a wide variety of current “mainframers” as well as others who can help the transition from computing in general to the mainframe community.  There is an emphasis on education so a significant number of the zNextGen project members are also educators from schools all over the world.
IBM is assisting the educational aspect of the project in two ways:  One, they are supplying curriculum for free.  There are no strings attached, the educator can use the material in any fashion they like for their own programs.  This is very helpful to most educators who are strapped for time to do curriculum development for new programs.
Two, IBM is making time available on their two data centers in the US so that the students can get some hands-on experience.  While this is useful, having your compute facilities half a country away is not too practical.  Unfortunately most educational institutions cannot afford their own mainframe, so, up till now, it was the only choice.
The advent of TurboHercules changes the picture completely.  It is now possible to deliver an emulated mainframe for each classroom (if you want to share locally).  If the educator wants to take it a step further, you can configure an emulated mainframe for each student since many computer labs have a workstation computer for each student or pair of students.  The educators are excited about the possibility of a more “hands-on” experience for the student especially since it makes for a more satisfying educational experience overall.

Who Knew?

One of the more surprising bits of knowledge I have encountered so far is the number of folks at SHARE who know about and have had personal experience with the Hercules emulator.  Many are using it for a personal “sandbox” to test bits of code and JCL here and there.  Even more surprising is the number of IBM folks who know about the capabilities of the emulator.  When they mention it as an alternative way of running code (mainly zLinux of course), I am a bit shocked.

The Rock and the Hard Place

Another theme that surfaced was the current status of many of the state and local government IT departments.  On one hand their budgets are either fixed or shrinking.  On the other, they are being asked to be more responsive to their customers (the taxpayers).  Actually “asked” isn’t the correct phrase; it’s “required by law.”  This came up in conversations I had with several mainframe administrators from counties and other local government entities  from around the US.  It seems that some of the appointed officials can go to jail if they don’t meet the requirements of the new laws so there is a sense of urgency here!
One problem the administrator has is disaster recovery and business continuity.  The new Federal laws state that each government entity has to provide their services in a timely manner, even in the event of a disaster.  If the mainframe happens to go down as a result of the disaster, the state/county/city is supposed to have an alternate way to provide mainframe services.  At the moment these state/county/city budgets cannot possibly cover a second mainframe for the disaster recovery site, let alone the annual maintenance on it.
To accommodate disaster recovery the IBM license can be transferred to an alternate machine in the event that the original machine is inoperable.  Therefore these administrators are now thinking that they can utilize a TurboHercules-based system at their disaster recovery site to provide mainframe services during the outage of their primary machine.  Needless to say, the cost of the TurboHercules based machine is well within their budget while still providing the same level of service as the original mainframe.

Linux on the Mainframe

Just based on a count of session titles, I’m thinking that Linux is making serious inroads on the mainframe.  IBM seems to be pushing z/Linux as a “companion” operating system running on the same box as their flagship z/OS.  There are many applications better suited to Linux than z/OS, but they can be run on the same system utilizing the virtualization capabilities of the mainframe.  The claim is that the customer can consolidate the Linux-based applications from a large number of smaller, distributed systems into a single mainframe that is running at a much higher load average.  It’s a compelling argument for many.