The Mainframe Extends its Reach

Over the course of the last decade there has been considerable discussion about the future development and use of the revered Mainframe platform, usually now to be found under the IBM System z banner. At times much that has been written has not flattered the mainframe but that may be about to change. Whilst the platform is still by no means cheap in absolute Dollar, Sterling or Euro terms there is usually an array of financing options available to help meet most potential scenarios. Beyond that, the platform usually manages to compare favourably when its scale, management, power / space efficiency and overall TCO estimates are calculated.

There is absolutely no doubting IBM’s commitment to the platform. The company continues to invest large sums of money and resources developing the mainframe in both the hardware and software platforms. Equally it is important to recognise that there is a very active community built around the mainframe and it is clear that the majority of these are also committed to developing their offerings further. To see that this is the case one has simply to look at how companies such as CA and BMC are developing their complementary management tools as well activities by application ISVs such as ACI who are now robustly promoting mainframe based solutions. The mainframe vendor ecosystem is large and active.

Clearly there are challenges that organisations using the mainframe need to address. Perhaps the most visible of these concerns the age of those currently administering these enterprise workhorses. In many cases these highly skilled professionals are in the age bracket where considerations of retirement are not far away. Given the skills required to run mainframes this is causing some concerns but there is now an active education programme in place to tempt students and those new to IT to acquire mainframe skills. At the same time the overall management workload is easing as CA, IBM and other vendors deliver new tools to the market to help reduce the workload burden further. In some ways this is somewhat ironic as several studies have indicated that mainframe administrators can already handle far larger workloads than administrators of other platforms.

But the debate on the future of the mainframe should not be focussed so much on the development of the technology itself or how to ensure that skilled administrators are available to run the systems. Instead it should now focus on what role the mainframe has going forward to deliver business services? To understand this it is important that people understand just what type of system the Mainframe is today and what business operations it can assist. In some places this “understanding” may be several years behind reality and is often linked to out of date perceptions of where things fit.

Recently the importance of meeting this challenge head on has become even more important, partly as a consequence of recent system z announcements by IBM, but even more so as business requirements for secure, cost-effective, flexible and resilient business services continue to grow. The announcement in July of the release of the IBM zEnterprise 196 System has huge potential to cause a major rethink on where the mainframe is perceived to play, if IBM can wake organisations up and educate on the system as it exists today rather than where people, many IT professionals included, think it sits with images of times long past.

As well as offering all of the now well-established offload engines, such as the IFL, zIIP, ZaaP to run Linux, DB2 and java workloads, the new system promises to allow organisations to add zBlade extension systems running IBM’s Power platform or x86 workloads. When used with the new Unified Resource Management software it will become possible for administrators to manage services composed of workload elements running on any of the mainframes multiple operating systems and IBM’s AIX or Linux platforms on the special blade extensions as single environments with all of the control functionality and flexibility for which the mainframe should be well known.

Challenging peoples’ out of date perceptions takes time and effort and can be extremely taxing. The challenge for IBM and its ecosystem of suppliers is to assist in perception resetting, especially helping to update the understanding of the potential use of mainframes amongst both the wider IT community and, more importantly, amongst business managers. The new IBM zEnterprise 196 offers IBM a great opportunity to reposition the mainframe and to actively seek out new customers rather than to simple continue to grow amongst its well established user base.

It is clear that the platform has the capacity to deliver a greatly expanded range of IT services cost effectively and the challenge for IBM and the wider mainframe ecosystem is to ensure that organisations understand where its capabilities can be most effectively deployed. This will take considerable effort by IBM and its ecosystem partners like CA and BMC. But the platform has never been better positioned for a major market re-education and the wider economic and regulatory environment make now the time for the undertaking to begin. The major questions are thus will the market see these developments as defensive measure to protect the established mainframe base or as moves to encourage others to take up the platform and will IBM aggressively seek to educate potential new customers on the extended modern mainframe’s capabilities?

Martin's flying the nest

It is with some sadness that we say goodbye this week to Martin Atherton. After a lively three and a half years with Freeform Dynamics, he has decided to fly the nest to give himself the space to capitalise on some of his core talents. Those of you who know Martin will be familiar with his articulation, presentation and relationship building skills, and it’s in this area of ‘outreach’ that his heart really lies.

In the meantime, I believe Martin will be taking some time out over the summer to explore the opportunities that are out there in the industry. He’ll be a good catch for someone, and we look forward to Martin remaining a close friend of Freeform wherever he lands.

I'd like to add my personal gratitude for his broad contribution over the years - thanks Martin and all the best!

Jon

Sugaring the pill

The iPad signals the start of a new wave of tablets. Supporting users that wish to work on these devices will be difficult, but existing technologies can help.

Originally published on CIO.co.uk

Apple, as a computer company, has been focused on the consumer market. It has paid lip-service to trying to tackle the ‘bread and butter’ corporate market, instead relying on niche departments to decide on Macs in order to run specific applications, or for professionals with the budget and freedom of choice to make their own choice to purchase, run and support a Mac.

But Apple is, by its own admission, no longer a computer company. The launch of the iPod in 2001 started the shift, but now Apple derives more than half of its revenue from the sales of the iPod and iPhone. The iPhone has tremendous traction, selling more than 8 million units in the first quarter of 2010, with many going to business users.

Now Apple is tackling a market that has always promised great things, but never really delivered. The new iPad tablet has already seen sales of over two million units in less than two months, and Apple is on course to ship more iPads this year than the entire sales of Windows Tablet PCs since it launched in 2002.

Arguably, the failure of the Tablet PC to reach critical mass lies in the name. It is a PC, with all the drawbacks that entails for extreme mobility. The success of the iPhone demonstrated the potential of devices with limited capabilities but sophisticated and polished interfaces, and this has translated into the success of the iPad.

Apple is far from alone in sensing the opportunity. HP acquired Palm for its WebOS which it intends to deploy on a range of devices including tablets, while Google is also making moves, with partner Dell launching the Streak Tablet based on the Android platform.

While it is not yet clear what the long term picture will look like, it is certain that there will be a sizeable market of ultra-portable computing devices that do not run Windows. These will employ a variety of operating systems, form factors and user interfaces. Each will be accompanied by their own security and management issues.

Many of these new tablets will be purchased by business users. Much of their use will be an extension of what smart phones are used for today: communications, such as voice, texting and email; web browsing; content consumption, such as music and video; and amusement or productivity through native applications.

Tablets enable a much richer environment than smart phones with larger screens, potentially better performance and longer battery life. This will enable tablets to make the switch from being content consumers which smart phones are quite good at, to content producers at which smart phones are not very good. And this will mean that business users increasingly will want to use the tablets to do work. The difficulty is that the whole environment is new and alien to IT.

Getting the software vendors that provide business applications to produce and support applications for so many device types will be nigh on impossible. It will be difficult enough to persuade them to do so for one or even two leading platforms. This will make it tough enable tablet users to work with business systems natively on the devices. And while it is fairly easy to locate reasonably good document viewers, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find a workable editor that can preserve the document formatting and structure, making sharing, distribution and document flow problematical.

It may be possible to provide access to applications through the use of Web or Cloud systems, although the use of advanced scripting tools and languages for rich application environments could pose compatibility or usability issues for tablet users.

The best solution, especially in the short to medium term as the market matures and develops, will be to avoid custom solutions as much as possible, and make use of tried and tested and widely implemented technologies. Virtual desktop solutions may prove to be an ideal way to deploy applications and services to these new tablets. This type of infrastructure, from the likes of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft, is already being used to provide remote virtual access to systems across many companies, supporting many users including mobile workers with laptops.

In this scenario the applications run in the data centre, and the tablet accesses them though a dedicated virtual desktop application, which provides the ‘window’ into the virtual desktop and business applications. The applications would run unmodified, ensuring full compatibility and features, while requiring minimal additional training and support as the results would be the same as running the applications on a small-screen notebook.

Although desktop virtualisation is a ‘silver bullet’ for running business applications on the new wave of tablets, it is not perfect. Continuous connectivity will be essential to productivity, as the applications run externally, as there is not yet the ability to cache the applications and work offline. If there is no connection, then the applications will not run. This will be fine if users can locate coffee shops or other locations with Wi-Fi services. It may even be suitable to run virtual desktop applications over 3G connections. But in many situations where users may wish to work, such as on trains and planes, or even automobiles, connectivity may be patchy and unreliable. Cost may also be an issue if the user is highly mobile and travels internationally as roaming charges mount.

How can Organisations be helped to exploit Storage Management Solutions?

The amount of data stored by organisations continues to grow at a very fast rate. Indeed, as the figure below illustrates, the growth of data to be served has become one of the most important drivers impacting both the architecture and operation of IT systems. It is also clear from our work in this space however, that managing storage is not an area where many organisations excel. This begs the question, how active will the channel be in taking new storage solutions to market?

We know from conversations with IT professionals that most of the architectural attention is rightly focussed on the server side of ‘service delivery’, with storage utilised simply to support what is happening on the server. One reason for this is that, especially in small and mid-sized businesses, IT professionals tend to be generalists rather than specialists. The result is that expert storage knowledge can be at a premium.

It is also fair to say that until very recently in many organisations, storage has not been that high on the agenda, but this state of affairs is changing. The rapid growth of data being stored, coupled with the expectations of users to be able to access all data without limitations, is putting the storage infrastructure under stress. In addition wave upon wave of new legislation is compelling organisations to retain more data, or indeed delete information according to set rules. As a consequence the costs of data storage and management are becoming more and more visible elements in the IT budget.

Thus many companies are faced with the key questions of how to keep the cost of their storage use under control whilst the data volumes generated ramp up, and how to ensure that users can find key information in a convenient and timely manner. Against this background it is not surprising that many of the recent developments in storage management solutions have become increasingly prominent. For storage management, the ‘do nothing’ era is coming to an end.

The exact moment for a company to revisit its approach to storage management will vary by organisation. The balance point at which making changes becomes economically favourable is hard to judge, given that the breakdown of storage costs, especially operational costs, are still somewhat opaque. More strategic storage decisions are likely to be taken as part of a bigger review of infrastructure spending unless some outside, usually regulatory, factors intervene to stimulate a change of approach.

So what solutions could be of interest? Clearly storage virtualisation and thin provisioning, archiving and data deduplication are all tools which may be useful in certain scenarios. The challenge for many small and midsized enterprises will be to work out which solutions fit their own circumstances, particularly given the aforementioned lack of storage skills in house. If the basics of storage expertise are not present, it becomes quite a leap to expect such organisations to have the knowhow to adopt more advanced storage solutions.

Consider storage virtualisation for example. Whilst many mid-market organisations may have adopted x86 server virtualisation to some extent, the same cannot be said of storage virtualisation. In many ways if organisations already have a level of understanding of server virtualisation it will be easier for them to relate to the potential benefits of storage virtualisation. These include consolidation, resource usage optimisation, increased availability and resilience coupled with the ability to manipulate and protect data more flexibly and effectively.

However, given the limited understanding in the general IT community regarding such capabilities, a major hurdle to their adoption is clear to see. Who is going to educate the markets? So far the majority of the storage management solution vendors have done a less than effective job marketing and evangelising their tools, especially with respect to highlighting potential usage cases and achievable business benefits.

Until the vendors get better at such primary education there is an obvious space for the channel to step up to this particular plate. The need for sophisticated storage management is growing in small and mid-market companies, but they are crying out for “someone” to explain, position and deliver such solutions. While firms of storage specialists exist, it will be interesting to monitor how the broader channel community tackles storage management in the coming months and years.