August 11, 2004
IBM Dusts Off Mainframes By Clint Boulton
As a leading server vendor, IBM (
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The company has been making a case for not just the survival, but the continued success of its zSeries mainframe machines as it announced one of Europe's largest deployments of Linux on the mainframe.
Swiss-owned Endress+Hauser, which makes process control devices, has agreed to consolidate its 19 global, Unix-based SAPR/3 systems onto two IBM eServer zSeries 990 mainframes. The systems boast 36 integrated Linux processors. Financial terms of the deal were not made public, but zSeries 990 generally top the $1 million mark.
The goal is to make Endress+Hauser's applications, which serve 3,500 users and are housed in the company's data center in Weil am Rhein, Germany, easier to manage.
This includes perks central to IBM's e-business on-demand computing strategy, such as virtualization, which allows multiple computer systems to be partitioned and run independently. Virtualization allows customers to run multiple servers on one mainframe.
Walter Rink, managing director of Endress+Hauser InfoServe, the IT service provider of the Endress+Hauser Group, discussed the customer's challenge in a statement.
"Being a global company, our IT users are spread across many locations," Rink said. "When we considered which platform we needed to migrate our ERP application from SAP R/2 to R/3, we also took the opportunity to look at how we could bring together the SAP R/3 systems onto a single server."
While IBM, HP, (
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IBM
aimed to prove skeptics wrong with its next-generation z990 (code-named T-Rex) mainframes over a year ago. The company has gone on to grow its mainframe revenue for four consecutive quarters, with a more than 30 percent year-to-year for the last three.
This strongly suggests customers are still interested in mainframe technologies despite other industry trends to smaller, module boxes. But many customers are also looking for smaller servers based on Linux, which bodes well for IBM, which is crafting a Linux-based blade server.
While the biggest win in awhile, Wednesday's zSeries coup is hardly a one-off for IBM. Last month, the vendor completed work on disaster recovery gear for the Principal Financial Group, the Des Moines, Iowa, provider of employee benefits.
Principal's data centers utilize zSeries mainframe servers and IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers (ESS) to decrease the potential for data loss. The system serves 15.6 million customers and can be up and running in less than 24 hours in the event of a disaster.
BAM from IBM
IBM is readying a new software product, known internally as BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), for use in supply chain management, risk management and other areas where customers want to generate real-time reports from either single or multiple sources of information.
Produced this summer through IBM's Extreme Blue college internship program, BAM will be marketed to financial firms this fall by IBM's field technical sales force.
BAM later will be sold to retail chains for back-end supply chain management, said Derick McGee, who participated this summer in the six-year-old IBM program. Beyond financial risk management and retail supply chain management, IBM expects to target BAM at other vertical market segments, too, IBM officials said.
BAM uses technology obtained in IBM's recent acquisition of Alphablox Corp., according to McGee, one of four student interns who worked on the BAM Project at IBM's lab facility in Almaden, Calif.
IBM's software will provide a dashboard designed for easy customizability by end-users, together with back-end connectivity in real time to multivendor object relational and flat file databases. Other features will include data drilldown, graphical charts and the ability to set thresholds for real-time alerts.
To read more about IBM's purchase of Alphablox, click here.
BAM is geared to replacing static data warehouse reports—which companies often produce only once a day—with dynamic reports, McGee said during a demo session at an IBM media event Wednesday in New York. The software will be sold to financial firms as an aid to
compliance with emerging Basel II regulations.
On the supply-chain side, retail chain managers will use BAM to stay up-to-date on pricing and inventory levels. Customers will be able to set up the software to alert them if distributor pricing for an item falls below a specified point, for example.
Student developers used IBM's Eclipse-based WebSphere Studio to create BAM. The software will support a number of different OSes, including Linux and Microsoft Windows. It will run on IBM middleware products such as
WebSphere Portal, DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere MQ.
Aimed at promoting product innovation, IBM's Extreme Blue internship program culls "the best and the brightest" from a wide pool of student applicants, said David Barnes, one of several IBM execs also on hand at the event.
IBM offers jobs to about 90 percent of Extreme Blue participants upon graduation—and of those, about 90 percent accept, according to Barnes.
Other MBA and computer science students demoing projects Wednesday interned over the summer at IBM labs in Cambridge, Mass.; Raleigh, N.C.; Austin, Texas; and Toronto.
