IT KEE

IBM's DB2 Raises Bar for Manageability
Executive Summary: DB2 8.1 Enterprise Server Edition
Usability
Good
Capability
Good
Performance
Excellent
Interoperability
Excellent
Manageability
Good
Scalability
Excellent
Security
Good

Version 8.1's improvements in uptime, manageability and administrative tools will appeal to current DB2 customers, while its Workgroup Server Edition continues to offer strong value, especially for those looking for an enterprise database to run on one- to four-CPU-based servers. This release doesn't change the competitive landscape but fine-tunes DB2 in a number of useful ways.
COST ANALYSIS
DB2 provides a middle path between Microsoft's SQL Server (less expensive and simpler to manage but not as rich in functionality) and Oracle9i (more expensive to purchase and similar in administrative complexity). DB2's growing consolidation of management tools between the server and mainframe will help to lower costs for shops already using DB2 on IBM zSeries systems.
(+) Increases uptime because more configuration changes don't require a restart; adds data compression; new Health Center, Memory Visualizer and Development Center tools aid manageability and speed of development; new type 4 Java Database Connectivity driver; data clustering on more than one search key.
(-) Doesn't provide the fine-grained security controls or Enterprise JavaBean support found in Oracle9i and Sybase ASE; XML storage features are not as flexible as those offered by Oracle9i; Web service features require use of IBM's WebSphere application server; data compression restricted to default and null column values.

EVALUATION SHORT LIST
Oracle's Oracle9i
Microsoft's SQL Server
Sybase's ASE
www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb

IBM's DB2 Raises Bar for Manageability
Executive Summary: DB2 8.1 Enterprise Server Edition
Usability
Good
Capability
Good
Performance
Excellent
Interoperability
Excellent
Manageability
Good
Scalability
Excellent
Security
Good

Version 8.1's improvements in uptime, manageability and administrative tools will appeal to current DB2 customers, while its Workgroup Server Edition continues to offer strong value, especially for those looking for an enterprise database to run on one- to four-CPU-based servers. This release doesn't change the competitive landscape but fine-tunes DB2 in a number of useful ways.
COST ANALYSIS
DB2 provides a middle path between Microsoft's SQL Server (less expensive and simpler to manage but not as rich in functionality) and Oracle9i (more expensive to purchase and similar in administrative complexity). DB2's growing consolidation of management tools between the server and mainframe will help to lower costs for shops already using DB2 on IBM zSeries systems.
(+) Increases uptime because more configuration changes don't require a restart; adds data compression; new Health Center, Memory Visualizer and Development Center tools aid manageability and speed of development; new type 4 Java Database Connectivity driver; data clustering on more than one search key.
(-) Doesn't provide the fine-grained security controls or Enterprise JavaBean support found in Oracle9i and Sybase ASE; XML storage features are not as flexible as those offered by Oracle9i; Web service features require use of IBM's WebSphere application server; data compression restricted to default and null column values.

EVALUATION SHORT LIST
Oracle's Oracle9i
Microsoft's SQL Server
Sybase's ASE
www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb

ADT: The Mainframe Capacity Conundrum: Getting Better All the Time
By Stephen Swoyer, 3/14/2006
http://www.adtmag.com/esArticle.aspx?a=1641
It’s no wonder mainframe shops have embraced z/Linux, J2EE, and other next-generation workloads out of necessity. After all, IBM Corp. prices z/Linux and z/WebSphere capacity at a fraction of the cost of full-blown z/OS capacity (for COBOL and Assembler applications), so—on paper, at least—it’s a no-brainer: that switching (where possible) to next-generation workloads can result in large savings.
Some mainframe vets take the opposite view, however. As far as they’re concerned, Big Blue’s next-generation push is actually a Big Iron bait and switch (see http://www.esj.com/Enterprise/article.aspx?EditorialsID=1608).
What’s not to like about cheap mainframe workloads? For one thing, skeptics argue, z/Linux and Big Iron WebSphere can’t husband system capacity and resources as efficiently as z/OS, TPF, VSE, and other traditional mainframe operating environments. Organizations save money in the short term but end up paying more in the long-term by purchasing bigger, more powerful mainframes. This shouldn’t and doesn’t disqualify IBM’s next-generation push, however.
For one thing, mainframe hardware has grown ever more powerful with each new generation. When it debuted five years ago, the z900 mainframe was the largest and most powerful Big Iron system IBM had ever developed. But the z900 was, in turn, dwarfed by the z990 (T-Rex) systems that Big Blue announced just 30 months later. T-Rex was itself humbled last summer when IBM again unveiled its latest and greatest mainframe, System z9.
The point, officials argue, is that customers who stick with the platform will reap the rewards—primarily in the form of more Big Iron capacity for the buck. "As customers move from z900 to z990 to z9, and as they move from z/OS 1.4 to 1.5 to 1.7 … those customers who stay the most current [on mainframe hardware and operating environments] have seen very dramatic price/performance improvements in z/OS workloads of all kinds," said Colette Martin, zSeries program director for IBM, in an interview earlier this year.
Of course, customers that aggressively pursue next-generation workloads will probably need all the mainframe bang-for-the-buck they can get, at least in the short term.
"I think the doubling of MIPS, the growth of the MIPS capacity of the machines, that is encouraging—but the software that consumes the new MIPS is typically in the WebSphere and the Linux workloads," says Andre den Haan, CIO of mainframe ISV Seagull Software Inc. "To support 1,000 users, you have X [times] the number of MIPS that you require in a traditional workload environment. It is not unrealistic that you might need at least 20 times as many MIPS to support the same number of users in a Java environment."
Don’t call den Haan a next-gen skeptic, however. He thinks the emergence of Big Iron Linux and J2EE are indications of a healthy, if evolving, mainframe market.
"It is essentially a fact of life. It is the case with every computing platform that new methods of building software require you to double or quadruple your computing capacity," he comments. "You saw it in the PC world. We ran PC applications in the early 1980’s with 128 KB floppy disks and 16 KB of main memory. Of course, you’ve had this huge growth of hardware capacity since then—it’s probably 1000 fold or more of what it was 20 years ago."
What’s more, says Ken Sharpe, an operating systems specialist with a southwestern state government, there’s a capacity trickle-down effect that benefits all mainframe shops. "We do have [Big Iron] Linux but we [have] not sift[ed] any COBOL workloads from MVS to it," Sharpe observes, noting that he won’t, for this reason, comment on the merits of z/OS efficiency relative to those of z/Linux.
Even so, he says, his and other mainframe shops are benefiting from Big Blue’s next-gen push, which has, arguably, helped spur enormous expansions in mainframe capacity from one hardware generation to the next.
"Just watch out for the sales [and] enhancement changes IBM is doing on the new machines [such as System z9]," he says, noting that Big Blue’s new MSU pricing structure at first threw him for the proverbial loop. "The MSU rating for the new boxes is discounted. This got me very confused until I read the fine print. I told our managers the migration … would only give us an increase of 3 percent CPU and I was very wrong." Instead, Sharpe explains, a migration from his organization’s existing 2064-2C4 systems to new 2094-702 mainframes would result in an 11 percent improvement in mainframe price/performance.
In many cases, Big Iron vets who have deployed Linux- or J2EE-based workloads have pragmatic takes on the pluses and minuses of the next-gen value proposition. "We've been working with Linux on z/Series for approximately four years. Two years ago we piloted a z/VM [and] WebSphere trial, and that has gone quite well. We have been in production with z/VM and Linux on z/Series for about 16 months. We have [a] couple [of] dozen applications coming down the [pike], and about 10 or so in production. One of these is a fairly heavy hitter," says Jim Melin, a mainframe systems programmer with a Minnesota county government. "That said we have [two IFLs] with 7 [GB] of memory driving the environment [6 GB central, 1 GB expanded]. At peak loads, we're seeing 25 percent of processor capacity being used on average."
"What have we learned about Java efficiency [versus] 'traditional' workloads such as COBOL? We've learned that WebSphere is resource-intensive, and Java, even though it is byte code that is 'compiled' by the just-in-time compiler, is not as efficient as traditional workloads on z/OS," Melin comments. "Why is that? Well, for one, z/OS compiler design, and as a result, COBOL coding design, comes from the very old-school, resource-constrained environments of the early mainframe world. Every iota of efficiency you could get out of something the better you were. A simple coding change to a program can vastly alter the performance in the real world—sometimes for the worse."
He contrasts this approach with traditional J2EE application development. "Traditional Java development is done in the Wintel world, or even if it is on Linux, it is largely done on Intel hardware where memory is plentiful, cycles are cheap, and efficiency isn't a huge concern. If it's not behaving well, people tend to throw more processing power or memory at it. It's a cheap way of getting more out of the application," he explains.
"In the Linux on z/Series under z/VM environment, inefficiency is multiplied, not masked. If you have an application on four server regions and it unnecessarily uses more memory that it needs to, and is inefficient in its design, you will consume memory and CPU resources that in the Intel world affect a single machine, but in the virtualized world—be it z/VM or VMWare—this consumes resources that could otherwise be used by other virtual machines."
This doesn’t have to be a showstopper, Melin argues. "The lesson to be learned here is that there are always tuning opportunities in the environment, the configuration and the applications themselves."
More to the point, he says, some solutions to next-gen capacity woes can be found in last-gen best practices. "There are application-design methods that are time tested in the z/OS environment that have bearing in the J2EE world," he explains. "Case in point—our heavy-hitter application recently ran into some problems. [We] rolled out a new version and it was not behaving well. We examined everything we could tune in the z/VM, z/Linux environment and asked some questions of IBM. What came out of it was that the application was changed to be more efficient. This solved that issue for them."

Consolidation sparks mainframe revival
By Kate Evans-Correia, Senior News Editor27 Feb 2004 SearchDataCenter.com
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For the second time in as many weeks, IBM has announced a mega deal with a German company in the banking industry to overhaul its IT infrastructure using its zSeries mainframes and storage.
Postbank, which has 11.5 million customers and is the biggest private customer bank in Germany, is running its new backbone IT system -- an SAP transaction platform -- on an infrastructure developed by IBM.
The existing Fujitsu-Siemens mainframe system was replaced with IBM zSeries and pSeries servers. Four IBM z900 mainframes will be used as SAP database servers and for additional back-office applications. DB2/zOS provides the database platform for SAP/AM in data sharing mode.
Last week, IBM announced that Sparkassen Informatik, one of the largest providers of IT services for the German banking industry, has purchased 20 IBM z990 "T-Rex" mainframes to anchor one of the largest IT consolidation projects ever undertaken. The four-year deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, IBM said.
"This is the biggest deal of its kind I've ever seen," said Edward Broderick, principal analyst at the Robert Frances Group, of the Sparkassen Informatik deal.
Without a doubt, both deals are a reflection of the growing demand for the z990 mainframe, which Broderick refers to as a "glorious implementation of technology, the maturity of zOS, autonomic computing and on-demand."
"They have taken a legacy mainframe and injected vigor and enthusiasm into what people thought was dead," he said. "It's not dead. It's not in the hospital. It's not even sick. Companies are now figuring out that client/server was a smoke-and-mirror charade."
Not only is it not dead, it's actually thriving. According to IBM's fourth-quarter results, sales of the monolithic server were up 33% from the previous year. Some say the surge could just be the natural spike in sales expected following the release of the much-anticipated T-Rex z990 mainframe, which experts say breathed life into an ailing platform.
Mike Kahn, analyst with the Wellesley, Mass.-based Clipper Group, said that in the past year there have been a number of very large companies reconsidering how they do enterprise processing. But, he said, this idea isn't just about the mainframe. It's about consolidation.
"I think what's going on with the mainframe is that businesses recognize that the mainframe has all the characteristics of a consolidated platform," he said. "And, I think you'll see more consolidation."
As major financial institutions in Europe seek to expand their services, IBM is winning deals because of its ability to simplify the IT environment by reducing the number of servers and storage, yet provide the capability to meet any demand, experts say. Businesses such as Postbank and Sparkassen Informatik (SI) are dealing with mammoth amounts of data, and the cost of consolidating as well as upgrading has now become very attractive.
In fact, SI consolidated from 36 z900 mainframes to 20 z990s, providing an increase in processing capacity to 100,000 MIPS. SI estimates that its services currently support 30 million end users throughout Germany. A company spokesman said it expects to save 200 million euros by the beginning of 2005.
"There are a lot of incentives on the z990 to consolidate, and most of it has to do with economics," Kahn said. "Businesses are choosing to upgrade for economic reasons. They don't have to upgrade. IBM has made it very attractive to do so."
Postbank's new infrastructure is accessed by more than 9,000 branch offices, and it handles more than 10 million customer accounts, as well as millions of debit-card and checking transactions every day -- and is now able to double this number on demand.
The SAP/AM giro-transaction system, which has been running since October, processes customer transactions from the bank's online and IVR (interactive voice response) services, as well as its branch offices. This is believed to be one of the largest SAP implementations worldwide.
The Postbank solution was designed around the need for capacity on demand, utilizing IBM's autonomic computing features and built-in high availability and data security capabilities.
The new server and storage infrastructure is part of the project that Postbank began in 2000 and has since completed successfully.
Postbank will also use IBM systems and storage to expand into new offerings, such as outsourcing by handling the process payment transactions for Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank in the future.

German trains switch to Linux on mainframes
By Matt Stansberry, News Editor16 Feb 2005 SearchDataCenter.com
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Is running Linux on the mainframe becoming mainstream? With the adoption of the open source operating systems by giant government agencies, the once "live-free-or-die" revolutionary is becoming
z/OS skills are getting harder to find in schools. It's easier to find people with development skills on more contemporary applications. Linux is a much more mainstream environment. Gordon HaffPrincipal Analyst, Illuminata
another working stiff. So far Linux had been somewhat experimental for most mainframe sites. But in recent months, more Linux consolidation case studies have emerged.
For example, Berlin-based Deutsche Bahn, the company that manages the German railway system, switched 55,000 Lotus Notes users on an IBM zSeries 990 to Linux in the first step of a process to shift its major IT systems to open source. Deutsche Bahn uses Lotus Notes for its mail system and as a platform for 5,500 databases containing 6.5 terabytes of data. The operating system will transfer from a z/OS environment to SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
Deutsche Bahn chose Linux as the server platform for its infrastructure on the advice of DB Systems, its IT service provider. DB Systems projects benefits such as cost savings, higher vendor flexibility and integration advantages. But according to Gordon Haff, principal analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc., savings may not be the only reason to switch. "It's a strategic move," Haff said. "z/OS skills are getting harder to find in schools. It's easier to find people with development skills on more contemporary applications. Linux is a much more mainstream environment."
Detlef Exner, director of IT production for DB Systems, admitted that some members of his staff have been waiting to switch to Linux for years. "Our staff welcomed the decision and was eager to carry out the migration. Of course, they needed some time to get used to the new systems, but the acceptance rose quickly," he stated.
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DB Systems initiated the project in 2003, and decided to make Linux the server platform throughout Deutsche Bahn in 2004. The migration should be finished by the end of 2005 when all critical systems such as databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers and network infrastructure will be running on Linux.
Enterprise applications like SAP will be moved from Unix to Linux, as well as key applications such as passenger sales support systems. The system for train timetabling has already been moved to Linux.
Despite the switch from z/OS, Deutsche Bahn had no intentions of scrapping the mainframe. Exner cited high availability and customer support as the main reasons for sticking with the zSeries.
According to IBM's Colette Martin, program director of zSeries product marketing, there are some areas where the mainframe is the undisputed leader. "These include business resilience, security, virtualization, workload management and business integration. This is where the mainframe excels."
"Customers have asked us to help them leverage these capabilities across their heterogeneous IT infrastructure," Martin said.
And while some quarters have been better than others for zSeries, mainframes have shown a lot of growth recently. And much of that is from Linux.
"IBM is putting a lot of effort into making customers take note, mostly in companies that already have a mainframe system," said Mark Lillycrop, chief analyst and CEO of U.K.-based Arcati Ltd. "Generally, IBM doesn't make money out of Linux itself, but it does from the applications and subsystems and by providing migration expertise and other add-on services."
According to Lillycrop, there is inherent value for users as well. Linux offers a way of consolidating huge numbers of distributed applications onto the mainframe, where there are benefits in centralized management. "Also, the virtualized Linux environment on the mainframe allows hundreds of system images to be created, which allows customers to set up new servers 'on the fly' for test, back-up, etc. The other benefit of Linux, of course, is that it allows a far greater range of key business applications to run on the mainframe, alongside traditional z/OS apps," Lillycrop explained.
"The Deutsche Bahn example is exactly the type of mainframe use we envisioned," Martin said. "We have many customers who are investing in this value proposition. Our entire sales force is mobilized around these kinds of opportunities.

LAMP lights the way in open-source security
By Joris Evers, CNET News.com
Tuesday , March 07 2006 09:41 AM


The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible.

The so-called LAMP stack of open-source software has a lower bug density--the number of bugs per thousand lines of code--than a baseline of 32 open-source projects analyzed, Coverity, a maker of code analysis tools, announced Monday.



The U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded US$1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source code analysis. The funding, announced in January, is for a three-year "Open Source Hardening Project."

LAMP includes the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and a scripting language--PHP, Perl or Python. It has been pushing its way into mainstream corporate computing, a rival to Java and Microsoft's .Net.

In the analysis, more than 17.5 million lines of code from 32 open-source projects were scanned. On average, 0.434 bugs per 1,000 lines of code were found, Coverity said. The LAMP stack, however, "showed significantly better software quality," with an average of 0.29 defects per 1,000 lines of code, the technology company said.

There is one caveat: PHP, the popular programming language, is the only component in the LAMP stack that has a higher bug density than the baseline, Coverity said.

Of the other open-source projects scanned, Coverity found that the Amanda back-up tool had the highest number of bugs per 1,000 lines of code, with a bug density of 1.237. The lowest was the XMMS audio player, with 0.051 defects per 1,000 lines of code.

In absolute numbers, most defects were found in X, the low-level graphical interface software for Linux and Unix. Coverity found 1,681 defects in X, it said. With only six defects, XMMS also scored best in absolute numbers.

Coverity's analysis looked for 40 of the most critical security vulnerabilities and coding mistakes in software code. The company did not give details on the scope of the flaws it found. The analysis can't be used to measure the security of open source code next to that of proprietary code because that code is not available for scanning.

As part of the government-funded effort, Stanford and Coverity have built a system that does daily scans of the code contributed to popular open-source projects. The resulting database of bugs is accessible to developers, allowing them to get the details they need to fix the flaws, Coverity said.

Gartner: Linux continues drive into data centers By Colin Barker,
March 14 2006 10:53 AM
A straw poll of attendees at Gartner's Data Center Conference in January revealed that 40 percent of them were running a combination of Linux or Unix and Windows. This shows that there is little sign that "Linux will 'hit a wall', the analysts suggested in a research note published this week.
The revelation comes on the heels of a statement by a senior executive of IBM in February that "40 percent of [IBM's] mainframe customers are on Linux on zSeries". Rich Lechner, IBM's vice-president of virtualization, said that "the greatest penetration [IBM] ever anticipated was 25 percent".

According to Gartner analyst George Weiss: "Nothing in this [latest] survey reveals any factors that would suggest the momentum in favour of Linux will 'hit a wall'." But Weiss also cautions that "the more complex Linux platform deployments become...the more likely it is that costs will approach, if not exceed, those of other [operating system] environments".
Gartner asked attendees of its Data Center Conference to say what the makeup of their major enterprise data center was. The largest section, 40 percent, said it comprised mainframes running Unix, Linux and Windows. Fourteen percent said they had a mainframe with just Unix and Windows, 4 percent were running Windows on a mainframe, and just 1 percent had a mainframe running Unix only.
According to the Gartner results, there was no separate section for a mainframe just running Linux without Windows.
The second largest group, 24 percent, said they were running with Unix, Linux and Windows but without a mainframe. Ten percent of the total group questioned were running Unix and Windows but not running any mainframe systems, 3 percent were using Windows and Linux in a mainframe-free environment, and only 4 percent were running Windows without mainframe hardware.
"For now, reported user experience with Linux continues to be positive," Weiss wrote, "which should prove beneficial for growth and adoption rates".
According to Weiss' note, 31 percent of those surveyed said that they were planning to increase their Linux expenditure rapidly, while 51 percent said it would grow moderately. Just three percent said that their spending on Linux would decrease moderately or strongly.