Mainframe code presents problems
Apps written in older languages clash with today’s systems
By: Robert L. Mitchell (12 May 2006)
By some estimates, the total value of the applications residing on mainframes today exceeds US$1 trillion. Most of that code was written over the past 40 years in Cobol, with some assembler, PL/1 and 4GL thrown into the mix.
Unfortunately, those programs don’t play well with today’s distributed systems, and the amount of legacy code at companies such as Sabre Holdings Corp. in Southlake, Tex., makes a rewrite a huge undertaking.
“We’re bound by our software and its lack of portability,” Sabre vice-president Alan Walker said of the 40,000 programs still running on IBM Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), Agilent Modular Power System and other mainframe systems.
With a shortage of Cobol programming talent looming in the next decade and a clear need for greater software agility and lower operating costs, IT organizations have begun to make transition plans for mainframe applications. The trick lies in figuring out which applications to modernize, how to do it and where they should reside.
Applications fall into one of three groups based on scale, said Dale Vecchio, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Applications under 500 MIPS are migrating to distributed systems. “These guys, they want off,” Vecchio said. As organizations begin peeling away smaller applications, they may move to a packaged application; port the application to Unix, Linux or Windows; or, in some cases, rewrite the applications to run in a .Net or Java environment, he said.
In the 1,000-MIPS-and-up arena, the mainframe is still the preferred platform. Applications between 500 and 1,000 MIPS fall into a grey area where the best alternative is less clear. An increasingly common strategy for these applications is to leave the Cobol in place while using a service oriented architecture (SOA) to expose key interfaces that insulate developers from the code.
“If you expose those applications as a Web service, it’s irrelevant what that application was written in,” said Ian Archbell, vice-president of product management at tool vendor Micro Focus International PLC in Rockville, Md. “SOA is just a set of interfaces, an abstraction.”
“SOA at least allows you to break the dependency bonds,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass.
STUCK IN NEUTRAL
Cobol isn’t going away, but it’s also not moving forward. While the Cobol code base on mainframes is projected to increase by three per cent to five per cent a year, that’s mostly a byproduct of maintenance, said Gary Barnett, an analyst at Ovum Ltd. in London. No one is learning [Cobol] in school anymore, and new applications aren’t being built in Cobol anymore,” said Schmelzer. “Cobol is like Latin.”
Vendors such as Micro Focus have abandoned the idea of evolving the Cobol language for distributed application development. “Micro Focus is not about a better Cobol compiler,” said Archbell.
Instead, its approach is to “embrace and extend,” he said. “We expose things like aggregated CICS transactions as JavaBeans, Web services or .Net or C# code. It’s wrappering.” But with so much legacy code, that process won’t take place overnight. “It could take 20 years,” Archbell said.
Sabre still has more than 10,000 MIPS of applications on mainframes, and Walker plans to migrate everything off over the next few years. The company’s TPF-based fare-searching application, used by Travelocity.com LP and travel agents, has been rewritten to run as a 64-bit Linux program on four-way Opteron servers.
Sabre migrated the back-end data to 45 servers running MySQL that each contain fully replicated data. The new system is more flexible and “pretty cheap” compared with the mainframe, Walker said.
He questions the conventional wisdom that all high-end applications need to stay on mainframes, noting that the search application was in the thousands of MIPS. “It’s pretty obvious that you don’t need mainframes to do large-scale transactions,” he said, pointing to the successes of eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
Barnett points out that very few of his clients have been successful at completely rewriting large-scale applications. In Sabre’s case, it’s worth noting that the application was CPU- and memory-intensive and that competitive pressures would have forced a rewrite anyway. “We solved a larger problem,” which was the need to generate hundreds of results instead of the 10 to 20 the TPF system could deliver per search, Walker said.
Simply rewriting millions of lines of code to deliver the same features not only wouldn’t cut it financially at The Bank of New York Co., but also would require a lifetime of work, said Edward Mulligan, executive vice-president of the technology services division. A gradual transition to packaged applications might help such businesses, said Ovum’s Barnett.
“Eighty per cent of core business processes in banks are the same. In 10 years, it will make little sense to have your own, unique homegrown savings program,” he said.
Mulligan has been migrating some smaller applications, freeing up expensive mainframe capacity. The big reason is cost. When the vendor of his problem management software refused to bring licensing in line with equivalent packages in the Windows arena, he migrated to a cheaper Windows version.
The total operating costs of running applications on the mainframe can be “easily” 10 times that of a Unix or Windows architecture, said Sabre’s Walker.
While IBM has begun offering sub-capacity, usage-based pricing, few third-party vendors of mainframe software have followed suit. “Vendors who don’t embrace flexible pricing are accelerating the decline in their business,” said Barnett.
At Sabre, Walker plans to continue to migrate off the mainframe, which he said is simply too expensive.
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.
zSeries Summit - feedback
"We are getting a next generation," said Steven A. Mills, senior vice president in charge of I.B.M.'s software business, "by adding new people and enabling other programming languages on the mainframe." . . . The company is working with some big customers to convince university computer science departments that mainframe programming is a skill of the future. A group from the online brokerage firm Charles Schwab and I.B.M. spoke last month to the faculty at Arizona State University. There is a coming shortage of mainframe software engineers, they said, as this generation reaches retirement age. "Our message was this is a skill you can acquire and still use all the modern tools," said Jeremy Lamb, vice president for mainframe services at Schwab. -- The New York Times
Seeking to breathe new life into its mainframe computers, IBM will unveil today new software and initiatives aimed at letting the big-iron machines offer more Web-based services and process more transactions. -- San Jose Mercury News
"It's easier to manage the mainframe than a bunch of Windows servers. We have a smaller staff running the mainframe and those functions run 80 percent of our business," said Bill Homa, CIO of supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers. Hannaford Brothers deployed a System z mainframe last October to serve as the hub of its SOA. "We used to be fairly distributed, but the difficulty of managing thousands of distributed servers was just a nightmare. In the past five years we've made an effort to make everything we can centralized," Homa said. - InfoWorld/IDG
Daniel Lieber, president of partner Innovative Ideas Unlimited, Wakefield, Mass., says the offering vastly simplifies the effort of porting code to the mainframes. A developer was able to port an application in a day, Lieber says. "I think it will give the mainframe a new lease on life." - VarBusiness
Pund-IT analyst Charles King said Mills' pitch for the z9 as an SOA platform was compelling. "One of the reasons the mainframe is still around is you have petabytes of legacy data and legacy applications," King said after the event. "If you're talking about helping a customer break into the great, wide wonderful world of SOA, if you're truly helping them to move into this new method of doing business, you have to figure out a way for them to leverage that legacy information. If an SOA can revitalize something like COBOL then maybe they're really on to something here." -- Internet.com
American Modern Insurance Group, which runs an IBM mainframe and IBM AIX servers, is in the early stages of developing an SOA system, and senior VP and CIO John Campbell says the company's mainframe will play a role in that environment. "Like many, we're starting to explore the opportunities of an SOA approach. What we're looking for is the flexibility to quickly respond to business changes," he says. The mainframe will be a transaction engine that the insurance company's business partners will access through SOA." -- InformationWeek
"We have a big franchise, so it's important that customers have a road map," Mills said.. . . IBM also announced a tool which automatically generates Cobol code. The Rational-branded product is meant to simplify the task of writing mainframe applications for programmers familiar with Java and Linux, Mills said. "You don't have to have unique mainframe skills," he said. "We're opening up the aperture to more programmers with more diverse skills." -- ZDNet
Issue on ODF
the largest ministry, the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), has shown the wisdom of adopting OpenDocument formats as the de facto document format. Since 2004, Mindef has adopted OpenOffice and the OpenDocument format. It plans to deploy OpenOffice to 20,000 desktops by the first half of this year.Mindef gave the following reasons for its decision to select OpenOffice:1. It avoided paying more than $10 million by not upgrading more than 20,000 desktops to Office 2003. When the next release of Office is launched, it has the option of staying on OpenOffice or adopting this new release. In other words, in two to three years' time, it can again avoid paying tens of millions of dollars by not migrating to the latest version of Microsoft Office. This decision cycle will be repeated every three to four years.2. It retains the choice of using proprietary software or OSS as OpenOffice can coexist with existing, older versions of Microsoft Office.3. It will not be forced to upgrade by vendor-introduced obsolescence when a proprietary software vendor introduces a new version of its software.4. It has the flexibility to read and modify codes, which is not possible with proprietary software.With proprietary software, even if you are a big customer and the changes you want are reasonable, and reflect the needs of most users, the most the vendor can promise is that the feature will be available with the next release.With the money saved by not buying new Microsoft Office licences, Mindef can channel valuable resources to its core competency areas.
