DancingDinosaur

zEnterprise Use Cases Start Rolling In

dancingdinosaur — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:50:42 +0000

IBM has become more forthcoming with information about the initial zEnterprise hybrid computing users. This is a welcomed development.

These organizations adopted the zEnterprise and the zBX to run a hybrid (mixed platform) computing environment, not just as a bigger, faster z10. What those organizations are doing—the use cases—is essential information if an IT manager is to seriously consider adopting a hybrid computing strategy.

A few names already have trickled out. EUROCONTROL, one of the more recent, was reported at DancingDinosaur here. EUROCONTROL is the European air traffic control organization. Its goal was to streamline operations and reduce costs. IBM put out a news release on it here, in November. Then in December, IBM unveiled BG Phoenics, a European IT services provider, here. BG Phoenics turned to hybrid computing—two z196 machines, two zBX cabinets with POWER7 and System x blades in a cluster running Linux, DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, and more to reduce server and management sprawl.

An interesting data warehousing use case is Nova Ljubljanska Bank (NLB), a Slovenia bank. IBM provided the bank with a new z196 and business analytics capabilities. The analytics initially took the form of the Smart Analytics Optimizer but with plans to upgrade to the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA), a blade that incorporates Netezza capabilities. The system also included the zBX, Linux on z, and DB2 for z/OS. The goal was to speed up the processing of financial queries. Complex queries that previously had taken up to 1.5 hours to complete can now be completed in seconds. Check out the NLB video here.

A utilities company that previously ran Power Systems switched to the z196, zBX, POWER7 blades, DB2 v10, and SAP to support growth that would drive its previous production throughput of 80,000 bills/hour to over 150,000 bills per hour. Actually the system turned out to be able to scale above 400,000 bills per hour, more than enough to support an anticipated 30 million added customers over the next 18 months. The z196 was configured with 100 GB of memory, 7 CPs and 7 zIIPs.

So, zEnterprise hybrid computing use cases are starting to be published. Certainly more details are needed, not only on the speeds, feed, and configurations, but also implementation details, the choices that were made, and the organizational challenges that had to be overcome. Have no doubt, hybrid computing entails significant organizational challenges starting before the machines even hit the loading dock. Also needed is third-party validation. But this a welcome start. DancingDinosaur is looking forward to more.

At the same time IBM unveiled the recent use cases, it also offered some details on zEnterprise and hybrid computing adoption. For example, approximately 100 organizations took zBX cabinets and over 950 blades have been shipped. Last fall that number stood at around 80 zBX cabinets shipped. And despite weak sales performance in the Q411, the amount of z MIPS shipped in 2011 still grew 16%. Also, a full complement of zBX blades now are shipping: POWER7, System x blades for Linux and for Windows, and specialized blades like the IDAA and DataPower.

The IDAA is an interesting computing story that delivers startling performance and is only available for the zEnterprise, a situation IBM makes clear is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. The IDAA enables the zEnterprise to be extremely cost competitive at BI analytics when put up against long time BI leaders like Teradata and Oracle Exadata. At some point DancingDinosaur will take a closer look at the IDAA.

And just in case you thought the zEnterprise is going away anytime soon, don’t worry. The trends are headed in the zEnterprise’s favor. IBM added 62 mainframe clients in 2010, 76 new mainframe clients in 2011, and expects to hit 100 or more in 2012. Remember all the pundits over the years who predicted that the mainframe was a dinosaur heading to extinction? Don’t bet against the zEnterprise.

zEnterprise Cost per Workload

dancingdinosaur — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:54:50 +0000

Is the zEnterprise is too expensive? That is a complaint DancingDinosaur frequently encounters. Acquiring a mainframe and putting into useful service is not cheap. The z114 starts at $75,000 but to run workloads you’ll have to spend more.

Usually DancingDinosaur shifts the discussion to total cost of ownership (TCO) or Fit for Purpose (or Tuned to the Task). That puts the cost discussion into the context the full costs, not just the cost of the hardware or into the context of what you’re trying to achieve. And you should be trying to achieve something; nobody buys a mainframe for the fun of it.

John Shedletsky, IBM VP of competitive technology, has been dissecting the cost of zEnterprise, Power Systems, and distributed platforms in terms of the workloads being run. It makes sense; different workloads have different requirements in terms of response or throughput or availability or security or any other number of attributes and will benefit from different machines and configurations.

Most recently, Shedletsky introduced a new workload benchmark for business analytic reports executed in a typical day, called the BI Day Benchmark. Based on Cognos workloads, it looks at the number of queries generated; characterizes them as simple, intermediate, or complex; and scores them in terms of response time, throughput, or an aggregate measure. You can use the resulting data to calculate a cost per workload.

DancingDinosaur, as a matter of policy, steers clear of proprietary benchmarks like BI Day. It is just too difficult to normalize the results across all the variables that can be fudged, making it next to impossible to come up with repeatable results.

A set of cost per workload analyses Shedletsky published back in March here avoids the pitfalls of a proprietary benchmark. In these analyses he pitted a zEnterprise with a zBX against POWER7 and Intel machines all running multi-core blades. One analysis looked at running 500 heavy workloads. The hardware and software cost for a system consisting of 56 Intel Blades (8 cores per blade) for a total of 448 cores came to $11.5 million, which worked out to $23k per workload. On the zEnterprise running 192 total cores, the total hardware/software cost was $7.4 million for a cost per workload of $15k. Click on Shedletsky’s report for all the fine print.

Another interesting workload analysis looked at running 28 front end applications. Here he compared 28 competitive App Server applications on 57 SPARC T3-1B blades with a total of 936 cores at a hardware/software cost of $11.7 million compared to a WebSphere App Server running on 28 POWER7 blades plus 2 Data Power blades in the zBX for a total of 224 cores at a hardware/software cost of $4.9 million. Per workload the zEnterprise cost 58% less. Again, click on Shedletsky’s report above for the fine print.

Not all of Shedletsky’s analyses come out in favor of the zEnterprise or even POWER7 systems. Where they do, however, he makes an interesting observation: since his analyses typically include the full cost of ownership, where z comes out ahead the difference often is not the better performance but the cost of labor. He notes that consistent structured z management practices combined to lower labor costs.

If fewer people can manage all those blades and cores from a single unified console, the z Unified Resource Manager, rather than requiring multiple people learning multiple tools to achieve a comparable level of management, it has to lower the overall cost of operations and the cost per workload. As much as someone may complain that a z114 starts at $75,000, good administrators cost that much or more.

Shedletsky’s BI Day benchmark may never catch on, but he is correct in that to understand a systems true cost you have to look at the cost per workload. That is almost sure to lead you to hybrid computing and, particularly, the zEnterprise where you can mix platforms for different workloads and manage them all in a structured, consistent way.

Predictive Analysis on zEnterprise

dancingdinosaur — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:31:17 +0000

IBM has been positioning the System z for a key role in data analysis. To that end, it acquired SPSS and Cognos and made sure they ran on the z. More recently, growing interest in Big Data and real-time data analytics only affirm IBM’s belief that as far as data analytics goes the zEnterprise is poised to take the spotlight. This is not completely new; DancingDinosaur addressed it in October 2009.

Over the last several decades people would laugh if you suggested a mainframe for data analysis beyond the standard canned system reporting. For ad-hoc querying, multi-dimensional analysis, and data visualization you needed distributed systems running a variety of specialized GUI tools. In addition, you’d want a small army of business analysts, PhDs, and various quants to handle the heavy lifting. The resulting queries could take days to run.

In a recent analyst briefing, Alan Meyer, senior manager for Data Warehousing on z, built the case for a different style of data analysis on the zEnterprise. He drew a picture of companies needing to make better informed decisions at the point of engagement while applications and business users are demanding the latest data faster than ever. At the same time there is no letup in pressure to lower cost, reduce complexity, and improve efficiency.

So what’s stopping companies from doing near real-time analytics and the big data thing? The culprits, according to Meyer, are duplicate data infrastructures, the complexity of integrating multiple IT environments, insufficient and inconsistent security, and insufficient processing power, especially when having to handle large volumes of data fast. The old approach clearly is too slow and costly.

The zEnterprise, it turns out, is the ideal vehicle for today’s demanding analytics. It is architected for on-demand processing through pre-installed capacity paid for only when activated and while adding processors, disk, and memory without taking the system offline. Virtualized top to bottom, the zEnterprise delivers the desired isolation while prioritization controls lets you define critical queries and workloads. Its industry-leading processors ensure the most complex queries run fast, and low latency enables near real-time analysis. Finally, multiple deployment options means you can start with a low-end z114 and grow through a fully configured z196 combined with a zBX loaded with blades, especially the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA), a revamped version on the Smart Analytics Optimizer.

Last October IBM unveiled the IDAA and a host of other analytics tools under the smarter computing banner. But the IDAA is the zEnterprise’s analytic jewel. There IDAA incorporates Netezza, which speeds complex analytics through in-memory processing and a highly intelligent query optimizer. When run in conjunction with DB2 on the z, the results can be astonishing, with queries that normally require a few hours completed in just a few seconds, 1000 times faster according to some early users.

Netezza, when deployed as an appliance, streamlines database performance through hardware acceleration and optimization for deep analytics, multifaceted reporting, and complex queries. When embedded in the zEnterprise, it delivers the same kind of performance for mixed workloads—operational transaction systems, data warehouse, operational data stores, and consolidated data marts—but with the z’s extremely high availability, security, and recoverability. As a natural extension of the zEnterprise, where the data already resides in DB2 and OLTP systems, the z is able to deliver pervasive analytics across the organization while further speeding performance and ease of deployment and administration.

Already companies are reporting valuable results. Marriott Hotels reports using the system to book inventory down to the last room available to maximize yield. Chartis Insurance turned to it to meet SLAs that allow for no down time while requiring high performance and fast time to market. In the process, it achieved what it reports as seamless 99.99% up time, the fastest performance available, and time to market measured in days. Swiss Re turned to IDAA to put the right answers into the hands of decision makers across the business.

Today, IDAA and Netezza are just two components of a comprehensive zEnterprise data analytics portfolio that includes Cognos, SPSS, InfoSphere, Guardium, Optim, QMF, MDM, and more. IBM offers powerful data analytics capabilities for its Power and System x platforms, but the IDAA, which is the heart of the fast, near real time predictive analytics, is available only for the zEnterprise, either the z114 or the z196. Might be ideal for a private analytics cloud.

EUROCONTROL Adopts zEnterprise Hybrid Computing

dancingdinosaur — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:45:22 +0000

Since IBM introduced hybrid computing and the zEnterprise in 2010, adoption has been slow, to say the least. In November IBM announced a couple of new hybrid computing users.

At a recent analyst briefing, IBM reported about 80 zBX sales. Given the thousands of active mainframe shops in the world this represents very slow adoption at best. IBM managers insist adoption takes time, and they point to Linux on z, which took 10 years to surpass adoption by one-third of the mainframe shops. (BTW, DancingDinosaur has long argued that Linux saved the mainframe.)

The comparison to Linux on z is valid. And like Linux on z, hybrid computing raises a number of cultural, organizational, and political issues for enterprise IT. Nobody wants to trigger platform turf war.

DancingDinosaur has been talking with data center managers about zBX adoption since it was introduced. For some, the issue is cost. For others, the issue is the lack of a compelling use case.

EUROCONTROL, the European air traffic control organization, has found a convincing reason for zEnterprise hybrid computing in cost efficiency and performance. “I want to run each application where we get the lowest cost and the best performance,” says Huub Meertens, head of the Support Engineering Section of EUROCONTROL, the European air traffic management organization located at Maastricht, The Netherlands. The organization runs a mix of System z, RISC, and x86 servers.

The organization had assembled what it considered an effective platform for its applications and tools to control the air traffic in the Benelux and north-west Germany area. The organization divided its workloads into mission-critical air traffic control and administrative and support systems and began a consolidation effort. The administrative systems, specifically Linux systems, were the target for the initial consolidation phase.

An in-depth study focusing on reliability, functionality, flexibility, migration, management and cost of ownership showed that the heterogeneous and fully virtual zEnterprise hybrid environment would be the best fit. This option scored particularly well in terms of reliability, flexibility, management, and cost.

The new environment would consolidate six mainframes and 20 RISC servers down to three IBM System z servers running Linux. The IT group deployed the z196, zBX, 6 x-blades, and 1 p-blade. IBM handled the initial installation but the EUROCONTROL team handled the linking of the zEnterprise to its network. The zBX simply extended their network and immediately became a part of it. They turned on the Unified Resource Manager, which was a primary reason they went the hybrid route.

The ability to manage the consolidated environment from one console already has proven advantageous. In a cost comparison of multiple options, a virtualized x86 option and the fully virtualized hybrid platform running x86 and zEnterprise, turned out to have comparable costs when running 60 Linux instances. The new zEnterprise hybrid environment (z196, zBX, x-blades) running 100 Linux instances, however, delivers more than a 20% cost advantage. And, the more apps they run, Meertens concluded, the greater the zEnterprise advantage. Also, the fully virtualized environment is proving to be more flexible and better at meeting their requirements for safety, capacity, availability, floor space, and energy usage at minimized costs.

Meertens also reports that the HX5 blades the organization deploys achieve the same performance in the zBX as they do in a stand-alone Blade Center. Their zEnterprise environment currently runs only Linux applications. Previously the Linux apps, mainly Oracle, ran on z10 with Linux engines and on distributed Intel servers. At that time the workload performance for Oracle apps was better on the Intel platform, but the Oracle licensing structure was more advantageous running on Linux on System z. Today, the Oracle apps on the z196 outperform the Intel blade, Meertens reports.

All EUROCONTROL’S Windows workloads currently run on conventional Windows servers with VMware. In 1Q 2012 the organization plans to pilot Windows on x86 blades in the zBX.

Watch Mainframe Executive (March/April issue) for a more detailed piece on the EUROCONTROL experience. DancingDinosaur will continue to follow the Windows HX5 blade pilot.

zEnterprise Private Cloud ROI

dancingdinosaur — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:04:26 +0000

Many mainframe veterans think the System z has long acted as a private cloud, at least since SOA appeared on the System z, allowing users to access data and logic residing on the System z through nothing more than their browser. And they are right.

The distributed world, unlike the mainframe world, sees private clouds as something new and radical because it is not straightforward there to virtualize, service-enable, and integrate all the piece parts that make up a private cloud. The System z learned these tricks years ago, and the zEnterprise with x86 and p-blades in an attached zBX makes it even easier.

With the z114 and the System z Solution Edition for Cloud Computing program a mainframe-based private cloud becomes that much less expensive to acquire, especially since most of the piece parts already are included and optimized from the start. The System z Solution Edition for Cloud includes the z hardware, Tivoli software, and IBM services to deliver the foundation for the private cloud.

A private cloud, whether distributed or mainframe-based, does not come cheap. The payback, however, still is there; it just comes in a different form. The private cloud restructures IT around a services delivery model. Applications and users tap IT-based data and business logic as services. Cost savings are generated from the ensuing operational efficiency enabled through the standardization, automation and virtualization of IT services. When the organization progresses to the point where users can self-provision and self-configure the needed IT services through private cloud automation and management, the real efficiencies kick in.

According to IDC many of today’s private cloud business cases are being anchored by savings from application rationalization and IT staff productivity improvements in addition to expected optimization of hardware assets. But unlike the public cloud, which promises to shift IT spending from CAPEX to OPEX, private clouds actually drive increases in CAPEX since the organization is likely to invest in new hardware and software optimized for virtualized cloud services delivery and management automation.

With a mainframe private cloud, much of the investment in virtualized, optimized, and integrated hardware assets has already been made. The private cloud initially becomes more of an exercise in partitioning and reallocating those assets as a private cloud. Still, given the appeal of the IT services model, it is likely that the organization will boost its hardware assets to accommodate increasing demand and new services.

The greatest ROI of the private cloud, whether mainframe-based or distributed, comes from the business agility it enables. The virtualized pool of IT resources that makes up the private cloud can be easily reallocated as services to meet changing business needs. Instead of requiring weeks if not months to assemble and deploy the IT hardware and software resources necessary to support a new business initiative, those resources can be allocated from the pooled virtual resources in minutes or hours (provided, of course, sufficient resources are available). With a private cloud you can, in effect, change the business almost on-the-fly and with no additional investment.

As CIO, how are you going to put a value on this sudden agility? If it lets the organization effectively counter competitive challenges, seize new business opportunities, or satisfy new customer demands it could deliver astounding value. It all depends on the business leadership. If they aren’t terribly agile thinkers, however, the value might be minimal.

Other benefits from a private cloud include increased IT productivity and efficiency, the ability of business users to self-provision the desired IT resources (with appropriate policy-based automation controlling the provisioning behind the scenes), and an increased ability to monitor and measure IT consumption for purposes of chargeback or, as is more likely, show back. Such monitoring and measurement of IT consumption has long been a hallmark of the mainframe, whether a private cloud or not.

Even with a mainframe-based private cloud the organization will likely make additional investments, particularly in management automation to ensure efficient service delivery, monitoring, measurement, chargeback, self-provisioning, and orchestration. IBM Tivoli along with other mainframe ISVs like CA and BMC provide tools to do this.

In the end, the value of private cloud agility when matched with agile thinking business leadership should more than offset the additional investments required. And with a zEnterprise-based private hybrid cloud, which comes highly virtualized already, you have a head start on any distributed private cloud.

IBM zBX Blades Cheap (Free!)

dancingdinosaur — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:52:40 +0000

T’is the season of discounts, and it apparently applies to the zEnterprise as much as it does to holiday gifts. This deal, however, does not appear to end with the holiday. DancingDinosaur supports anything IBM does to lower enterprise data center costs.

Here’s the deal: migrate competitive workloads to the zEnterprise Blade Center Extension (zBX) and you can receive up to six zBX Power or x86 blades for free. So, replace 2, 4, even 6 HP UX or Linux Systems or x86 servers (remember, there are now Windows blades) and receive an equal number of free Power or x86 blades to run in the zBX. The deal focuses on HP, but IBM staff says it applies to Oracle/Sun systems too. Given a $5000 cost for low end x86 blades, that could amount to a $30,000 discount on top of whatever other discounts IBM will throw in. For high end, more richly configured blade replacements it could come to much more.

Of course, you need a zEnterprise (z196 or z114) and to buy a new zBX to cash in on this. But, if you took a deeply discounted System z under the IBM Solution Edition program you could get in at a bargain price. And if your choice was a z114, IBM also is offering the DS8800 storage system for the z114 at an attractive entry price.

The deals are being offered under IBM’s Freedom by Design program. IBMer Paulo Carvao details the blade offer here in a presentation titled System z: Delivering on the Promise of Smarter Computing. Check out slide #15.

Even without free blades, the z makes an attractive consolidation play. According to IBM you can consolidate an average of 30 distributed servers or more on a single z114 core, or hundreds in a single footprint. In effect, you can deliver a virtual Linux server for approximately $500 per year, which works out to be as little as $1.45 per day per virtual server. If you are consolidating Oracle servers, the savings in Oracle licensing costs alone would cover a big chunk of the investment.

A dearth of zBX blade performance data, however, has slowed zBX adoption for some. A little performance data, however, has started to trickle in. For instance, some recent results came from an Italian company that moved its SAP workload to POWER7 blades on a zBX. It was able to boost bill processing from 60K per hour to 430K per hour, better than a 7x increase.

In general, IBM blade performance in the zBX should be the same as the performance in its standard blade centers. Actually, it might be a little better since the consolidated zEnterprise-zBX combination can cut down the number of network hops in some situations. And IBM insists zBX blades are priced competitively like its standard IBM blades. And then there are the free blades with a competitive upgrade, with which no one will quibble.

While on the subject of zEnterprise deals, the regular prices of specialty engines continues to be a MIPS bargain, delivering more MIPS for the money than earlier versions. One customer used the increased MIPS from zEnterprise specialty engines to reduce the number of cores the company bought, which resulted in a substantially lower acquisition cost with no reduction in overall MIPS. With the right workloads, this is a very effective cost saving strategy.

IBM System z for Social Business

dancingdinosaur — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:03:44 +0000

Most IT people do not think of the System z for social business. Probably they think more in terms of x86 systems running Linux or Windows. Some might think Power Systems and AIX. The System z, however, has a good story to tell when it comes to social business, and with the zEnterprise and zBX machines that story only gets better.

Social business today generally refers to some form of collaboration, information sharing, or interaction through social networking or social media. Blogging and micro-blogging, like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and such are what usually come to mind. Here’s a link to the Society for New Communications Research, which covers this topic in depth.

IBM, through its 1995 acquisition of Lotus Development Corp that brought it Notes, has been involved in social business for quite some time. At that time Lotus Notes was called groupware, but even then it did considerably more. Basically, it included what amounted to a Notes application development environment. Groupware was a vague concept back then. Still Notes, even then, went beyond groupware and shared documents.

Social business today is equally vague, although the market seems to be coalescing around the concept of information sharing and personal interaction, mainly for the purpose of some form of business collaboration. Lowe’s Home Centers, for example, uses IBM Connections, a Lotus Notes social business product, to enable its floor staff to quickly locate expert resources across its stores in response to customer inquiries. Lowe’s is a mainframe shop, but like many large enterprises, it supports a number of platforms. It deployed IBM Connections on AIX.

As it turns out, IBM offers several social business tools from its Lotus group. Dubbed the Lotus collaboration suite, the tools can be run on the System z or other IBM platforms. Find details on the Lotus social business tools for z here. Of course, running the social business tools on the z instead of a distributed platform brings the advantages of the mainframe’s scalability, availability, manageability, and security.

The Lotus collaboration suite includes:

Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes—the original server and client components as an enterprise-class platform for critical business, collaboration, mail, and messaging applications

Lotus Quickr—consists of team collaboration software for accessing and interacting with the people, information, and project materials and provides team spaces, content libraries, team discussion forums, wikis, and connectors to simplify the sharing and management of documents and information among a team

IBM Connections—social software for business by enabling the development and management of networks of resources and expertise

Lotus Sametime—the Notes platform for unified real-time communication and collaboration

For organizations looking to run these tools on the System z or zEnterprise the workloads could qualify for the System z Solution Edition discounted pricing with either the System z Solution Editions for Enterprise Linux or the IBM Enterprise Linux Server, both of which provide discounted hardware, software, middleware, and maintenance for Linux deployments on the z platform.

With any social business tools, the question of ROI becomes tricky. It is difficult to identify quantifiable measurements for collaboration or information sharing. Managers will have to look at business processes like new product development or customer service and even then the one-to-one correlation may not be there. For instance, if a Lowe’s floor person can get the right answer to a customer’s question on the spot while the customer is still there in the store, it might save a sale. Or, Lowe’s might have gotten the sale anyway. Go figure.

With the advent of the zEnterprise and hybrid computing, the System z social business story gets more interesting. It should be possible to deploy pieces of the IBM collaboration suite on different platforms and manage them as a single virtual platform under the z.

IBM Power Systems Winning Streak

dancingdinosaur — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:29:48 +0000

With all the attention the zEnterprise has gotten in the past year, IBM Power Systems almost seem like an afterthought, at least in terms of the ink it generates. Back in August, however, IDC noted a rebound in the high end UNIX server market of which Power is a big part. Fueling the rebound apparently is the gradual easing of the recession, which has led organizations to begin revamping their systems, and the Power Systems group has been scoring wins all along.

Whether economic recovery is the driving reason or IBM simply is reaping the benefits of the 2011 refresh of the entire Power Systems product lineup, the Power Systems group experienced a 15% year-over-year share increase and expanding profit margins. It also has cashed in on the mistakes of HP and Oracle to the tune of over 250 competitive displacements, resulting in over $225M of business equally split between former HP and Oracle-Sun customers. In you are interested, click here for IBM’s 3Q11 details.

But the financials, good as they are, aren’t the most interesting Power story. A pair of presentations earlier this year by IBMers Steve Will and Patrick O’Rourke laid out some of the goodies the refreshed platform is delivering. For example, PowerVM can drive over 90% virtualization while VMControl delivers industrial strength automation required to take full advantage of that level of virtualization. At the same time, IBM’s EnergyScale technology can reduce Power Systems energy consumption up to 90%. Meanwhile, IBM also was upgrading to AIX 7, which the company dubbed the future of UNIX. (DancingDinosaur sees Linux as the future of UNIX, but that another post.)

The latest rev of the POWER7 processor offers 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket and up to four threads per core. With up to 4.25 GHz processor speed and an integrated eDRAM L3 cache these systems can fly. And the next rev of the processor already is on the roadmap.

Of course, the Power Systems poster child is Watson, the system built around a set of Power 750 servers that won the Jeopardy challenge. The IBM POWER7 processor is optimized to meet the demands of natural language processing, which is what Watson is all about. The processor can handle thousands of analytical tasks at once combined with massive parallelism in which multiple complex tasks execute simultaneously on individual processor threads. Specifically, Watson used multiple IBM Power 750 servers clustered together, each with four processor sockets containing eight POWER7 cores per socket and four threads per core. And you know the result: Watson won by a mile.

Although the number of Power Systems 750 servers, processor sockets, cores per socket, and threads per core used in Watson may not be your typical Power Systems configuration, IBM insists that the processor was not designed specifically for Watson but can handle a wide range of analytical tasks. IBM already has targeted healthcare, financial services, and call centers as primary use cases for Watson-like capabilities.

The interesting thing about the Power Systems win streak is that it does not include natural language processing workloads. The new wins look more like traditional Power Systems workloads than like Watson. For example, the University of Texas at Austin is attempting to predict river behavior in real time. The system combines river systems data with weather and sensor data to predict a river’s behavior more than 100x the normal speed. The combination of analytics and weather simulation on a Power 7 and generate 100 miles of river simulation in an hour, fast enough for people to get out of the way.

Staples, the office supply superstore, turned to Power Systems running IBM WebSphere Commerce 7 to optimize its website for high volume transactions. Staples saw page performance improved anywhere from 25- 55% with IBM POWER7 Systems, according to the company.

Power Systems can process an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing information in real time. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two particularly intense retail shopping days almost upon us, Staples will want all the performance boost they get from the Power platform.

With the introduction of the zEnterprise and hybrid computing and with the recent announcement of x86 blades for the zBX to fill out the multiple zEnterprise hybrid computing platforms, it is easy to forget that Power blades and AIX also can play in this game.

SUSE zBX Promo Saves $39K

dancingdinosaur — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:49:17 +0000

A few months back SUSE launched a promotion to drive adoption of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on zBX blades. If you are a new or existing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z user, you can get a free Basic subscription for x86 blades in your zBX. Full details here.

Ordinarily, the x86 subscription costs $349. With the zBX able to take 112 x86 blades that comes to $39,088 in subscription charges avoided if you load the maximum number of x86 blades and use them all to run SUSE. By comparison, the cost of a basic subscription for the System z is $11,999. The Basic subscription allows unlimited use of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with all your zBX hardware and includes code maintenance for patches, fixes and security updates, but it does not include any active support services.

This promotion has generated surprisingly little buzz. In part it got lost in the acquisition by Attachmate. It also got ignored due to the generally slow adoption of the zBX. At last count, IBM reported over 80 zBX customers. Nice but given the number of active System z shops that is not exactly a big percentage of mainframe users jumping on the zBX bandwagon. To be fair, hybrid computing, of which the zBX is a key component, is both new and radically different; adoption will take time. The SUSE promotion is only good for the combination of System z and zBX.

The SUSE free subscription is a cute gesture, but it is a gimmick of minimal value. Any System z shop that wants more support won’t be interested in a Basic subscription; rather a higher level of support is available at an additional fee. Few shops are likely to deploy a zBX with 112 x86-blades running SUSE Linux, which is what it would take to capture the full $39,000 value of the promotion.

SUSE insists that some customers have picked up on the offer although they do not identify them. SUSE’s Basic subscription is the entry-level offering. System z shops are more likely to opt for the Standard offering, 12hr x Mon-Fri (5 day) support, or Priority, 24×7 support. No free subscription with these.

SUSE’s promo actually turns out to be a pretty expensive way to deploy free Linux. A popular third party discount reseller offers IBM Hx5 blades starting at just under $5000 (Server – blade – 2-way – 1 x Xeon E7-4807 / 1.86 GHz – RAM 8 GB – no HDD). The purchase of 112 blades at $4500 each comes to $504,000, maybe less if you wrangle a discount.

You still will need to buy multiple zBX cabinets to house the blades. Figuring a maximum of 28 x5 blades per rack, you need 4 racks to accommodate 112 blades. That’s going to run close to $1 million. And that’s not all the costs.

So, to capture the full savings of $349 on each of 112 x86 blade SUSE Linux subscription you’ll probably end up spending close to $2 million. And why would you need to run that many instances of x86 Linux in the first place if you already have a zEnterprise? A more realistic use case might be 8-12 x86 blades running Linux in the zBX. The couple of thousand dollars in savings won’t be dramatic, but you probably won’t want the Basic subscription anyway.

If you already have a zEnterprise and want to run many instances of Linux use z/VM with IFLs to run hundreds, if not thousands of Linux instances just on the z. Then, if you really want a good deal take advantage of the IBM System z Enterprise Linux Solution Edition package. (You’ll have to qualify it as a new workload but with a little creativity that shouldn’t be too difficult.)

The combination of the zEnterprise and zBX and the resulting hybrid computing represents the future of enterprise computing. Linux certainly will play a big role. However, deploying SUSE on 112 x86 blades in a zBX, even with the promotion, may not be the best way to get there.

Academic Initiative Addresses zEnterprise Skills

dancingdinosaur — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Is there a mainframe skills shortage? Before the recession there certainly was talk of it although it never quite materialized as predicted. Sure, data center managers openly wondered how they would replace the skilled mainframers nearing retirement age, but the market meltdown that wiped out a big chunk of 401k retirement savings and the subsequent recession seemed to delay a lot of retirement plans.

IT analyst Joe Clabby questioned the notion of a skills shortage in a TechTarget piece here. And if there is still a looming a mainframe skills shortage IBM’s System z Academic Initiative seems to be making great progress in heading it off.

IBM’s Academic Initiative for System z, now in its eight year, has enlisted over 1000 educational institutions, which it is equipping with the tools and materials to teach enterprise systems thinking and mainframe skills. Over 43,000 students have taken courses or otherwise gained mainframe exposure through the program. Most importantly, these students are landing mainframe jobs at leading companies like Bank of Montreal, Bank of America, and Citigroup.

While the national unemployment rate in general remains unacceptably high, stubbornly stuck at 9%, the mainframe unemployment rate, based on non-scientific anecdotal evidence, seems much lower. Messages to DancingDinosaur complaining about the lack of mainframe jobs, frequent a year ago have stopped completely. And mainframe job postings appear regularly on LinkedIn’s numerous mainframe interest groups.

A recent briefing on the Academic Initiative for System z made the point that most System z organizations do NOT face a general skills issue. Almost two-thirds of the shops responding to an IBM question on the subject noted that they have the skills they need. If there was any problem, it is among midsize shops (500-1499 MIPS) where 20% complained that they have openings but cannot attract people with z skills. Among the largest shops, 17% reported openings but couldn’t get management approval to fill them. If this is where the biggest percentage of complaints is then clearly there is no mainframe skills problem.

Still, if you need a mainframe job, IBM, through the System z Academic Initiative, has made a mainframe jobs bulletin board (systemzjobs.com) available free to job seekers. A recent visit showed over 1500 mainframe jobs posted. You can access the jobs board here or post a job.

Many of the schools participating in the Academic Initiative for System z do not have their own mainframe. Instead they remotely access a mainframe IBM has made available elsewhere to give students and faculty access to a System z.

Syracuse University has its own z10 and has been using it to cultivate enterprise systems thinking among its students. Most students, according to David Dischiave, the faculty member heading the Academic Initiative at Syracuse, arrive at school with “false technology awareness.” Sure they know how to swipe smartphones and run apps, but they lack fundamental technology skills and, especially, they lack enterprise systems thinking, which is central to the role of the mainframe.

Dischiave has been pleased to see increased student interest in the school’s reinvigorated enterprise systems curriculum. But what caught him by surprise was the pushback from the faculty, which wasn’t prepared. They better get prepared. Going forward, they can expect enterprise systems thinking to become even more critical on all platforms as the zEnterprise and virtualized and hybrid computing gain traction.