Data and Analytics—Key to Security at IBM Edge 2013

A well planned global bank robbery netted $45 million in one day without anyone setting foot in a bank. As reported in the New York Times, the robbers manipulated financial information with the stroke of a few keys and used that information to loot automated teller machines. To stop this kind of crime you need data security and analytics, not cops with guns drawn.

Forty-five million dollars disappeared, said IBM Fellow and VP, Innovation Bernie Meyerson, and nobody even noticed! Eventually they noticed and a few people—those visiting ATM machines—were arrested, but they weren’t the brains of the operation.

The lesson from this caper: you have to monitor data patterns and recognize abnormalities. No system picked up the fact that a handful of ATM access numbers were being used at the same time at widely dispersed locations. This goes beyond IT perimeter defense.

The solution, said Meyerson, is an agile defense based on real-time analytics. Then you can look for a variety of behaviors and attributes and stop an attack almost as soon as it is underway. Better yet, you might predict an attack before it starts.

For example, you can baseline normal behavior and use analytics to identify behavior outside the baseline. Or, you can profile an individual based on the files he or she normally views and the websites the person usually visits. Activities outside normal behavior would trigger an alarm that merits further exploration.

This kind of IT security goes beyond today’s standard IT security best practices built around perimeter protection, user identification and authorization, anti-virus, intrusion detection, and such. Rather, it is based on collecting a wide range of data in real-time and analyzing it to determine if it is outside the norm for that person. A bit Big Brother, yes, but it’s a dangerous world out there.

IBM brings a slew of products and services to this battle, including cognitive computing. In this case Watson, the Jeopardy winning IBM system, represents your biggest gun. Watson, which is smart and fast to begin with, also can learn. What, asks Meyerson, if cognitive systems like Watson could see the big picture and understand the context? Well, you can be pretty confident that $45 million wouldn’t disappear globally in hours without being noticed

Although most IT managers aren’t worrying about losing $45 million to theft in one day that doesn’t mean they don’t face complex and demanding security challenges. Cloud computing and mobile, especially with the added demand for BYOD,  is complicating what many previously considered good security blocking and tackling. Add to that Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)—slowly developing threats over an extended duration—spearfishing (different from phishing, another threat), zero-day attacks, SQL insertion, and attackers operating under the auspices of nation states; IT managers simply cannot relax their guard.

At Edge 2013 the IBM security team laid out its comprehensive security program that entails tools to automate security hygiene, manage security incidents through analytics, combat mobile threats, control network access, manage identity and third-party security, and address cloud and virtualization security. In short, the IBM program offers defense in depth.

IBM security experts at Edge 2013 also offered a variety of security tips: Begin with the assumption your organization has experienced attacks and already is infected to some extent, whether aware of it or not. A vulnerability analysis is a good place to start.

Understand how attackers work, such as by using social media to identify the weak points they can use to lure individually targeted managers—especially those who may have higher levels of system authorization—into opening an infected email. Pause before you click anything new.

Also avoid, replace, or update un-patched legacy systems, software, and systems with insecure configurations. That’s inviting trouble.

Finally, once the bad guy is in, you need a response strategy to move fast to isolate the problem and stop any spread while trying not to tip the bad guys off that you’re on to them. Resist the mad scramble to recover because it can ruin the evidence. Instead, follow your methodical response plan. You do have one, right?

Big Data as a Game Changing Technology at IBM Edge 2013

If you ever doubted that big data was going to become important, there should be no doubt anymore. Recent headlines from the past couple of weeks of the government capturing and analyzing massive amounts of daily phone call data should convince you. That this report was shortly followed by more reports of the government tapping the big online data websites like Google, Yahoo, and such for even more data should alert you to three things:

1—There is a massive amount of data out there that can be collected and analyzed.

2—Companies are amassing incredible volumes of data in the normal course of serving people who readily and knowingly give their data to these organizations. (This blogger is one of those tens of million .)

3—The tools and capabilities are mature enough for someone to sort through that data and connect the dots to deliver meaningful insights.

Particularly with regard to the last point this blogger thought the industry was still five years away from generating meaningful results from that amount of data coming in at that velocity. Sure, marketers have been sorting and correlating large amounts of data for years, but it was mostly structured data and not at nearly this much. BTW, your blogger has been writing about big data for some time.

If the news reports weren’t enough it became clear at Edge 2013 that big data analytics is happening and companies like Constant Contact and many others are succeeding at it now. It also is clear that there is sufficient commercial off-the-shelf computing power from companies like IBM and analytics tools to sort through massive amounts of data and make sense of it fast.

Another interesting point came up in one of the many discussions touching on big data. Every person’s personal data footprint is as unique as a fingerprint or other bio-metrics. We all visit different websites and interact with social media and use our credit and debit cards in highly individual ways. Again, marketers have sensed this at some level for years, but they haven’t yet really honed it down to the actual individual on a mass scale, although there is no technical reason one couldn’t.

Subsequent blogs will take up other topics from Edge 2013, such as software defined everything.

Although there were over a dozen sessions on System z topics, the mainframe did not have a big presence at the conference. However, Enterprise Systems 2013 was being promoted at IBM Edge. It will take place Oct. 21-25 in Orlando, Fl. It will combine the System z and the Power System Technical University along with a new executive-focused Enterprise Systems event. It will include new announcements, peeks into trends and directions, over 500 expert technical sessions across 10 tracks, and a comprehensive solution center.

IBM Technical Edge 2013 Tackles Flash – Big Data – Cloud & More

IBM Edge 2013 kicks off in just one week, 6/10 and runs through 6/14. Still time to register.  This blogger will be there through 6/13.  You can follow me on Twitter for conference updates @Writer1225.  I’ll be using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference. As noted here previously I’ll buy a drink for the first two people who come up to me and say they read DancingDinosaur.  How’s that for motivation!

The previous post looked at the Executive track. Now let’s take a glimpse at the technical track, which ranges considerably wider, beyond the System z to IBM’s other platforms, flash, big data, cloud, virtualization, and more

Here’s a sample of the flash sessions:

Assessing the World of Flash looks at the key competitors, chief innovators, followers, and leaders. You’ll quickly find that not all flash solutions are the same and why IBM’s flash strategy stands at the forefront of this new and strategic technology.

There are many ways to deploy flash. This session examines Where to Put Flash in the Data Center.  It will focus particularly on the new IBM FlashSystem products and other technologies from IBM’s Texas Memory Systems acquisition. However, both storage-based and server-based flash technologies will be covered with an eye toward determining what works best for client performance needs.

The session on IBM’s Flash Storage Future will take a look at how IBM is leveraging its Texas Memory Systems acquisition and other IBM technologies to deliver a flash portfolio that will play a major role across not only IBM’s storage products but its overall solution portfolio and its roadmap moving forward.

The flash sessions also will look at how Banco Azteco, Thompson Reuters, and Sprint are deploying and benefiting from flash.

In the big data track, the Future of Analytics Infrastructure looks interesting. Although most organizations understand the value of business analytics many don’t understand how the infrastructure choices they make will impact the success or failure of their analytics projects.  The session will identify the key requirements of any analytical environment: agility, scalability, multipurpose, compliance, cost-effective, and partner-ready; and how they can be met within a single, future-ready analytics infrastructure to meet the needs of current and future analytics strategies.

Big data looms large at the conference. A session titled Hadoop…It’s Not Just about Internal Storage explores how the Hadoop MapReduce approach is evolving from server internal disks to external storage. Initially, Hadoop provided massively scalable, distributed file storage and analytic capabilities. New thinking, however, has emerged that looks at a tiered approach for implementing the Hadoop framework with external storage. Understanding the workload architectural considerations is important as companies begin to integrate analytic workloads to drive higher business value. The session will review the workload considerations to show why an architectural approach makes sense and offer tips and techniques, and share information about IBM’s latest offerings in this space.

An Overview of IBM’s Big Data Strategy details the company’s industrial-strength big data platform to address the full spectrum of big data business opportunities. This session is ideal for those who are just getting started with big data.

And no conference today can skip the cloud. IBM Edge 2013 offers a rich cloud track. For instance, Building the Cloud Enabled Data Center explains how to get maximum value out of an existing virtualized environment through self-service delivery and optimization along with virtualization optimization capabilities. It also describes how to enable business and infrastructure agility with workload optimized clouds that provide orchestration across the entire data center and accelerate application updates to respond faster to stakeholder demands and competitive threats. Finally it looks at how an open and extensible cloud delivery platform can fully automate application deployment and lifecycle management by integrating compute, network, storage, and server automation.

A pair of sessions focus on IBM Cloud Storage Architectures and Understanding IBM’s Cloud Options. The first session looks at several cloud use cases, such as storage and systems management.  The other session looks at IBM SmartCloud Entry, SmartCloud Provisioning, and ServiceDelivery Manager.  The session promises to be an excellent introduction for the cloud technical expert who desires a quick overview of what IBM has to offer in cloud software and the specific value propositions for its various offerings, along with their architectural features and technical requirements.

A particularly interesting session will examine Desktop Cloud through Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Mobile Computing. The corporate desktop has long been a costly and frustrating challenge complicated even more by mobile access. The combination of the cloud and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provides a way for companies to connect end users to a virtual server environment that can grow as needed while mitigating the issues that have frustrated desktop computing, such as software upgrades and patching.

There is much more in the technical track. All the main IBM platforms are featured, including PureFlex Systems, the IBM BladeCenter, IBM’s Enterprise X-Architecture, the IBM XIV storage system, and, for DancingDinosaur readers, sessions on the DS8000.

Have you registered for IBM Edge 2013 yet?  There still is time. As noted above, find me in the Social Media Lounge at the conference and in the sessions.  You can follow me on Twitter for conference updates @Writer1225.  I’ll be using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference. I’ll buy a drink for the first two people who come up to me and say they read DancingDinosaur.  How much more motivation do you need?

A look at IBM Edge 2013 tracks: Storage, PureSystems & more

Nobody ever accused this blogger of being executive caliber but that hasn’t stopped me from rummaging around the Executive Track offerings at IBM Edge 2013 coming up Jun 10-14 in Las Vegas. Called the Executive Edge, the sessions run the first two and a half days and look pretty interesting. (The technical track, which is larger and runs the entire conference, actually looks much more interesting if you are inclined toward serious geekiness; this blogger intends to attend sessions from both tracks.)

Executive Edge is organized into three sections.  The third section seems to have most of the technology product material.  Here you will find sessions on PureSystems, FlashSystems, the eX5 (x86), Storwize, and Enterprise Storage (probably DS8000).  This third section also includes this intriguing topic: How Data Science Will Change the Course of History.  If I reported to an executive, I would steer him to that one, which should be intriguing to say the least.

The first section has some interesting topics.  One looks at customer usage scenarios around big data and storage.  Some of those DancingDinosaur has already covered, like the City of Honolulu.  Another session, titled All-Flash Everywhere, will probably explain to executives how flash storage radically changes several decades of traditional storage thinking. Again, DancingDinosuar covered it a few weeks back here and also on the Storage Community blog.

Another intriguing topic in this group is Storage Futures. This is being described as: The Next Big Thing in Storage is Software Defined Storage – the inclusion of cost effective, highly automated storage in a Software Define Environment. In the session the presenter will describe the value of this approach, the technologies involved, and the adoption roadmap IBM recommends clients to follow.  This is a great topic, a part of what I describe as Software Defined Everything.  This blogger has been briefed on IBM’s plans in this regard but can’t write or talk publicly until—guess when—IBM Edge 20913. This should be an interesting session.

The second section picks up where Storage Futures left off with Software Defined Networking, another part of my Software Defined Everything but one that is gaining traction today. Another session in this section will look at defending against cyber-threats with security-ready infrastructure and security intelligence in a virtualized world.

Security should attract a crowd of executives; whenever DancingDinosaur talks with executives about cloud computing you can see fear sweep over them.  The cloud, to them, is the Wild West filled with bad guys behind every rock. They may be right, but those same bad guys already are feeding on their on-premise systems. Reputable cloud computing vendors intending to survive are highly attuned to the security challenges. With luck this session will reassure them that they aren’t defenseless.

Have you registered for IBM Edge 2013 yet?  Last year this blogger was shocked at how many people–several thousand–showed up, and this year promises to be even bigger. Overall, IBM Edge 2013 will offer over 140 storage sessions, over 50 PureSystems sessions, more than 50 client case studies, and sessions on big data and analytics along with a full cloud track.  Look for me in the Social Media Lounge at the conference and in the sessions.  You can follow this blogger on Twitter for conference updates @Writer1225 and using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference. And then there is the FREE drink: I’ll buy a drink for the first two people who come up to me and say they read DancingDinosaur.  How’s that for motivation!

zEnterprise vs. Intel Server Farms

How many Intel x86 servers do you need to match the performance of a zEnterprise and at what cost for a given workload? That is the central question every IT manager has to answer.

It is a question that deserves some thought and analysis. Yet often IT managers jump to their decision based on series of gut assumptions that on close analysis are wrong. And the resulting decision more often than not is for the Intel server although an honest assessment of the data in many instances should point the other way. DancingDinosaur has periodically looks at comparative assessments done by IBM. You can find a previous one, lessons from Eagle studies, here.

 The first assumption is that the Intel server is cheaper. But is it? IBM benchmarked a database workload on SQL Server running on Intel x86 and compared it to DB2 on z/OS.  To support 23,000 users, the Intel system required 128 database cores on four HP servers.  The hardware cost $0.34 million and the software cost $1.64 million for a 3-year TCA of $1.98 million. The DB2 system required just 5 cores at a hardware/software combined 3-year TCA of $1.4 million

What should have killed the Intel deal was the software cost, which has to be licensed based on the number of cores. Sure, the commodity hardware was cheap, but the cost of the database licensing drove up the Intel cost. Do IT managers wonder why they need so many Intel cores to support the same number of users they can support with far fewer z cores? Obviously many don’t.

Another area many IT managers overlook is I/O performance and its associated costs. This becomes particularly important as an organization deploys virtual machines.  Increasing the I/O demand on an Intel system uses more of the x86 core for I/O processing, effectively reducing the number of virtual machines that can be deployed per server and raising hardware costs.

The zEnterprise handles I/O differently. It provides 4-16 dedicated system assist processors for the offloading of I/O requests and an I/O subsystem bus speed of 8 GBps.

The z also does well with z/VM for Linux guest workloads. In this case IBM tested three OLTP database production workloads (4 server nodes per cluster), each supporting 6,000 trans/sec, Oracle Enterprise Edition, and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) running on 12 HP DL580 servers (192 cores). This was compared to three Oracle RAC clusters of 4 nodes per cluster with each node as a Linux guest under z/VM . The zEC12 had 27 IFLs. Here the Oracle HP system cost $13.2 million, about twice as much as on the zEC12, $5.7 million. Again, the biggest cost savings came from the need for fewer Oracle licenses due to fewer cores.

The z also does beats Intel servers when running mixed high- and low- priority workloads on the same box. In one example, IBM compared high priority online banking transaction workloads with low priority discretionary workloads.  The workloads running across 3 Intel servers with 40 cores each (120 cores total) cost $13.7 million compared to z/VM on an zEC12 running 32 IFLs, which cost $5.77 million (58% less).

Another comparison demonstrates that core proliferation between Intel and the z is the killer. One large workload test required sixteen 32-way HP Superdome App. Production/Dev/ Test servers and eight 48-way HP Superdome DB Production/Dev/Test for a total of 896 cores. The 5-year TCA came to $180 million. The comparable workload running on a zEC12 41-way production/dev/test system used 41 general purpose processors (38,270 MIPS) with a 5-year TCA of $111 million.

When you look at the things a z can do to keep concurrent operations running that Intel cannot you’d hope non-mainframe IT managers might start to worry. For example, the z handles core sparing transparently; Intel must bring the server down.  The z handles microcode updates while running; Intel can update OS-level drivers but not firmware drivers. Similarly, the z handles memory and bus adapter replacements while running; Intel servers must be brought down to replace either.

Not sure what it will take for the current generation of IT managers to look beyond Intel. Maybe a new business class version of the zEC12 at a stunningly low price. You tell me.

BTW; are you planning to attend IBM Edge 2013 in Las Vegas, Jun 10-14? There will be much there to keep enterprise data center managers occupied.  Overall, IBM Edge 2013 will offer over 140 storage sessions, over 50 PureSystems sessions, more than 50 client case studies, and sessions on big data and analytics along with a full cloud track.  Look for me in the Social Media Lounge at the conference and in the sessions.  You can follow me on Twitter for conference updates@Writer1225.  I’ll be using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference.

EMC World and IBM Edge 2013 Spotlight Mainframe Storage

Two major technology conferences this spring are converging on Las Vegas and each offers session tracks on mainframe storage. EMC World runs today through May 9, and IBM Edge 2013, June 10-14; each will bring enough expert material to divert mainframe storage managers from the gaming tables.

At neither show is the mainframe the primary focus, but considerable material still addresses mainframe storage. For example, EMC World, which opens today offers sessions like:

VMAX Performance: Mainframe Performance with Symmetrix VMAX & Enginuity 5876. Here’s how EMC describes it—Symmetrix VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K running Enginuity 5876 introduce several performance improvements and new features for the Mainframe, which can affect how customers deploy. DancingDinosaur reported on the introduction of the VMAX 40K here last year.

VMAX: What’s New for Mainframe Symmetrix Environments Plus an Update on the EMC & IBM Partnership.  Of particular interest to DancingDinosaur readers may be the details on how EMC develops IBM-compatible technology and EMC’s long-standing working relationship with IBM

DancingDinosaur will miss EMC World and be attending IBM Edge 2013 instead. Please join this blogger at Edge 2013; when not attending a session you can find me where bloggers congregate in the Social Media Lounge.

Here are some of the sessions that look particularly interesting:

IBM z/OS Storage Management Ecosystem Update—provides an overview of IBM’s strategy for managing the z/OS storage ecosystems.  Learn how the strategic z/OS storage management product, OMEGAMON XE for Storage, fits into the strategy and how the rest of the Tivoli z/OS Storage management portfolio works together to address common z/OS storage tasks and problem resolution. The session also promises to include a short review of Tivoli z/VM storage products.

IBM z/OS + DS8K Synergy—offers an overview of the IBM DS8000 architecture and its deep integration with IBM z/OS to deliver performance, high availability, optimization, and manageability. No other storage system has the unique integration with the IBM mainframe, according to IBM.  That becomes particularly apparent when you start looking at Flash storage.

Introduction to the TS7700 Virtualization Engine Grid for the Uninitiated or Those Needing a Refresher—intended to introduce attendees to the IBM TS7700 Virtualization Engine, a virtualized tape solution. This basic level discussion will start by explaining why tape virtualization came about, and then cover basic and advanced concepts, up through the latest enhancements.  If you are not already familiar with virtual tape you don’t want to miss this.

Retention management is an increasingly important and tricky topic these days, particularly as it ties in with compliance and even legal ediscovery. Edge 2013 offers two complementary sessions on retention management.

Untangling Retention Management under DFSMSrmm—DFSMS Removable Media Manager (DFSMSrmm) delivers a wide variety of retention controls for the z/OS tape resources it manages. Often the variety of options and the differences in how they behave can be confusing. The session promises to explain how and why DFSMSrmm does what it does so attendees can make the best decisions for their environment.

DFSMSrmm Best Practices, Features and New Stuff—DFSMS Removable Media Manager (DFSMSrmm) is one of the most regularly enhanced tape management systems in the market. Often, however, new features are overlooked. This session offers an overview of key product features that every DFSMSrmm data center should be taking full advantage of to properly safeguard their environments. In addition, it will detail several little-known product capabilities that can streamline administrator efficiency, allowing more time for other management activities.

Overall, IBM Edge 2013 will offer over 140 storage sessions, over 50 PureSystems sessions, more than 50 client case studies, and sessions on big data and analytics along with a full cloud track.

Full disclosure: this blogger’s trip to Edge 2013 and related DancingDinosaur posts are being underwritten by IBM.  However, the choice of content, ideas, and opinions …even the mention of EMC… are my own. Hope to see you at Edge 2013. Find me in  the Social Media Lounge.

New Ways to Lower System z Costs

The latest System z capacity offerings offer new ways to boost z usage at  lower cost. The offerings were developed jointly with z users in response to their specific business requirements.

The offerings, reflecting IBM’s willingness to be flexible on pricing, enable z users who typically handle operations like development and testing on cheaper x86 platforms to move those operations to the z while getting the additional capacity they would need at a lower cost. In the process, they eliminate the extra steps involved in deploying the finished production system on the z. You can find more info on IBM System z software here.

With the new capacity offerings and other initiatives, IBM is demonstrating its intention to drive down the cost of mainframe computing in a variety of ways. For example, with the System z capacity offering for Cloud, IBM offers the flexibility to increase capacity, then move portions of that incremental capacity within a 12-18 month period. This enables clients to grow before they know exactly where they’ll want to run the work, a welcome sign of flexibility. 

For System z disaster recovery in the cloud, again users gain more flexibility by moving workloads between systems.  For clients who are working aggressively towards business resiliency and disaster recovery, this can be very valuable and removes the restrictions previously out there on the number of tests than can be run.

Specifically, this allows active capacity mobility between zEnterprise primary servers and disaster recovery servers (mirrored data center) for more than just a one-time test.  IBM also offers comparable deals in the form of active multiplex pricing for GDPS Active/Active workloads.  While the DR offering requires all workload moves to the DR box at one time, the active multiplex offering allows fractional workload movement.

And finally, with the System z Test and Development offering, IBM is now allowing for discounts for clients who want do their testing on the platform. Previously, IBM was willing to lower the cost for development, but now, by doing development and test on the platform, it’s making the mainframe more attractive again.

None of this is exactly new. Last June DancingDinosaur reported that IBM was moving in this direction with its System z capacity offering for the cloud.  For more, click here.

IBM also announced new System z software for development, deployment and automation of workloads, described as simple-to-use tools for mainframe development. They start with a new enterprise COBOL compiler that promises significant performance improvements to meet increasingly narrow batch windows organizations face and a new Rational Developer for System z and Rational Developer for Enterprise.

Given increasing demands for new ways to connect the z to mobile activities, IBM also announced enhancements to CICS; specifically the CICS TS feature pack for mobile extension, the IBM Mobile messaging client, and Cognos Mobile on z/OS among others. Organizations have been connecting mobile applications to the z for years using SOA and gateways in one form or another.  These just provide another, possible more efficient way to do it.

After you build the app you need to deploy it. For this IBM announced a new Business Process Manager for z/OS, the Operational Decision Manager for z/OS, and Integration Bus on z/OS (previously called IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS). Organizations also can rapidly deploy Java workloads with the new CICS Transaction Server for z/OS, Value Unit Edition. Finally, Tivoli System Automation on z/OS can provide automated end-to-end deployment and management.

At the same briefing IBM introduced Algar Telecom, a Brazilian telco that offers other services as well. A new z user, Algar consolidated large numbers of Intel servers on a z196 and zBX, an example of z-based hybrid computing.  It offers an interesting experience DancingDinosaur will take up in a later post here along with the experience of a z196 shop that upgraded to a zEC12 to create a z-based production systems core around a slew of Intel blades. Both organizations report good results.

Finally, please note: the IBM Edge Conference 2013 is coming up in Las Vegas, June 10-14. Last year Edge was primarily a storage event. This year there continues to be a large amount of storage material, including considerable new material around System z storage, but it appears IBM has expanded the program beyond storage. DancingDinosaur covered it last year and will begin covering Edge 2013 in a series of posts leading up to the event. Please join me in Las Vegas.  If you register here by 4/28 you can save a few bucks. Look for me there; I’ll be the blogger wearing the Mainframes Rule t-shirt.

Next Generation zEnterprise Developers

Mainframe development keeps getting more complicated.  The latest complication can be seen in Doug Balog’s reference to mobile and social business on the zEnterprise, reported by DancingDinosaur here a few weeks ago. That is what the next generation of z developers face.

Forget talk about shortages of System z talent due to the retirement of mainframe veterans.  The bigger complication comes from need for non-traditional mainframe development skills required to take advantage mobile and social business as well as other recent areas of interest such as big data and analytics. These areas entail combining new skills like JSON, Atom, Rest, Hadoop, Java, SOA, Linux, hybrid computing along with traditional mainframe development skills like CICS and COBOL, z/VM, SQL, VSAM, and IMS. This combination is next to impossible to find in one individual. Even assembling a coherent team encompassing all those skills presents a serious challenge.

The mainframe industry has been scrambling to address this in various ways.  CA Technologies added GUI to its various tools and BMC has similarly modernized its various management and DB2 tools. IBM, of course, has been steadily bolstering the Rational RDz tool set.   RDz is a z/OS Eclipse-based software IDE.  RDz streamlines and refactors z/OS development processes into structured analysis, editing, and testing operations with modern GUI tools, wizards, and menus that, IBM notes, are perfect for new-to the-mainframe twenty- and thirty-something developers, the next generation of z developers.

Compuware brings its mainframe workbench, described as a modernized interactive developer environment that introduces a new graphical user interface for managing mainframe application development activities.  The interactive toolset addresses every phase of the application lifecycle.

Most recently, Micro Focus announced the release of its new Enterprise Developer for IBM zEnterprise.  The product enables customers to optimize all aspects of mainframe application delivery and promises to drive down costs, increase productivity, and accelerate innovation. Specifically, it enables both on- and off-mainframe development, the latter without consuming mainframe resources, to provide a flexible approach to the delivery of new business functions. In addition, it allows full and flexible customization of the IDE to support unique development processes and provides deep integration into mainframe configuration management and tooling for a more comprehensive development environment. It also boasts of improved application quality with measurable improvement in delivery times.  These capabilities together promise faster developer adoption.

Said Greg Lotko, Vice President and Business Line Executive, IBM System z, about the new Micro Focus offering:  We are continually working with our technology partners to help our clients maximize the value in their IBM mainframes, and this latest innovation from Micro Focus is a great example of that commitment.

Behind all of this development innovation is an industry effort to cultivate the next generation of mainframe developers. Using a combination of trusted technology (COBOL and mainframe) and new innovation (zEnterprise, hybrid computing, expert systems, and Eclipse), these new developers; having been raised on GUI and mobile and social, can leverage what they learned growing up to build the multi-platform, multi-device mainframe applications that organizations will need going forward.

As these people come on board as mainframe-enabled developers organizations will have more confidence in continuing to invest in their mainframe software assets, which currently amount to an estimated 200-300 billion lines of source code and may even be growing as mainframes are added in developing markets, considered a growth market by IBM.  It only makes sense to leverage this proven code base than try to replace it.

This was confirmed in a CA Technologies survey of mainframe users a year ago, which found that 1) the mainframe is playing an increasingly strategic role in managing the evolving needs of the enterprise; 2) the machine is viewed as an enabler of innovation as big data and cloud computing transform the face of enterprise IT—now add mobile; and 3) companies are seeking candidates with cross-disciplinary skill sets to fill critical mainframe workforce needs in the new enterprise IT thinking.

Similarly, a recent study by the Standish Group showed that 70 percent of CIOs saw their organizations’ mainframes as having a central and strategic role in their overall business success.  Using the new tools noted above organizations can maximize the value of the mainframe asset and cultivate the next generation mainframe developers.

IBM FlashSystem Remakes Data Center Economics

Yesterday IBM announced the IBM FlashSystem, to drive Flash technology further into the enterprise. The IBM FlashSystem is a line of all-Flash storage appliances based on technology IBM acquired from Texas Memory Systems.

Flash can shorten the response of servers and storage systems to data requests from milliseconds to microseconds – an order of magnitude improvement. And because it is all electronic—nothing mechanical involved—and being delivered cost-efficiently at even petabyte scale, it can remake data center economics, especially for transaction-intensive and IOPS-intensive situations.

For example, the IBM FlashSystem 820 is the size of a pizza box but 20x faster than spinning hard drives and can store up to 24 TB of data.  At the high end, you can assemble a 1 PB FlashSystem that fits in one rack and delivers 22 million IOs per second (IOPS). IBM calculates you would need 630 racks of high capacity hard disk drives or 315 racks of performance optimized disk to generate an equal amount of IOPS.

Mainframe shops already are familiar with Flash mainly in the form of cache and SSD. The zEnterprise makes extensive use of cache to boost performance and to ensure reliability and availability. The DS8000 storage line has been SSD capable for several years.  The IBM System Storage DS8870, for example, comes equipped with IBM POWER7- based controllers. In a tiered storage environment it can automatically optimize the use of each storage tier, particularly SSD and now Flash, through the free IBM Easy Tier capability.

The IBM FlashSystem changes data center economics. One cloud provider reported deploying 5TB in 3.5 inches of rack space compared to deploying 1300 hard disks to achieve 400k IOPS and it did so at one-tenth the cost.  Overall, Wikibon reports an all Flash approach will lower total system costs by 30%; that’s $4.9 million for all flash compared to $7.1 million for hard disk.  Specifically, it reduced software license costs 38%, required 17% few servers, and lowered environmental costs by 74% and operational support costs by 35%.  At the same time it boosted storage utilization by 50% while reducing maintenance and simplifying management with corresponding labor savings.

For data center managers, this runs counter to everything they learned about the cost of storage. Traditional storage economics starts with the cost of hard disk storage being substantially less than the cost of SSD or Flash on a $/GB basis. Organizations could justify SSD, however, by using it in small amounts to tap its sizeable cost/IOPS advantage for IOPS-intensive workloads.

IBM reversed traditional storage economics with the new FlashSystem storage by adopting a different approach to understanding the storage investment. Forget about cost/GB; even forget about cost/IOPS. Instead, focus on a systems perspective by considering all the costs involved in the total solution, from energy consumption to hard disk failure to labor to the cost of server software licensing. Then factor in the economic benefits of handling more transactions faster, more responsive systems, faster analytics, and more.

As reported in PC World, Steve Mills, IBM Senior Vice President put it this way at the introduction:  Right now, generic hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. An enterprise hard drive will cost about $4 per gigabyte, and a high-performance hard drive will run about $6 per gigabyte. If an organization stripes its data across more disks for better performance, the cost goes up to about $10 per gigabyte. In some cases, where performance is critical, hard-drive costs can skyrocket to $30 or $50 per gigabyte. A solid state disk from IBM runs about $10 per gigabyte and can be filled to capacity, so they actually are less expensive in many cases.

And Mills was only talking from the cost/GB perspective; when you take a full systems perspective Flash looks even better. Said Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, Systems Storage, IBM Systems & Technology Group in the announcement: “The economics and performance of Flash are at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications.” But this actually goes beyond just transactions. Also look at big data analytics workloads, technical computing, and any other IOPS-intensive work.

As far as z data centers go, the IBM FlashSystem appliances, aimed primarily at open systems, are off in the future. However, mainframe data centers can continue to leverage SSD and Flash as they have and even expand it since it is increasingly easier to justify the investment, especially with an IBM enterprise-class SSD running about $10 per gigabyte.  IBM further extends the value of SSD/Flash through the use of Real-time Compression and thin provisioning, which stretches your bang for the buck.  So, using your workloads as the guide start thinking about cost-effectively working more SSD/Flash into your data center to lower costs.

IBM Big Data Innovations Heading to System z

Earlier this week IBM announced new technologies intended to help companies and governments tackle Big Data by making it simpler, faster and more economical to analyze massive amounts of data. Its latest innovations, IBM suggested, would drive reporting and analytics results as much as 25 times faster.

The biggest of IBM’s innovations is BLU Acceleration, targeted initially for DB2. It combines a number of techniques to dramatically improve analytical performance and simplify administration. A second innovation, referred to as the enhanced Big Data Platform, improves the use and performance of the InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams products. Finally, it announced the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise.

BLU Acceleration is the most innovative of the announcements, probably a bona fide industry first, although others, notably Oracle, are scrambling to do something similar. BLU Acceleration enables much faster access to information by extending the capabilities of in-memory systems. It allows the loading of data into RAM instead of residing on hard disks for faster performance and dynamically moves unused data to storage.  It even works, according to IBM, when data sets exceed the size of the memory.

Another innovation included in BLU Acceleration is data skipping, which allows the system to skip over irrelevant data that doesn’t need to be analyzed, such as duplicate information. Other innovations include the ability to analyze data in parallel across different processors; the ability to analyze data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling; and actionable compression, where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed because the data order has been preserved.   Finally, it leverages parallel vector processing, which enables multi-core and SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) parallelism.

During testing, IBM reported, some queries in a typical analytics workload ran more than 1000x faster when using the combined innovations of BLU Acceleration. It also resulted in 10x storage space savings during beta tests. BLU acceleration will be used first in DB2 10.5 and Informix 12.1 TimeSeries for reporting and analytics. It will be extended for other data workloads and to other products in the future.

BLU Acceleration promises to be as easy to use as load-and-go.  BLU tables coexist with traditional row tables; using the same schema, storage, and memory. You can query any combination of row or BLU (columnar) tables, and IBM assures easy conversion of conventional tables to BLU tables.

DancingDinosaur likes seeing the System z included as an integral part of the BLU Acceleration program.  The z has been a DB2 workhorse and apparently will continue to be as organizations move into the emerging era of big data analytics. On top of its vast processing power and capacity, the z brings its unmatched quality of service.

Specifically, IBM has called out the z for:

• InfoSphere BigInsights via the zEnterprise zBX for data exploration and online archiving
• IDAA (in-memory Netezza technology) for reporting and analytics as well as operational analytics
• DB2 for SQL and NoSQL transactions with enhanced Hadoop integration in DB2 11 (beta)
• IMS for highest performance transactions with enhanced Hadoop integration  in IMS 13 (beta)

Of course, the zEnterprise is a full player in hybrid computing through the zBX so zEnterprise shops have a few options to tap when they want to leverage BLU Accelerator and IBM’s other big data innovations.

Finally, IBM announced the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, which should simplify and streamline the deployment of Hadoop in the enterprise. Hadoop has become the de facto open systems approach to organizing and analyzing vast amounts of unstructured as well as structured data, such as posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, online transaction records, and cell phone location data. The problem with Hadoop is that it is not intuitive for conventional relational DBMS staff and IT. Vendors everywhere are scrambling to overlay a familiar SQL approach on Hadoop’s map/reduce method.

The new IBM PureData System for Hadoop promises to reduce from weeks to minutes the ramp-up time organizations need to adopt enterprise-class Hadoop technology with powerful, easy-to-use analytic tools and visualization for both business analysts and data scientists. It also provides enhanced big data tools for management, monitoring, development, and integration with many more enterprise systems.  The product represents the next step forward in IBM’s overall strategy to deliver a family of systems with built-in expertise that leverages its decades of experience in reducing the cost and complexity associated with information technology.