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.

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.

Oracle’s Tough 3Q and New SPARC Chip

Almost like a good news/bad news joke, Oracle announced dismal financials last week along with the next rev of its SPARC processor. The company clearly is hoping that the new processor will revive its rapidly fading hardware business and pose some sort of challenge to IBM’s zEnterprise and Power Systems.

Hardware systems product revenue was $671 million. That’s sounds good for a quarter until you realize it was down 23% over the previous year. Ouch. Hardware systems support didn’t do much better, falling to $570 million even as Oracle’s hardware maintenance prices continued to climb, noted Timothy Sipples, who writes a blog called Mainframe.  Hardware platforms go through refresh cycles, as DancingDinosaur readers know, but Oracle has been struggling at this with Sun for three years.

Note that these figures include what Oracle calls its engineered systems like Exadata and Exalogic. These types of systems combine Oracle’s Sun hardware with its software in an optimized product. Such systems were expected to provide the synergies necessary to justify the initial Sun acquisition. And maybe they will someday, but Oracle stockholders have to be getting impatient. Along with the engineered systems was Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster.  During that time IBM has been delivering its own highly optimized systems, hybrid systems, a new generation of  HPC systems, and expert-integrated systems.

Oracle’s 3Q report didn’t even mention its storage business, which consists mainly of StorageTek tape products and Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance family.  By comparison, IBM has been advancing its storage offerings with products like Storwize, XIV, Real-time Compression, SSD, and more.

About the only bright spot Oracle could point to was its cloud effort. In the 3Q report it declared: “The Oracle Cloud is the most robust and comprehensive cloud platform available with services at the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and application (SaaS) level. In Q3, our SaaS revenue alone grew well over 100% as lots of new customers adopted our Sales, Service, Marketing and Human Capital Management applications in the Cloud,” according to Oracle President, Mark Hurd. And even here IBM has been busily building out its SmartCloud as-a-service offerings and putting them into a slew of SmarterPlanet initiatives.

From the standpoint of DancingDinosaur readers, who tend to focus on the System z, zEnterprise, and Power Systems, the most interesting part of Oracle’s recent activity is the new SPARC processor, the T5. New T5 servers can have up to eight microprocessors while Oracle’s new M5 system can be configured with up to thirty-two microprocessors. The M5 runs the Oracle database 10 times faster than the M9000 it replaces, according to Oracle. For the record, the top end zEC12 includes 101 cores. The zEC12 chip runs at 5.5 GHz.

Elizabeth Stahl, IBM’s chief technical strategist and benchmark guru, wrote this on her blog about Oracle’s T5 claims: Many of the claims are Oracle’s own benchmarks that are not published and audited. For price claims, Oracle, as they’ve done in the past, only factors in the price of the pizza box – make sure you add in the all-important software and storage. Stahl goes on to directly address Oracle’s benchmark claims here.

DancingDinosaur has been waiting for a rebound of the SPARC platform in the hopes that it might revive the Solaris on z initiative led by David Boyes and others. They actually had it working and at least one serious bank was piloting it. Lack of support from Oracle/Sun and IBM killed it. Solaris on z could have attracted Sun customers to the zEnterprise, mainly those in banking and financial services where Solaris and Sun were strong.  In case you are interested, Oracle still offers Solaris, now Oracle Solaris 11, and touts it as the first cloud OS.

Lessons from IBM Eagle- zEnterprise TCO Analyses

Lessons from IBM Eagle-IBM Systems z  TCO Analyses

A company running an obsolete z890 2-way machine with what amounted to 0.88 processors (332 MIPS) planned a migration to a distributed system consisted of 36 distributed UNIX servers. The production workload consisted of applications, database, testing, development, security, and more.  Five years later, the company was running the same in the 36-server multi-core (41x more cores than the z890) distributed environment only its 4-yearTCO went from $4.9 million to $17.9 million based on an IBM Eagle study.  The lesson, the Eagle team notes: cores drive platform costs in distributed systems.

Then there is the case of a 3500 MIPS shop which budgeted $10 million for a 1-year migration to a distributed environment. Eighteen months into the project, already 6 months late, the company had spent $25 million and only managed to offload 350 MIPS. In addition, it had to increase staff to cover the  over-run, implement steps to replace mainframe automation, had to acquire additional distributed capacity over the initial prediction (to support only 10% of total MIPS offloaded), and had to extend the dual-running period at even more cost due to the schedule overrun. Not surprisingly, the executive sponsor is gone.

If the goal of a migration to the distributed environment is cost savings, the IBM Eagle team has concluded after 3 years of doing such analyses, most migrations are a failure. Read the Eagle FAQ here.

The Eagle TCO team was formed in 2007 and since then reports completing over 300 user studies.  Often its studies are used to determine the best platform among IBM’s various choices for a given set of workloads, usually as part of a Fit for Purpose. In other cases, the Eagle analysis is aimed at enabling a System z shop to avoid a migration to a distributed platform. It also could be used to secure a new opportunity for the z. Since 2007, the team reports that its TCO studies secured wins amounting to over $1.6 billion in revenue.

Along the way, the Eagle team has learned a few lessons.  For example:  re-hosting projects tend to be larger than anticipated. The typical one-year projection will likely turn into a two- or three-year project.

The Eagle team also offers the following tips, which can help existing z shops that aren’t necessarily looking to migrate but just want to minimize costs:

• Update hardware and software; for example one bank upgraded from z/OS 1.6 to 1.8 and reduced each LPAR’s MIPS by 5% (monthly software cost savings paid for the upgrade almost immediately)
• Take advantage of sub-capacity, which may produce free workloads
• Consolidate System z Linux, which invariably saves money; many IT people don’t realize how many Linux virtual servers can run on a z core. (A debate raging on LinkedIn focused on how many virtual instances can run on an IFL with quite a few suggesting a max of 20. The official IBM figure:  consolidate up to 60 distributed cores or more on a single System z core, thousands on a single footprint; a single System z core = an IFL.)
• Changing the database can impact capacity requirements and therefore costs
• Workloads amenable to specialty processors, like the IFL, zIIP, and zAAP, reduce mainframe costs through lower cost/MIPS and fewer general processor cycles
• Consider the  System z Solution Edition (DancingDinosaur has long viewed the Solution Edition program as the best System z  deal going although you absolutely must be able to operate within the strict usage constraints the deal imposes.)

The Eagle team also suggests other things to consider, especially when the initial cost of a distributed platform looks attractive to management. To begin the System z responds flexibly to unforeseen business events; a distributed system may have to be augmented or the deployment re-architected, both of which drive up cost and slow responsiveness.  Also, the cost of adding incremental workloads to System z is less than linear. Similarly, the cost of administrative labor is lower on System z, and the System z cost per unit of work is much lower than with distributed systems.

DancingDinosaur generally is skeptical of TCO analyses from vendors. To be useful the analysis needs context, technical details (components, release levels, and prices), and specific verifiable quantitative results.  In addition, there are soft costs that must be considered.  In the end, the lowest acquisition cost or even the lowest TCO isn’t necessarily the best platform choice for a given situation or workload. Determining the right platform requires both quantifiable analysis and judgment.

zEC12 for Social Business

Given Doug Balog’s comments a couple of weeks ago and reported by DancingDinosaur here it should be no surprise that alongside mobile another high priority non-traditional System z workload would be social business. Of the two, mobile and social, the biggest hurdle for mainframe data center managers to get their heads around may be social, which conjures up images chatty teens.

There are, however, serious business use cases for social, starting with collaboration. And as good a platform as any, maybe better than some even, is the hybrid zEnterprise, particularly the zEC12.  When the lower cost version arrives later this year as expected social business on the z will make that much more sense where cost is an issue.  Those chatty teens, in fact, point to another use case for social business—the ability to galvanize disparate and widespread groups of people into taking action, such as coming out for a product launch event.

What makes the zEC12 an appealing platform for social business is its hybrid computing capabilities through the zBX, its solid security, and its ability to handle multiple diverse workloads at the same time. IBM’s PureSystems, the industry’s other hybrid computing platform, may be an almost equally attractive candidate for social business albeit minus the sheer power and other virtues of the zEnterprise.

There is no doubt that IBM is enamored of the cloud, mobile, social, and big data—the last three clearly non-traditional z workloads. In an announcement at the end of February on cloud-based analytics and mobile initiatives for its global ecosystem the company was quick to trumpet the latest IDC projection on the topic: the IT industry has been transitioning to a new era of computing built on mobile, cloud services, social networking and big data analytics. In 2013, spending will exceed $2.1 trillion, driven by double-digit growth in mobile, cloud, big data and social technologies …

Balog was clearly in synch with industry trends when he began talking up non-traditional workloads for z a few weeks back, including mobile, social, and analytics workloads. The February announcement focused mainly on the Power, PureSystems, and System x platforms but it could just as well been referencing the zEnterprise too.

For social business, collaboration probably will be the first non-traditional social workload to gain traction on the zEnterprise followed closely by customer service.  This blogger has been writing about collaboration in the form of Notes groupware going back to the days of Lotus Development.  Today, Notes has become one of the mainstays of the IBM social business and collaboration toolset in the form of IBM Connections, which the zEnterprise supports through Linux on z and hybrid computing. Now IBM is talking about the next phase of collaboration. It will be driven by social software that enables a smarter workforce and delivers an enhanced customer experience.

For the zEnterprise the key is IBM Collaboration Software that empowers people to connect, collaborate, and innovate while optimizing the way they work. Linux on System z combines the comprehensive collaboration environment with the power of the IBM System z. Lotus Domino on Linux for System z, for instance, has matured into a powerful mail and collaboration platform. IBM reports it can easily scale to support over 10,000 production users on a single System z while reducing operational complexity through System z virtualization and ensuring security.  Meanwhile, Domino server-to-server communications run at memory speed, and admins have a single point of management when clustering within the same zEnterprise server.  In fact, they can manage the entire hybrid computing environment through the Unified Resource Manager.

The zEnterprise plays the role of the underlying social business hardware platform, the place where data resides and is secure and where applications ranging from the capabilities in IBM Connections to messaging, real-time collaboration, analytics, social and web content management, and portals run as an integrated, unified infrastructure.  Alongside your usual CICS and production applications you soon might run applications like Trilog for social project management or Bunchball for gamification, maybe even among the datacenter IT staff to spur it to new levels of efficiency.

For social business, IBM described 2011 as a year of exploration, experimentation, and in some cases innovation.  Both small and large organizations in a variety of verticals globally began to realize the power of bringing social behaviors, processes and platforms behind the firewall. According to a 2011 AIIM survey, over 50% of organizations considered social business to be either an imperative or significant to their business goals.

In 2013, social business will be much bigger still, driven by double-digit growth in mobile, cloud, big data and social technologies. Although these may be non-traditional mainframe workloads z shops need to embrace them or risk becoming irrelevant.

IBM Gets Serious About Mobile

Just last week IBM announced IBM MobileFirst, a multi-product initiative to pull together a comprehensive mobile computing platform.  There was nothing in the announcement specific to the zEnterprise, but IBM has been telegraphing System z involvement in mobile for over a year.

In November of last year DancingDinosaur wrote of the z and all other platforms going mobile. Over a year earlier, DancingDinosaur was writing about  using the z with smartphones. With SOA, Java, Linux, WebSphere, and Lotus running on the z and with data that mobile apps and users want residing on the machine, the zEnterprise should become over time a prime player in enterprise mobile business.

Doug Balog, general manager of IBM’s System z mainframe business, might have had MobileFirst in mind when he said in Computerworld that the next steps IBM is considering include making it easier for customers to run mobile and social networking applications on mainframes.  Such an approach would, for example, benefit banks that want to offer mobile apps but still want the power and resilience of a mainframe behind those apps.

The first mobile workload you see on the zEnterprise, however, will not be Foursquare or some other funky mobile app.  More likely, it will be an operational analytics app dissecting mobile banking transaction data or analyzing the behavior of anyone making purchases through their smartphone.

MobileFirst boasts what IBM describes as the broadest portfolio of mobile offerings covering platform, management, security, and analytics.  In terms of platform, for instance, it currently offers streamlined deployment for private clouds on the PureApplication System. It provides single sign-on across multiple apps on a device, and supports all four of the latest mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry). It can handle native, web, or hybrid app development, promises easy connectivity to existing data and services for mobile usage, and can be deployed on premise or through managed service delivery.

In terms of management and security MobileFirst offers unified management across all devices, making it suitable for BYOD. Similarly, it can secure sensitive data regardless of the device, including the option to remotely wipe corporate data. It also supports DOD-grade encryption and FIPS 140-2 compliance and will grant or deny email access based on device compliance.  It also provides context-aware risk-based access control through IBM Worklight. More security is delivered through IBM Security Access Manager for Mobile and Cloud and IBM AppScan.

As for analytics, MobileFirst will automatically detect customer issues through user and mobile device data. It offers user behavior drill down through high fidelity replay and reporting to analyze the user experience. Finally, it correlates customer behavior with network and application data to determine conversion and retention rates and quantify business impact. It also can capture all activity on a device and link it to backend resources. Recently acquired Tealeaf will play a key role for user analytics and behavior.

As you would expect, in addition to acquisitions IBM is rapidly assembling an ecosystem of mobile players, carriers, and ISVs to build out a complete MobileFirst offering starting with players like AT&T, IBM as a surprising Apple VAR (US only), working with Nokia Siemens Networks to develop the IBM WebSphere Application Service Platform for Networks to run IT apps at the mobile network edge, and a slew of resources for developers. There even is an IBM Academic Initiative for Mobile patterned after the System z Academic Initiative to increase the availability of skilled mobile developers. IBM also is jump starting Mobile First with about 200 of its own applications; mainly old favorites like Cognos and its key middleware.

But MobileFirst isn’t IBM’s only initiative with a mobile component. IBM Connections has had a mobile component since August 2011. Similarly, Lotus Notes Traveler supports Notes mobile users on all the major smartphones through IBM Lotus Domino or Lotus Domino Express deployments, and in the IBM cloud with IBM SmartCloud Notes.  Although they weren’t specifically called out in the MobileFirst briefing IBM assures DancingDinosaur they are included as part of the initiative’s application layer.

From the standpoint of a zEnterprise data center or any enterprise-class data center MobileFirst shouldn’t present a problem. Yes, it will increase the number and frequency of users accessing data handled through the data center and the number of devices they are using. And you’ll be running more data analytics more often. But IBM clearly has put effort into thinking through the critical security challenges of mobile and is providing a broad set of tools to begin addressing them. Sure, there is no RACF for mobile, at least not yet, but if it is needed you can bet there will be.

New Announcements Fuel zEnterprise Rebound

A couple of weeks ago DancingDinosaur looked at the year-end results posted by IBM, with the z, led by the zEC12, leading the gains. Despite some tough quarters earlier in 2012, the System z has been on quite a roll; in 4Q12  it experienced 56% year to year revenue growth, the strongest since 2000.

The numbers look that much when better compared to what had immediately preceded them. In 3Q12, the z was down 19% on revenue (ouch).

The financials prove what long-time IBM watchers know: a new mainframe intro always kicks up the numbers, although it may take a quarter or two. The new machine, the zEC12, launched at the end of August 2012. Historically IBM follows a new mainframe with a business class version about a year after the initial launch, so we can expect a business class version of the zEC12 around August or September. (The z114 was introduced in July 2011, a year after the z196.) You can expect IBM will price it aggressively, as was the z114.

But it wasn’t only the new machine driving the good number.  Since the introduction of hybrid computing in 2010 with the zEnterprise 196, IBM has been doggedly pushing the idea of cloud computing, analytics (big data or otherwise), efficient centralized management, elastic scalability, and mobility. It has steadily brought out tools and optimizations that enhance the z for these kinds of workloads. Today its three main growth initiatives for the z focus on cloud, analytics, and security, which parallel IBM’s overall Smarter Computing thrust.

Optimizations and enhancements, like those announced or previewed earlier this week, will continue to drive the zEnterprise forward. For example, newly enhanced tools like z/OSMF (z/OS Management Facility) ease management of z/OS through a modern, browser-based console for z/OS.

The newest version, z/OSMF Version 2.1, previewed this week, provides intuitive management intended to enable IBM’s Smarter Computing through such capabilities as at-a-glance reports on software service levels and system software assets. New workflow capabilities promise to simplify z/OS configuration tasks and tune them to user roles. It leverages the Liberty profile for WebSphere for z/OS to accelerate deployment and speed time to value. Finally, it includes a REST API for jobs submission, which bridges batch and web-based applications and, in the process, helps bring younger z/OS system programmers up to speed.

Eletrobras Electronuclear, Brazil, the largest generator of electricity in Latin America, turned to z/OSMF for help in cloning its production system to ensure system resilience. As an Eletrobras manager noted: With z/OSMF this cloning process is much easier and can be completed in a matter of a few hours.

Also previewed was z/OS Version 2.1, described by IBM as the Smart Foundation for Smart Computing. z/OS v2.1 brings enhanced security through a new crypto server and support for additional industry security standards.  Enhancements around paging and throughput enable greater scalability while providing optimized performance reporting.  It offers enhanced data serving to fuel analytics for new data-hungry analytic applications as well as optimized data storage and faster file retrieval through an enhanced zFS along with improved FICON management. For management, it includes built in workload optimization, extended management reporting, and continued batch modernization.

IBM also previewed a z/VM upgrade, version 6.3. This adds support for 1TB of real memory and improved performance with HiperDispatch. The z/VM memory will provide better performance for larger virtual machines and reduced LPAR sprawl by allowing up to 4x more VMs per LPAR.  z/VM v6.3 boasts a higher server consolidation ratio with support for more virtual servers than any other platform in a single footprint, according to IBM.

Meanwhile IBM continues to roll out z customer examples at an increasing pace. Bankia, a Spanish banking company, turned to the System z for real-time integration of data to facilitate monitoring and mitigate risk. Vantiv, a leading payment processor based in Cincinnati, turned to the z for its cryptographic coprocessors to secure 2 billion transactions per month.

Marriott, an early zEC12 adopter, uses the machine to centralize its reservations and streamline the selling of rooms through elastic pricing. The University of Florida turned to the z for a scalable and reliable IT infrastructure that could accommodate students accessing and interacting with applications and data through mobile applications.

Already 2013 promises to be an interesting year for z shops. Expect more innovation, optimization, and a new low cost business class machine to accompany the zEC12.