SHARE Attracts Mainframers to Providence

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty keynoted the 4-day SHARE conference, which opened in Providence, RI, on Monday. DancingDinosaur didn’t arrive until Tuesday—sorry Ginni, missed your speech–but found the event packed with sessions and a lively vendor expo.

10-core z14 processor

The session on making the business case for Linux on z and IBM Linux One proved interesting. Dancing Dinosaur has covered this topic multiple times. The main point: Linux on the z drives greater cost efficiency when compared with Linux on distributed servers.  Just add up the number of servers and admins you will need to host, say, a few thousand Linux instances.  Other points the speaker, an IBMer named Eduardo Olivera, were security, even without the z14’s pervasive encryption, which is coming to Linux on z, and high availability. It also brings non-disruptive scalability as well as delivering excellent Linux performance on the z. Linux on LinuxOne, he added, costs less since the core that runs Linux costs less than cores running z/OS.

Multiple instances of Linux benefits from a hypervisor as an added layer. On LinuxOne the primary hypervisor is KVM.

Another session was titled IBM MQ and the IBM Integration Bus for Docker Container and Cloud environments and led by Mark Taylor and David Coles. With the advent of the z14 and its new container pricing, containers will become a bigger topic going forward. DancingDinosaur covered container pricing a couple of weeks ago here with more coming in upcoming posts. Suffice for now that there is more in the z world than Docker containers.

Most of the session focused on MQ, which is IBM’s message hub. MQ essentially decouples applications and systems, which opens a range of possibilities. For starters, MQ v9 works with IBM’s Bluemix and has been simplified through the availability of pre-configured default and templates. According to Taylor there is almost no situation in which, with a little creativity, you cannot deploy MQ to advantage. IBM, he suggested, is preparing to offer MQ as a hosted service (MQaaS) through the IBM cloud. In that case, MQ will become considerably easier, especially for mainframe novices.

Rocket hosted an interesting session titled the API Revolution on Z—unlock your mainframe for accelerated digital transformation. In effect, Rocket laid out the business case for IBM z/OS Connect and went on to describe how it augments the IBM product with connections to more obscure products, like Adabas, and different ways data sets are organized, such as physically sequential, indexed sequential, and others.

Driving the need for APIs, RESTful and others, coincides with the fading away of data warehouses. Until recently, organizations created large data warehouses in which they parked data for analytics.  Today, if an organization wants to be competitive, it needs to access the data where it resides in, at the least, near real time and in its native form. Organizations don’t have the time to transform or normalize the data before analyzing it.

Instead, applications need to grab the latest data through an API and analyze it in whatever format it takes—SQL, JSON, NoSQL, SMF, basically anything, on the spot through Spark or something even faster. And Rocket wasn’t talking about data that was read-only; the data has to be fully transaction compliant.

Brocade hosted an interesting session titled Data Center Modernization for Mainframe Environments. DancingDinosaur has sat through many mainframe modernization presentations and they always focus on something different. Sometimes they focus on managing software deployment to minimize peak hourly charges. Other times the modernization strategy focuses on storage. Since this was Brocade’s session mainframe modernization focused on the network and the switches to optimize packet speed.

This is becoming increasingly important as flash storage gets coupled with really fast, highly optimized servers that easily saturate an older network design. Brocade’s latest Gen6 Directors promise to solve the problem, at least until the next generation of even faster flash and server processors arrive. Remember, the new z14 has a 10-core, 5.2 GHz processor that has been optimized at more levels than we can track.

For Brocade modernization comes down to chasing anything that impact latency. To modernize your mainframe environment just identify all the little things that add latency. It’s not just about buying a bigger pipe or faster switch; it might require cleaning dirt from fiber optic cables that add to latency in barely discernible increments.

But maybe the biggest delight for many at SHARE on Tuesday was the lobster and shellfish served during the vendor expo. For over an hour everyone feasted on lobster rolls and other shellfish. Unfortunately, DancingDinosaur is allergic to lobster.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Join Me at Share in Providence

Share runs all week but DancingDinosaur plans to be there on Tues., 8/8. Share is happening at the Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence, RI, August 6–11, 2017. Get details at Share.org.  The keynote looks interesting that day: As Share describes it: Security and regulatory compliance are concerns that impact every professional within your IT organization.

In the Tuesday Keynote presentation at SHARE Providence, expert panelists will offer their perspectives on how various roles are specifically impacted by security, and what areas you should be most concerned about in your own roles. Listen to your peers share their insights in a series of TED-style Talks, starting with David Hayes of the Government Accountability Office, who will focus on common compliance and risk frameworks. Stu Henderson of Henderson Consulting will discuss organizational values and how those interacting with the systems are part of the overall control environment, followed by Simon Dodge of Wells Fargo providing a look at proactive activities in the organization that are important for staying ahead of threats and reducing the need to play catch-up when the auditors arrive. In the final talk of the morning, emerging cyber security threats will be discussed by Buzz Woeckener of Nationwide Insurance, along with tips on how to be prepared. At the conclusion of their presentations, the panelists will address audience questions on the topics of security and compliance.

You’ll find me wandering around the sessions and the expo. Will be the guy wearing the Boston hat.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

New Software Pricing for IBM Z

One of the often overlooked benefits of the introduction of a new mainframe like the Z is cost savings. Even though the machine may cost more, the cost of the performance and capabilities it delivers typically cost less on a per unit basis. In the case of the new Z, it’s not just a modest drop in price/performance. With the new Z, IBM announced, three new Container Pricing models for IBM Z, providing greatly simplified software pricing that promises flexible deployment with competitive economics vs. public clouds and on-premises x86 environments.

Working on the new IBM Z

Here are the three biggest software pricing changes:

• Predictable and Transparent Container Pricing—providing organizations greatly simplified software pricing that combines flexible deployment with competitive economics vs. public clouds and on-premises x86 environments. To IBM, a container can be any address space, however large and small. You can have any number of containers. “Container Pricing provides collocated workloads with line-of-sight pricing to a solution,” explained Ray Jones, VP, IBM Z Software and Hybrid Cloud. With container pricing, Jones continued, “the client determines where to deploy using WLM, z/OS and SCRT do the rest.”
• Application dev and test—highly competitive stand-alone pricing for z/OS based development and test workloads. Organizations can increase their DevTest capacity up to 3 times at no additional MLC cost. This will be based on the organization’s existing DevTest workload size. Or a company can choose the multiplier it wants and set the reference point for both MLC and OTC software.
• Payment systems pricing are based on the business metric of payments volume a bank processes, not the available capacity. This gives organizations much greater flexibility to innovate affordably in a competitive environment, particularly in the fast-growing Instant Payment segment. To use the new per payment pricing, Jones added, up front licensing of IBM Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) software is required.

The Container Pricing options are designed to give clients the predictability and transparency they require for their business. The pricing models are scalable both within and across logical partitions (LPARs) and deliver greatly enhanced metering, capping and billing capabilities. Container Pricing for IBM Z is planned to be available by year-end 2017 and enabled in z/OS V2.2 and z/OS V2.3

Jones introduced the software discounts by reiterating that this was focused on software container pricing for IBM z and promised that there will be a technology software benefit with z14 as there was with the z13. IBM, he added, will offer a way to migrate to the new pricing, “This is a beginning of a new beginning. Clearly as we go forward we want to expand what’s applicable to container pricing.” His clear implication: IBM is intent on expanding the discounting it started when, several years ago, it introduced discounts for mobile transactions running on the z, which was driving up monthly software cost averages as mobile transaction volume began to skyrocket.

To understand the latest changes you need to appreciate what IBM means by container. This is not just about Docker containers. A container to IBM simply is an address space.  An organization can have multiple containers in a logical partition and have as many containers as it wants and change the size of containers as needed.

The fundamental advantage of IBM’s container pricing is that it enables co-location of workloads to get improved performance and remove latency, thus IBM’s repeated references to line-of-sight pricing. In short, this is about MLC (4hr) pricing. The new pricing eliminates what goes on in container from consideration. The price of container is just that; the price of the container. It won’t impact the 4hr rolling average, resulting in very predictable pricing.

The benefits are straightforward: simplified pricing for qualified solutions and allowance to deploy in the best way. And IBM can price competitively to the customer’s solution; in effect solution-specific pricing. When combined with the new price metric-payments pricing IBM trying to put together a competitive cost/price story. Of course, it is all predicated on the actual prices IBM finally publishes.  Let’s hope they are as competitive as IBM implies.

DancingDinosaur never passes up an opportunity to flog IBM for overpricing its systems and services. From discussions with Jones and other IBM during the pre-launch briefings managers the company may finally understand the need to make the mainframe or z or Z or whatever IBM calls it price-competitive on an operational level today. Low TCO or low cost of IOPS or low cost of QoS is not the same.

This is especially important now. Managers everywhere appear to be waking up to the need transform their mainframe-based businesses, at least in part, by becoming competitive digital businesses. DancingDinosaur never imagined that he would post something referencing the mainframe as a cost-competitive system able to rival x86 systems not just on quality of service but on cost. With the IBM Z the company is talking about competing with an aggressive cost strategy. It’s up to you, paying customers, to force them to deliver.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

New IBM Z Redefines Mainframe and Security and Cloud

By now you have certainly heard of IBM’s latest mainframe, the long-awaited z14, which the company refers to as Z. An announcement of a new mainframe usually doesn’t attract much notice, but maybe this announcement should. Even if you are not a mainframe fan this machine offers a solution that helps everybody—pervasive encryption of all data with no impact on operations or performance and with no need to take much action on your part, except to plug the machine in.

10-core z14 chip

At a time when organizations of all types and in every market segment are under attack from hackers, ransomware, data breaches, and more all data center managers should welcome automatic pervasive encryption. Yet 96% don’t. Of the 9 billion records breached since 2013 only 4% were encrypted! You already know why: encryption is a chore, impacts staff, slows system performance, costs money, and more. You know all the complaints better than DancingDinosaur.

The z14 changes everything from this point going forward. IBM has committed a 4x increase in silicon dedicated to cryptographic algorithms for pervasive encryption. In effect the Z encrypts all data associated with an entire application, cloud service, and database, in flight and at rest, automatically. This amounts to bulk encryption at cloud scale made possible by a massive 7x increase in cryptographic performance over the z13. This is 18x faster than comparable x86 systems and at just five percent of the cost of x86-based solutions.

In truth, it’s better than this. You get this encryption automatically virtually for free. IBM insists it will deliver the z14 at the same price/performance of the z13 or less. The encryption is built into the cost of silicon out of the box. DancingDinosaur has not seen any specific prices yet but you are welcome to scream if IBM doesn’t come through.

You immediately get rid of all the encryption headaches; you don’t have to classify data, manage encryption, or do any of the other chores typically associated with encryption. You just get it, automatically. The z14 also relieves you from managing encryption keys; only IBM Z can protect millions of keys (as well as the process of accessing, generating and recycling them) in tamper-responsive hardware that causes keys to be invalidated at any sign of intrusion and then be restored in safety.

When it comes to security, the z14 truly is a game changer. And it finally will get compliance auditors off your back once they realize how extensive z14 protection is.

IBM downplayed speeds and feeds with the z13 but they’re back with the z14. Specifically, a 5.2 GHz (versus 5.0 GHz IBM z13) is still a bit short of z12, which ran 5.5 GHz. But as with the z13, IBM makes up for it with more memory. The z14 can handle 32 TB of memory. It also includes up to 170 configurable cores (up to 10 per chip) for a total of 1832 MIPS. The L1 and L2 cache is on the core.  The L3 cache also sits on chip and is shared by on-chip cores, and communicates with cores, memory, I/O, and system controller as a single chip module.

Maybe not the richest specs but impressive nonetheless. IBM has been tweaking the box from top to bottom to boost performance. And all the while it will take over end-to-end encryption automatically, including encrypted APIs. Surprisingly, IBM has said nothing about Z’s power consumption but constantly on encrpytion/decryption has to draw more power than, say, the z13. Am waiting to hear what IBM has to say.

This is not just for mainframe jocks. Optimized IBM z/OS Connect technologies make it straightforward for cloud developers to discover and call any IBM Z application or data from a cloud service, or for Z developers to call any cloud service. IBM Z now allows organizations to encrypt these APIs and still run nearly 3x faster than alternatives based on comparable x86 systems.  These speeds and feeds have all been thoroughly documented and detailed at the bottom of the IBM Z press release here.

Will the z14 return the mainframe to positive revenue?  Probably for a few quarters, maybe more if non-mainframe shops want the clear payback of pervasive encryption, although it won’t be an easy transition for them without IBM assistance and incentives.

Next week DancingDinosaur will take up the Z’s three new container pricing models intended to make the Z competitive with public clouds and on-premises x86 environments.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Get a Next-Gen Datacenter with IBM-Nutanix POWER8 System

First announced by IBM on May 16 here, this solution, driven by client demand for a simplified hyperconverged—combined server, network, storage, hardware, software—infrastructure, is designed for data-intensive enterprise workloads.  Aimed for companies increasingly looking for the ease of deployment, use, and management that hyperconverged solutions promise. It is being offered as an integrated hardware and software offering in order to deliver on that expectation.

Music made with IBM servers, storage, and infrastructure

IBM’s new POWER8 hyperconverged solutions enable a public cloud-like experience through on-premises infrastructure with top virtualization and automation capabilities combined with Nutanix’s public and on-premises cloud capabilities. They provide a combination of reliable storage, fast networks, scalability and extremely powerful computing in modular, scalable, manageable building blocks that can be scaled simply by adding nodes when needed.

Over time, IBM suggests a roadmap of offerings that will roll out as more configurations are needed to satisfy client demand and as feature and function are brought into both the IBM Cognitive Systems portfolio and the Nutanix portfolio. Full integration is key to the value proposition of this offering so more roadmap options will be delivered as soon as feature function is delivered and integration testing can be completed.

Here are three immediate things you might do with these systems:

1. Mission-critical workloads, such as databases, large data warehouses, web infrastructure, and mainstream enterprise apps
2. Cloud native workloads, including full stack open source middleware, enterprise databases
   and containers
3. Next generation cognitive workloads, including big data, machine learning, and AI

Note, however, the change in IBM’s pricing strategy. The products will be priced with the goal to remain neutral on total cost of acquisition (TCA) to comparable offerings on x86. In short, IBM promises to be competitive with comparable x86 systems in terms of TCA. This is a significant deviation from IBM’s traditional pricing, but as we have started to see already and will continue to see going forward IBM clearly is ready to play pricing flexibility to win the deals on products it wants to push.

IBM envisions the new hyperconverged systems to bring data-intensive enterprise workloads like EDB Postgres, MongoDB and WebSphere into a simple-to-manage, on-premises cloud environment. Running these complex workloads on IBM Hyperconverged Nutanix POWER8 system can help an enterprise quickly and easily deploy open source databases and web-serving applications in the data center without the complexity of setting up all of the underlying infrastructure plumbing and wrestling with hardware-software integration.

And maybe more to IBM’s ultimate aim, these operational data stores may become the foundational building blocks enterprises will use to build a data center capable of taking on cognitive workloads. These ever-advancing workloads in advanced analytics, machine learning and AI will require the enterprise to seamlessly tap into data already housed on premises. Soon expect IBM to bring new offerings to market through an entire family of hyperconverged systems that will be designed to simply and easily deploy and scale a cognitive cloud infrastructure environment.

Currently, IBM offers two systems: the IBM CS821 and IBM CS822. These servers are the industry’s first hyperconverged solutions that marry Nutanix’s one-click software simplicity and scalability with the proven performance of the IBM POWER architecture, which is designed specifically for data-intensive workloads. The IBM CS822 (the larger of the two offerings) sports 22 POWER8 processor cores. That’s 176 compute threads, with up to 512 GB of memory and 15.36 TB of flash storage in a compact server that meshes seamlessly with simple Nutanix Prism management.

This server runs Nutanix Acropolis with AHV and little endian Linux. If IBM honors its stated pricing policy promise, the cost should be competitive on the total cost of acquisition for comparable offerings on x86. DancingDinosaur is not a lawyer (to his mother’s disappointment), but it looks like there is considerable wiggle room in this promise. IBM Hyperconverged-Nutanix Systems will be released for general availability in Q3 2017. Specific timelines, models, and supported server configurations will be announced at the time of availability.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Latest Compuware Tools Bring Mainframe and DevOps Together

At the end of June Compuware announced the integration of Topaz for Total Test, an automated unit testing tool for COBOL, with Jenkins, SonarQube and Compuware ISPW. Together, the technologies enable enterprises nimbly, easily and efficiently update their core mainframe applications in response to ever-changing business requirements.  This continues the company’s ongoing quarterly releases of updates and modernization of mainframe tools.

The latest enable mainframe legacy technologies to participate in integrated modern DevOps. They allow enterprise IT to better orchestrate changes to mainframe systems of record with changes to systems of engagement—a significant benefit given the fact that customer-facing digital services often rely on code running across multiple platforms, legacy and distributed.

Compuware Topaz for Total Test

The days when a mainframe shop can get by with leisurely updates of their systems, especially their business critical applications, are long gone.  Organizations need to modernize and integrate their tools to deliver the kind of fast response attributed to DevOps.

Of course, successful DevOps, whether mainframe or distributed, is less a matter of tools than of culture, communication, and process.  Still, there’s no doubt that modern, integrated, and context-aware tools along with automation help by speeding the process and reducing mistakes.

Topaz for Total Test appears to cover all the tool bases. It brings together automated unit testing for COBOL with Jenkins, SonarQube, and Compuware ISPW. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration software tool written in the Java for testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base in real time. The real time aspect is critical for DevOps, where speed counts. The software enables developers to find and solve defects in a code base rapidly and to automate testing of their builds. SonarQube (formerly Sonar[1]) is an open source platform for continuous inspection of code quality. Again, error elimination counts.

The problem, as Compuware sees it, comes from mainframe shops’ historical inability to update their business-critical COBOL applications fast enough due to antiquated tools, excessive dependence on specialized expertise, and risk concerns. All these combine to produce long delays in updating code.

The addition of Jenkins and SonarQube along with Compuware’s ISPW source code management and deployment produce a pretty complete DevOps package for mainframes. In addition, Compuware strengthened support for DB2. That support entails new stubbing for DB2 databases, which allows developers to run unit tests without requiring an active connection to a live DB2 database. While Topaz for Total Test can be used to test code that processes all types of mainframe data, its stubbing capability for DB2 but also VSAM and QSAM data types. This makes it easier to create repeatable tests fast. Data stubs are created automatically and do not require re-compiling.

Although much of the world’s business activity still revolves in one way or another around the mainframe, many mainframe shops struggle when it comes to updating those applications to reflect rapidly changing business demands. Typically, they are hampered by manual development and testing processes; ongoing loss of specialized COBOL programming knowledge; and the fear of introducing even the slightest defect into core mainframe systems of record, notes Compuware.

And it gets worse. “Given the abject failure of re-platforming initiatives, large enterprises hoping to avoid digital irrelevance must aggressively modernize their mainframe DevOps practices,” said Rich Ptak of IT analyst firm Ptak Associates in Compuware’s Topaz for Total Test announcement. “Key to the modernization and ‘de-legacing’ of mainframe applications is the adoption of unit testing for COBOL code that is equivalent to and well-integrated with unit testing as practiced across the rest of the enterprise codebase.”

Compuware Topaz for Total Test transforms mainframe application development by automatically breaking COBOL code down into units and creating tests for those logical units. Developers at all skill levels—not just mainframe cowboys but preferably those with distributed and open system skills or even systems novices—can quickly and easily perform unit testing on COBOL code just as they do in Java, PHP and other popular programming languages. In fact, Topaz is actually more advanced than typical Java tools, because it requires no coding and automatically generates default unit test result assertions for developers.  So yes, novices are welcome.

With the recently released integrations and enhancements, Compuware has now delivered mainframe innovations for eleven consecutive quarters. Few mainframe shops even try to do this, not even IBM. This reflects Compuware’s commitment to improving innovation throughput and quality using the latest Agile and DevOps methods.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

IBM Power and z Platforms Show Renewed Excitement

Granted, 20 consecutive quarters of posting negative revenue numbers is enough to get even the most diehard mainframe bigot down. If you ran your life like that your house and your car would have been seized by the bank months ago.

Toward the end of June, however, both z and Power had some good news. First,  a week ago IBM announced that corporate enterprise users ranked the IBM z  enterprise servers as the most reliable hardware platform available on the market today. In its enterprise server category the survey also found that IBM Power Systems achieved the highest levels of reliability and uptime when compared with 14 server hardware options and 11 server hardware virtualization platforms.

IBM links 2 IBM POWER8 with NVIDIA NVLink with 4 NVIDIA Tesla P100 accelerators

The results were compiled and reported by the ITIC 2017 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability survey, which polled 750 organizations worldwide during April/May 2017. Also among the survey finding:

• IBM z Systems Enterprise mainframe class systems, had zero percent incidents of more than four hours of per server/per annum downtime of any hardware platform. Specifically, IBM z Systems mainframe class servers exhibit true mainframe fault tolerance experiencing just 0.96 minutes of minutes of unplanned per server, per annual downtime. That equates to 8 seconds per month of “blink and you miss it,” or 2 seconds of unplanned weekly downtime. This is an improvement over the 1.12 minutes of per server/per annum downtime the z Systems servers recorded in ITIC’s 2016 – 2017 Reliability poll nine months ago.
• IBM Power Systems has the least amount of unplanned downtime, with 2.5 minutes per server/per year of any mainstream Linux server platforms.
• IBM and the Linux operating system distributions were either first or second in every reliability category, including virtualization and security.

The survey also highlighted market reliability trends. For nearly all companies surveyed, having four nines (99.99%) of availability, equating to less than one hour of system downtime per year was a key factor in its decision.

Then consider the increasing costs of downtime. Nearly all survey respondents claimed that one hour of downtime costs them more than $150k, with one-third estimating that the same will cost their business up to $400k.

With so much activity going on 24×7, for an increasing number of businesses, 4 nines of availability is no longer sufficient.  These businesses are adopting carrier levels of availability; 5 nines or 6 nines (or 99.999 to 99.9999 percent) availability, which translates to downtime per year of 30 seconds (6 nines) or 5 minutes (5 nines) of downtime per year.

According to ITIC’s 2016 report: IBM’s z Enterprise mainframe customers reported the least amount of unplanned downtime and the highest percentage of five nines (99.999%) uptime of any server hardware platform.

Just this week, IBM announced that according to results from International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker® (June, 2017) IBM exceeded market growth by 3x compared with the total Linux server market, which grew at 6 percent. The improved performance are the result of success across IBM Power Systems including IBM’s OpenPOWER LC servers and IBM Power Systems running SAP HANA as well as the OpenPOWER-Ready servers developed through the OpenPOWER Foundation.

As IBM explains it: Power Systems market share growth is underpinned by solutions that handle fast growing applications, like the deep learning capabilities within the POWER8 architecture. In addition these are systems that expand IBM’s Linux server portfolio, which have been co-developed with fellow members of the OpenPOWER Foundation

Now all that’s needed is IBM’s sales and marketing teams to translate this into revenue. Between that and the new systems IBM has been hinting at for the past year maybe the consecutive quarterly losses might come to an end this year.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

IBM Resurrects Moore’s Law

Guess Moore’s Law ain’t as dead as we were led to believe. On Jun 5 IBM and Research Alliance partners GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung, along with equipment suppliers announced the development of an industry-first process to build silicon nano sheet transistors that will enable 5nm chips. Previously, IBM announced a 7nm process using a silicon germanium (SiGe) alloy.

As DancingDinosaur wrote in early Oct. 2015, the last z System that conformed to the expectations of Moore’s Law was the zEC12, introduced Aug 2012. IBM could boast then it had the fastest commercial processor available.  The subsequent z13 didn’t match it in processor speed.  The z13 chip runs a 22 nm core at 5 GHz, one-half a GHz slower than the zEC12, which ran its 32nm core at 5.5 GHz. IBM compensated for the slower chip speed by adding more processors throughout the system to boost I/O and other functions and optimizing the box every way possible.

5nm silicon nano-sheet transistors delivers 40% performance gain

By 2015, the z13 delivered about a 10 percent performance bump per core thanks to the latest tweaks in the core design, such as better branch prediction and better pipelining. But even at one-half Ghz slower, the z13 was the first system to process 2.5 billion transactions a day.  Even more importantly for enterprise data centers, z13 transactions are persistent, protected, and auditable from end-to-end, adding assurance as mobile transactions grow to an estimated 40 trillion mobile transactions per day by 2025. The z13 also received and continues to receive praise for its industry leading security ratings as well as its scalability and flexibility.

Just recently Hitachi announced a partnership with IBM to develop a version of the z13 to run its own operating system, VOS3. The resulting z13 will run the next generation of Hitachi’s AP series.

But IBM isn’t back in pursuit of Moore’s Law just to deliver faster traditional mainframe workloads. Rather, the company is being driven by its strategic initiatives, mainly cognitive computing. As IBM explained in the announcement: The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.

Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology. “For business and society to meet the demands of cognitive and cloud computing in the coming years, advancement in semiconductor technology is essential,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Hybrid Cloud, and director, IBM Research in the announcement. “That’s why IBM aggressively pursues new and different architectures and materials that push the limits of this industry, and brings them to market in technologies like mainframes and our cognitive systems.”

Compared to the leading edge 10nm technology available in the market, according to IBM, a nanosheet-based 5nm technology can deliver 40 percent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 percent power savings at matched performance. This improvement enables a significant boost to meeting the future demands of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, virtual reality, and mobile devices.

These may not sound like the workloads you are running on your mainframe now, but systems with these chips are not going to be shipped in the next mainframe either. So, you have a couple of years. The IBM team expects to make progress toward commercializing 7nm in 2018. By the time they start shipping 5nm systems you might be desperate for a machine to run such workloads and others like them.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

IBM Puts Open DBaaS on IBM OpenPOWER LC Servers

Sometimes IBM seems to be thrashing around looking for anything hot that’s selling, and the various NoSQL databases definitely are hot. The interest is driven by DevOps, cloud, and demand for apps fast.

A month or so ago the company took its Power LC server platform to the OpenPOWER Developer Conference in San Francisco where they pitched Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) and a price-performance guarantee: OpenPOWER LC servers designed specifically for Big Data to deliver a 2.0x price-performance advantage over x86 for MongoDB and 1.8x for EDB PostgreSQL 9.5 guaranteed. With organizations seeking any performance advantage, these gains matter.

There are enough caveats that IBM will almost never be called to deliver on the guarantee. So, don’t expect to cash in on this very quickly. As IBM says in the miles of fine print: the company will provide additional performance optimization and tuning services consistent with IBM Best Practices, at no charge.  But the guarantee sounds intriguing. If you try it, please let DancingDinosaur know how it works out.

IBM Power System S822LC for Big Data

BTW, IBM published the price for the S822LC for big data as starting at $6,399.00 USD. Price includes shipping. Linux OS, however, comes for an additional charge.

Surprisingly, IBM is not aiming this primarily to the IBM Cloud. Rather, the company is targeting the private cloud, the on-premises local version. Its Open DBaaS toolkit, according to IBM, provides enterprise clients with a turnkey private cloud solution that pre-integrates an Open Source DB image library, OpenStack-based private cloud, and DBaaS software packages with hardware (servers/storage/network switches/rack) and a single source of support to enable a DBaaS self-service portal for enterprise developers and LOB users to provision MongoDB, Postgres, and others in minutes. But since it is built on OpenStack, it also supports hybrid cloud integration with IBM Cloud offerings via OpenStack APIs.

In terms of cost it seems remarkably reasonable. It comes in four reference configurations. The Starter configuration is ~$80k (US list price) and includes 3 Power 822LC servers, pair of network switches, rack, DBaaS Toolkit software, and IBM Lab Services. Other configurations include Entry, Cloud Scale, and Performance configurations that have been specified for additional compute, storage, and OpenStack control plane nodes along with high-capacity JBOD storage drawers. To make this even easier, each configuration can be customized to meet user requirements. Organizations also can provide their own racks and/or network switches.

Furthermore, the Power 822LC and Power 821LC form the key building blocks for the compute, storage and OpenStack control plane nodes. As a bonus, however, IBM includes the new 11-core Power 822LC, which provides an additional 10-15% performance boost over the 10-core Power 822LC for the same price.

This is a package deal, at least if you want the best price and to deploy it fast. “As the need for new applications to be delivered faster than ever increases in a digital world, developers are turning to modern software development models including DevOps, as-a-Service, and self-service to increase the volume, velocity and variety of business applications,” said Terri Virnig, VP, Power Ecosystem and Strategy at IBM. Open Platform for DBaaS on IBM in the announcement. Power Systems DBaaS package  includes:

• A self-service portal for end users to deploy their choice of the most popular open source community databases including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Neo4j and Apache Cassandra deployable in minutes
• An elastic cloud infrastructure for a highly scalable, automated, economical, and reliable open platform for on-premises, private cloud delivery of DBaaS
• A disk image builder tool for organizations that want to build and deploy their own custom databases to the database image library

An open source, cloud-oriented operations manager with dashboards and tools will help you visualize, control, monitor, and analyze the physical and virtual resources. A turnkey, engineered solution comprised of compute, block and archive storage servers, JBOD disk drawers, OpenStack control plane nodes, and network switches pre-integrated with the open source DBaaS toolkit is available through GitHub here.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Syncsort Drives zSystem and Distributed Data Integration

IBM appears to be so busy pursuing its strategic imperatives—security, blockchain, quantum computing, and cognitive computing—that it seems to have forgotten the daily activities that make up the bread-and-butter of mainframe data centers. Stepping up to fill the gap have been mainframe ISVs like Compuware, Syncsort, Data Kinetics, and a few others.

IBM’s Project DataWorks taps into unstructured data often missed

IBM hasn’t completely ignored this need. For instance, Project DataWorks uses Watson Analytics and natural language processing to analyze and create complex visualizations. Syncsort, on the other hand, latched onto open Apache technologies, starting in the fall of 2015. Back then it introduced a set of tools to facilitate data integration through Apache Kafka and Apache Spark, two of the most active Big Data open source projects for handling real-time, large-scale data processing, feeds, and analytics.

Syncsort’s primary integration vehicle then revolved around the Intelligent Execution capabilities of its DMX data integration product suite with Apache Spark. Intelligent Execution allows users to visually design data transformations once and then run them anywhere – across Hadoop, MapReduce, Spark, Linux, Windows, or Unix, both on premise or in the cloud.

Since then Syncsort, in March, announced another big data integration solution. This time its DMX-h, is now integrated with Cloudera Director, enabling organizations to easily deploy DMX-h along with Cloudera Enterprise on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. By deploying DMX-h with CDH, Syncsort explained, organizations can quickly pull data into new, ready-to-work clusters in the cloud. This accelerates how quickly they can take advantage of big data cloud benefits, including cost savings and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) delivery.

A month before that, this past February, Syncsort introduced new enhancements in its Big Data integration solution by again deploying DMX-h to deliver integrated workflow capabilities and Spark 2.0 integration, which simplifies Hadoop and Spark application development, effectively enabling mainframe data centers to extract maximum value from their data assets.

In addition, Syncsort brought new integrated workflow capabilities and Spark 2.0 integration to simplify Hadoop and Spark application development. It lets data centers tap value from their enterprise data assets regardless of where it resides, whether on the mainframe, in distributed systems, or in the cloud.

Syncsort’s new integrated workflow capability also gives organizations a simpler, more flexible way to create and manage their data pipelines. This is done through the company’s design-once, deploy-anywhere architecture with support for Apache Spark 2.0, which makes it easy for organizations to take advantage of the benefits of Spark 2.0 and integrated workflow without spending time and resources redeveloping their jobs.

Assembling such an end-to-end data pipeline can be time-consuming and complicated, with various workloads executed on multiple platforms, all of which need to be orchestrated and kept up to date. Delays in such complicated development, however, can prevent organizations from getting the timely insights they need for effective decision-making.

Enter Syncsort’s Integrated Workflow, which helps organizations manage various workloads, such as batch ETL on large repositories of historical data. This can be done by referencing business rules during data ingest in a single workflow, in effect simplifying and speeding development of the entire data pipeline, from accessing critical enterprise data, to transforming that data, and ultimately analyzing it for business insights.

Finally, in October 2016 Syncsort announced new capabilities in its Ironstream software that allows organizations to access and integrate mainframe log data in real-time to Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI). Further, the integration of Ironstream and Compuware’s Application Audit software deliver the audit data to Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). This integration improves an organization’s ability to detect threats against critical mainframe data, correlate them with related information and events, and satisfy compliance requirements.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.