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Is it time to scrap your Big Iron?

Galen Gruman, Information Age

12/04/2006 11:40:47

For 10 years, IT managers have heard the promises: cheap server farms will replace expensive mainframe systems, lowering costs and improving competitive advantage through modern applications. And for 10 years, it hasn't happened.

Vendors are still feeding IT the same sales pitch. This time around, it's coming from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, all companies with vested interests in selling their own boxes and legacy migration tools. Can these modern solutions really deliver on promises first made a decade ago?

As it turns out, the answer is a qualified yes. Distributed server systems can, in fact, replace the mainframe at a lower cost, especially in organisations running lower-end mainframe systems that offer 500 or fewer MIPS (millions of instructions per second) of computational power, according to Forrester Research analyst Phil Murphy.

As an organisation's IT infrastructure scales up, however, the answer is less clear, notes IDC Research Director Steve Josselyn. Some large organisations find the mainframe to be a much more efficient and economical platform, whereas others realise dramatic cost savings by migrating away.

A migration triple play According to Ted Venema, a consultant at legacy modernisation vendor BluePhoenix, when an organisation does decide to move applications from the mainframe, it typically faces three migration challenges: the hardware platform, the database system and the application development language.

The Danish Commerce and Companies Agency (DCCA), which processes business registrations and shares data with the tax agency of Denmark, migrated all three aspects of its mainframe environment in 2005. DCCA's legacy transaction system was based on the Adabas database and the Natural 4GL (fourth-generation language) from Software AG, running on an IBM System 390/MVS mainframe. In a typical month, the agency would run some 800,000 transactions over approximately 2700 applications.

Given the Adabas/Natural platform's 35-year lineage and diminishing market share, DCCA was concerned that its legacy environment would have few support options as time wore on. According to project manager David Graff Nielsen, the agency already had to rely on an outside firm to manage its code. Moreover, DCCA wanted to move to a more Web-enabled transaction environment, which would allow businesses to register and update their information over the Internet -- something the Adabas/Natural platform did not easily support.

So the agency moved its applications onto 16-processor x86 application and database servers running Suse Linux and Oracle 9.2i. The new platform is at least 25 per cent cheaper to operate and maintain, Nielsen says, freeing up money and people for the agency's goal of improving and Web-enabling its services, instead of merely reducing costs.

DCCA hired BluePhoenix to translate roughly 1 million lines of Natural code into Java and convert existing IBM JCL (Job Control Language) code to Korn shell scripts, using automatic tools developed especially for this project. That translated code isn't particularly object-oriented or well-formed, Nielsen says, but it functions well, and most importantly, it's accessible for maintenance and fine-tuning.

The new system uses the network more heavily because of increased traffic between servers and to support 3270 terminal emulation for connections to some outside systems. Nielsen, however, says this was a manageable increase.

Swapping out mainframe hardware, code and databases at the same time introduces a lot of risk. Nielsen says a key factor in ensuring that DCCA's transition ran smoothly was avoidance of translating and changing the code's functionality simultaneously, as had been done in a previous, failed migration effort.

Such changes would introduce too many variables, he says, making it difficult to verify that the new code was correct. By doing the translation first, the agency could rework the translated applications later, optimising them and adding new functionality -- in the meantime it could still run its business using the translated code.

Sabre pushes the limits Sabre Holdings -- parent of the Travelocity online consumer booking service and the Sabre travel reservations and ticketing system, which handles about 40 per cent of worldwide travel reservations -- is in the midst of one of the largest mainframe migrations. Todd Richmond, the company's vice president of enterprise architecture, says Sabre has the world's third-largest implementation of IBM TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) mainframes.

In an effort that began almost six years ago, however, Sabre has migrated most of its domestic booking services to four-way, Opteron-based HP NonStop servers running 64-bit Red Hat Linux and the MySQL database.

Initially, Sabre's IT managers thought they would have to migrate everything to the costly NonStop servers, but in the past year they discovered that they can use standard x86 servers for less-intensive work. Sabre will continue to use NonStop servers for database transactions because they are able to process the 14,000 transactions per second more reliably across large data sets typical of Sabre's environment.

Sabre's road away from the mainframe has not been easy, and the project is still several years from completion. This year, the company encountered unexpected problems in managing its server farms. "It's our No. 1 challenge," Richmond says, adding that Sabre had to build a lot of middleware to replicate the mainframe's end-to-end monitoring and self-management capabilities. "There are more hops now, so we have to be diligent about latency."

Sabre still experiences periods when reliability isn't the same as it was on the mainframe, Richmond says, but it has gained the advantage of much shorter development windows -- perhaps half as long -- owing to the combination of the move away from assembly language and the use of desktop development tools. Richmond's staff has also been able to code functions such as calendar-based flight availability in C++ and Java, which he believes could not have been done using mainframe code.

Richmond says Sabre expects to transition its international and multiroute domestic services before the end of the year. The step will allow the company to retire one of its three TPF datacentres, each of which contains about eight mainframes. During the next 18 months, Richmond expects to migrate Sabre's core passenger itinerary service to the distributed system as well, eliminating a second TPF datacentre.

That will leave only the master transaction database. Richmond thinks he may need to stick with IBM TPF for that one, at least for a while, as HP isn't yet certain it can deliver the TPF-level fault-tolerance that that database needs.

All told, this ambitious, multiyear migration effort costs "a significant percentage" of Sabre's annual $US150 million IT budget, but Richmond says it's well worth it. He says costs are already less than half of what they had been, mostly due to savings in per-transaction charges for the TPF facility.

Small shops the clearest winners The DCCA and Sabre Holdings examples show the longer-term promise of mainframe migration for large IT infrastructures. But according to Forrester's Phil Murphy, smaller shops -- especially those that use their mainframes primarily as application servers -- can make the best case for migration today. These small-scale mainframe environments are typically less complex than one like Sabre's, for example, yet they still cost significantly more than equivalent distributed systems.

Vestcom, a company that prints and distributes financial statements on behalf of banks and brokerages, is a prime example. A quarter of its IT budget went to pay for hosted services on an IBM System/370 mainframe running VMS, which provided about 150 MIPS of computing power.

Vestcom used the mainframe to download huge quantities of data, apply various formatting and calculation rules, then create and print the statements. But as revenues plummeted following the dotcom crash and a series of accounting scandals, the company needed to lower costs quickly. Vestcom CIO Joe Mislinski says the mainframe was an easy target.

Mislinski hired Micro Focus to port Vestcom's Cobol code to a quad-processor x86 server. Sticking with Cobol as its application language allowed Vestcom to reduce the number of variables in the transition, but some things just didn't translate.

Case in point: The mainframe could handle very large jobs and recover at any point in case of printer failure. In the new environment, however, tasks were distributed as several parallel sub-jobs, each going to independent printers. If a printer failed, there was no master job image that the software could use to recover from the interruption point.

"But none of this was insurmountable," Mislinski says. Vestcom ended up creating its own management tools to track the status of each sub-job on each printer, making it possible to reconstruct job status in case of failure at any point.

IDC analyst Josselyn notes that transitions away from the mainframe typically encounter such issues, as job management and recovery were solved in the mainframe world long ago and are now often taken for granted. Vestcom was helped by the fact that it found a hosted-services vendor that supported both the mainframe and distributed-system environments. That way, if the migration didn't work it would still have a backup option.

Vestcom spent $1 million on its mainframe migration, which Mislinski says he'll recoup in two years, based on operational savings. The modern PC interface also enables his operations staff to respond to customer requests in just half the time it took previously, he estimates. Plus, having the code on a Windows platform means his staff can take advantage of visual development environments. It also means his Cobol programmers are now working in the same environment as his C# coders, so they can cross-train each other.

No mass exodus Despite these companies' successes, migrating away from the mainframe is expensive and risky for most organisations. That's why IDC and Forrester Research see real interest in less than 5 per cent of enterprises surveyed. It's also why IBM still gets nearly $5 billion a year in zSeries mainframe sales, notes IDC's Josselyn. He says the attitude he encounters most from IT is, "If it's not broken, why fix it?"

Josselyn says IBM has adjusted some of its licensing fees to address the issue of high licensing costs. And, Forrester's Murphy advises, even users of orphaned mainframe technology -- languages such as PL/I or hardware such as ICL's or Bull's -- can still modernise their mainframe technology, rather than dump it, by deploying Cobol, C++, and Java applications on Unix partitions. That strategy at least will let IT rationalise its environment and make any later transition to distributed systems easier.

Also, although the desire to move from legacy programming languages with a dwindling supply of developers is a common secondary motivation for mainframe migration, both Murphy and Josselyn note that Cobol developers' salaries have not increased in recent years, indicating no shortage.

Meanwhile, however, system vendors have dramatically improved the reliability and scalability of distributed systems to the point that enterprises can consider x86- and RISC-based servers running variants of Unix, Linux, or Windows for mission-critical applications.

Josselyn says the area in which these platforms still have a disadvantage is in management, because workload, latency, and data management can become difficult as you scale to hundreds of servers. Murphy suggests though, that this situation may improve in the next several years, as vendors deliver better tools and as IT staffs learn to run the systems the mainframe way, using techniques such as virtualisation.

Enterprises with small mainframes or those that use them primarily as application servers -- the Vestcoms of the world -- are the most likely to begin wholesale migration to other platforms. Larger organisations are more likely to off-load some services and reduce the variety of mainframe systems in their portfolios while still taking full advantage of their available mainframe MIPS to keep per-transaction costs down, says Mike Gilbert, vice president of marketing at Micro Focus.

The first step is to decide which kind of organisation you are, then to really think through what should continue to run on the mainframe and what should be migrated elsewhere. The good news is that the time is ripe to finally make that migration happen. The Big Iron Age is by no means over, but the first signs of the Distributed Age are definitely here.

Sidebar

When mainframes make sense

For some companies, the costs and challenges of migration make sticking with Big Iron a no-brainer

Not everyone sees the mainframe as a relic of the past. In 1996, motor manufacturer Baldor Electric, beguiled by promises of lower costs and the desire to move to the SAP platform for all its CRM and ERP transactions, left the mainframe in favour of a Windows environment. According to Mark Shackelford, Baldor's IS director, the company was very unhappy with the results.

To serve Baldor's 50 offices, the company needed a capacity of about 1300 MIPS (millions of instructions per second), which would have meant hundreds of Windows servers. The pilot Windows system was not reliable at that scale, so Baldor moved to RISC-based Unix servers. That helped, but it still didn't deliver the mainframes reliability. IT costs began to rise, Shackelford says, jumping from 1 per cent of sales to 1.7 and was on track to hit 2 per cent.

So over 2005, Baldor dumped its Windows and Unix servers, consolidating everything onto one IBM zSeries 990 mainframe with 24 Linux and z/OS partitions. Shackelford says IT costs have gone back to 1 per cent of sales, and backup windows that took seven hours under the distributed system now take seven minutes.

Shackelford says IBM's high discount on SAP transaction processing plays a huge role in keeping his overall costs down. He says he pays about 15 per cent of the cost of more traditional CICS and IMS applications, and acknowledges that he might have pursued a different strategy without the discount.

California's Employment Development Department (EDD), which handles unemployment claims and job training, also explored migrating away from the mainframe. EDD deputy IT director Dale Jablonsky, however, says migrating its thousands of applications and systems would have cost the agency $2 billion and taken 20 or more years.

The agency's TCO (total cost of ownership) analysis showed that mainframe systems are typically no more -- and sometimes less -- expensive than the distributed systems that can handle EDD's scale of processing. The agency processes roughly 5 million transactions each day, not counting "a ton of queries on DB2", Jablonsky says.

Still, EDD is modernising its mainframe systems; deploying Web services and Attachmate WRQ software to simplify the interface for its 7000 users; migrating some applications off the mainframe that aren't part of the core transaction system; and off-loading some databases to eight-way Unix data servers on a SAN. Jablonsky says mainframes and distributed servers all have their place in his environment, based on their relative strengths and costs.

Dear IT graduate, just one word -- mainframes

Mainframes are once again gaining traction in some quarters, but finding young mainframe talent can be difficult By China Martens

Imagine today's computer science students experiencing the kind of cocktail party thrown for Benjamin Braddock by his parents in the 1967 movie "The Graduate". As the students wonder about what the future may hold, various older figures sidle up with one-word suggestions about possible careers. "Java", "Linux" and "Internet" you'd expect to hear whispered, but "mainframes?" Not so much.

"The mainframe has had one of the worst PR campaigns of the last 15 years," said mainframe analyst Mike Kahn, managing director of research firm The Clipper Group. "In the mid-90s, the mainframe was declared dead by the industry and that wasn't so far from the truth."

The mainframe's value proposition was completely out of sync with what was going on in the mid-90s as companies embraced PCs and decentralised their business operations, Kahn points out. Today, however, many organisations are looking once more at recentralising their IT functions, so the mainframe is swinging back into favour in some quarters.

Opportunities in big iron in the Western world are also on the rise as companies look to replace the staff who've been tending the computer behemoths and are now heading for retirement. At the same time, firms in China and parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere have recently purchased or are looking to invest in mainframes as they beef up their computing power.

Through work with educational institutions and corporations and under the banner of its Academic Initiative, IBM has committed to having 20,000 mainframe-trained professionals in the global market by 2010. Big Blue hopes to double the number of universities and colleges around the world signing up for its zSeries mainframe courses from last month's 150 to 300 by the end of this year. Of course, it's no altruistic gesture. If you factor in sales of associated software and storage, analysts estimate that IBM's mainframe business generates around 25 per cent of the company's revenue.

"It's not an issue hiring people with mainframe skillsets, but we are having difficulty in finding young people [with those skills], said Murray McBain, vice president of technology at the Royal Bank of Canada, an industry sponsor of the IBM mainframe program. He has been working with the faculty at Mohawk College, one of the Canadian educational institutions offering the IBM course in big iron.

When addressing computer science students at Mohawk, the first thing McBain did was to bring them up to date on mainframes and their role in today's computing world. "When we talked about Java, SOA (service-oriented architecture), and multiple operating systems, you could see it clicking," he said. "They weren't falling asleep on us, we were using terms they understood."

When he visited Mohawk, McBain took three of his senior managers with him, each with between 15 and 25 years of experience working with mainframes so that the students could appreciate that "real people are still working on mainframes", he said. Next up will be taking the experience he's had at Mohawk and replicating it with other Canadian schools, he said. McBain believes IBM's message about why students might consider studying mainframes becomes much more powerful when the vendor visits universities together with one or more of its customers who use the zSeries machines. "We just want to make sure that people are aware of the opportunities, how big and wide they are," McBain said. "Ninety five per cent of the Fortune 1000 are still running a good portion of their businesses on mainframes and probably 75 to 80 per cent of the Royal Bank's business is running on mainframes."

Not having sufficient mainframe experts is only part of a larger issue, according to analyst Kahn. "There are an awful lot of people graduating with degrees in computer science who really aren't learning anything about enterprise computing," he said. "They don't understand large systems thinking."

Today's computer science graduates have grown up in a PC world as have many of their teachers. "Classes and projects tend to be measured in days and weeks, not weeks and months," Kahn said. "They really don't work on any big projects."

When looking at the success of IBM's mainframe program, "You have to ask where is it sticking to the wall?" Kahn said. He believes the sticky places are community colleges and night schools, which are more focused on turning out employable students rather than some of the more elite academic institutions that may more rigidly adhere to the requirements of the ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). "The more journeyman colleges are more focused on large systems thinking," he noted. Additionally, some universities reserve mainframes as a subject for study with graduates with at least a master's degree with computer science, according to Kahn.

It can be easier working with smaller schools and community colleges, notes Mike Bliss, program manager for IBM's Academic Initiative and Big Blue's director of eServer zSeries technical support and marketing. "They can get a class [up and running] quicker," he said. "They have less bureaucracy and are less specialised."

As part of his research, Kahn interviewed many computer science students. "They were all talking about job security and getting a good job and not being laid off in three months," he said. "There is a lot of security in large systems. Mainframes is a place where you're needed." Students' initial take when they heard the word "mainframe" was first to wonder if such computers were still around any more and second to question their relevance to today's mainstream computing, according to Kahn. After being exposed to big iron and large systems thinking, some students' reaction was to note a significant disconnect from what they'd been taught in school and what they were discovering in the real world, he added.

Trying to encourage more students to learn about mainframes is all well and good, but there's a much more serious problem in US and Canadian universities. The number of students signing up to study computer science is plummeting with Kahn estimating that the rate has fallen by 40 per cent over the last three years.

He even came across an elite institution he declined to name that has resorted to lowering the GPA (grade point average) requirements for its computer science course as a way to raise enrolment numbers. "The dotcom bust is responsible for a lot of it and students reading about outsourcing in the papers every day," said Kahn. "And, oh, by the way, it's [computer science is] really hard. Students are looking for what's fun and not hard."

Lying at the root of the problem is that many students abandon maths or science way before they get to college, back in the ninth or 10th grade, according to Kahn.

Like Kahn, McBain at the Royal Bank of Canada is also concerned about the general drop-off in students enrolled to study computer science. When he asked professors at Mohawk what students were studying instead of IT, the answer tended to be biomedicine and forensics. "It's a bit of the CSI syndrome," McBain quipped, referring to the popular TV series set in Las Vegas, Miami and New York that focuses on the work of three fictional crime scene investigation teams. "We need to create the same syndrome for IT," he added, so that students have more dynamic associations with careers in computer science. Thinking aloud, McBain wondered if companies coming together to form an industry consortium might help encourage students to study IT. Such a body could visit high schools and universities and lay out the potential job opportunities in IT.

Universities in the mainframe program are asking IBM how the school can define terms relating to mainframe computing to aid students' job searching, according to Susan LeVangia, curriculum manager for the company's Academic Initiative zSeries program and senior software engineer.

Every relationship IBM has with an educational institution is different. Some take all the IBM teaching materials, some take part and others use the tools from Big Blue as a basis for building their own mainframe course curriculum, according to the company's Bliss. The IBM teaching materials mostly consist of PowerPoint modules with 20 to 30 slides in each module and include speaker notes and lab exercises, LeVangia said.

IBM has established mainframe hubs that universities can log into for mainframe access if they don't have their own big iron. The US hub is in New York, and can be accessed by any university around the world. Thirty to 40 universities are utilising the US hub at any one time, according to Bliss. IBM has other mainframe hubs in Brazil, China, Eastern Europe and India, and is looking at adding more hubs in Europe, he said.

[Sidebar]: Mainframes, computer science thriving in Poland Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, has its own mainframe. The school purchased a zSeries from IBM running Linux to support all the e-mail accounts of its more than 55,000 students on a single server. It's the university's second mainframe -- it had a model 4381 in the early 1990s, according to Bogusalw Mroz, the school's vice rector.

Poznan is the 150th university to sign up for IBM's mainframe education program. The first semester of offering a mainframe course has gone well, Mroz said. Looking ahead, the university plans to focus in on particular subjects, with mainframe security being a likely candidate for its own course, he added.

Unlike the US and Canada, Poland doesn't currently have any problem filling computer science places. Mroz reports strong competition among would-be students with 10 candidates for each place in computer science. However, he notes that figure pales in comparison with the demand to study biotechnology where the university is seeing 80 candidates for every one place.

Kris Bulaszewski, manager of systems and technology at IBM Poland, believes the work with Poznan has gone very well. He gave a lecture to students on mainframes which was very well received. He hopes to do something similar with another Polish university by the end of this year. Government, telecoms, banks and manufacturers in Poland are all using mainframes. Students with mainframe skills are likely to receive relatively high salaries as a way to encourage them to stay in the country. "It's an investment to keep good employees," said Bulaszewski. He was one of many people with IT skills who returned to Poland after working abroad when the country transformed into a market economy and a free society.