This surprising result came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site   between 1 November and 2 December 2011. 40% were from Europe and 50% from North America, with 10% from the rest of the world.

46% of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide, while 10% of respondents had 0-200 staff, 6% had 201-1000, 28% had 1001 to 5000, and 10% had 5001-10,000 staff. In terms of MIPS, 34% of respondents had fewer than 1000 MIPS installed, 40% fell into the mid-sized category between 1000 and 10,000 MIPS, and 26% were at the high end.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. Larger, more mature businesses (above 10,000 MIPS) were almost all experiencing some growth, but predominantly in 0 to 10% per year category. Sites in the 1000-10,000 MIPS range were showing a range of results with some sites suggesting a decline while others predicted growth of up to 50%. Sites below 1000 MIPS were experiencing a more complex future, with most expecting a small growth, but almost as many expecting no growth or negative growth (a business-speak euphemism for decline). The mainframe market does appear to be quite fragmented with competitive pressures at the lower end of the mainframe market, and some respondents commented about lack of understanding amongst management about the value of mainframe computing.

It was interesting to see that 6% of respondents had the zEnterprise z114s, with 19% having the z196s models installed. I expect that future surveys we’ll ask how sites are making use of the extra features on these models. Previous surveys have shown that there is a willingness amongst mainframes (especially larger ones) to purchase new models as they become available. In order to benefit from the new features

The big talking point during 2011 was cloud computing and whether mainframers really have been doing it since the 1960s and the impact of offering software (and anything else) as a service. The survey asked whether respondents currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Just 12% (up from last year’s 2%) of respondents said they did. 34% said they didn’t, and the rest weren’t sure. It’s still early days for a cloud computing initiative to move off the PowerPoint slides and into the business environment, so the survey asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 40% said they weren’t at present. Just 18% thought some mainframe applications would be cloud-enabled in the future. It will be interesting to follow these figures in future surveys.

The survey asked respondents which specialty processors (IFL, zIIP, and zAAP) they had. 16% of sites had all three (up from last year’s value of 6%) and a further 20% of sites had two of the three specialty processors (down from last year’s 28%). More sites had zIIP processors (48%) than any other. 36% had IFL processors, and 30% had zAAP specialty processors. 28% of sites don’t have a specialty processor installed.

The survey inquired about what proportion of enterprise data resides on the mainframe and what on other platforms. This produced, for the first year ever, the surprising result that more than half of the respondents use other platforms to manage the lion’s share of their corporate data. 44 percent of sites surveyed have more data on their mainframes, whereas 56 percent of the sites surveyed have more data stored on other platforms. Unfortunately, the survey was unable to drill down to find out why, but we can speculate that it may simply be the growth of data associated with the non-mainframe side of the business. It could be a result of the quantity of e-mails that organizations store for their staff. It could be that non-mainframe data is less well managed and ‘spreads’ into larger data sizes. Perhaps non-mainframe databases are less space efficient. Or maybe, people just create and save Excel spreadsheets and Word documents on Windows servers, where they wouldn’t keep equivalent files on mainframes. Or perhaps sites move their mainframe archive data off the mainframe, but still have it available online on, for example, a Linux distributed system. I’d be interested to hear yiour views on this.

The comments in the survey identified management ignorance of the power and benefits of using a mainframe. This is now a perennial reason given for the decline in mainframe computing within organizations. But cost was also highlighted as a factor mitigating against the successful growth of mainframe computing. One respondent suggested, “software costs are sinking the mainframe”.

Anyway, full details of the responses to many other questions can be found in the user survey section of the Yearbook. It’s well worth a read.

The Yearbook can only be free to mainframers because of the support given by sponsors. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

What makes this annual publication so important? The answer is that it provides a one-stop shop for everything a mainframer needs to know. For example, the technical specification section includes model numbers, MIPS, and MSUs for zEnterprise processors (z196s and z114s). There’s also a hardware timeline, and a display of mainframe operating system evolution.

In addition, there’s the glossary of terminology section explaining simply what all those acronyms stand for, but in a way that means you can understand them.

One section provides a media guide for IBM mainframers. This includes information on newsletters, magazines, user groups, blogs, and social networking information resources for the z/OS environment. Amongst the things it highlights are zJournal, INSIGHT-SPECTRA, IBM Listservs, SHARE’s Five Minute Briefing on the Data Center, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn discussions. As well as user groups such as SHARE and IDUG.

The vendor directory section contains an up-to-date list of vendors, consultants, and service providers working in the z/OS environment. There’s a summary of the products they supply and contact information. There are a number of new organizations in the list this year, and, sadly, a few familiar names have ceased trading.

The mainframe strategy section contains articles by industry gurus and vendors on topics such as: Why incremental process-driven IT modernization is relevant for your business; Network management for the modern data centre; Next-generation mainframe management; Best practices for application release management; Peeling the onion of SFTP: options for securing file transfer to and from z/OS.

For many people the highlight each year is the mainframe user survey. This illustrates just what’s been happening at users’ sites. It’s a good way for mainframers to compare what they are planning to do with what other sites have done. I will be looking at some of the survey highlights in my next blog.

The other great thing about the Yearbook – as far as many of the 15,000 people who download it are concerned – is that it is completely FREE.

It can only be free because some organizations have been prepared to sponsor it or advertise in it. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

To see this year’s Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, click on www.arcati.com/newyearbook12. If you don’t want to download a large PDF, again this year, each section is available as a separate PDF file.

Don’t miss out on this excellent publication.

The question of when COBOL will meet its demise has been debated for years now. But there is general agreement that the Common Business Oriented Language, first developed in 1959, will be alive and kicking well into this century.

Read more…

To enable/disable SharePoint auditing:

1. Open the site that you wish to audit
2. Click ‘Site Actions’
3. Select ‘Site Settings’
4. Click ‘Modify All Site Settings’
5. Under ‘Site Collection Administration’ you have ‘Site collection audit settings’
6. You would see Figure 1.
7. Here you can select what you wish to audit
8. Be very careful, SharePoint will not automatically purge these audit logs. They will continue to grow as long as they are enabled. I have seen content databases with 80GB of audit files!

Figure 1: Configure Audit settings page

To trim audit files:

1. Create the batch file shown in Figure 2. Note: CONTENTDATABASE is the name of the database within SQL.
2. Save it as ‘Purge Audit Logs.bat’
3. This will need to be run on your SharePoint Web frontend server as an Administrator. Do not be alarmed if it takes a little while to run. The time it takes depends on the amount of audit logs you are trying to trim.

SET STSADM=”c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE”

%stsadm% -o trimauditlog -date <YYYYMMDD> -databasename <CONTENTDATABASE>

Pause

Figure 2: Purge Audit Logs.bat

I would suggest running this on a system without users because it may have an impact on performance.

If you have large amounts of audit log files, I would recommend running the trim command on a month’s worth of audit logs at a time. The SQL transaction log file will grow very large during the trim process.

Once you have trimmed the audit logs you will need to run a shrink database task within SQL to reclaim the space used during the trim process.

I’d like to thank Darren for his continuing contributions, and a happy New Year to everyone.

The Department of Administration’s General Accounting Office has managed to keep the system running, even with frequent glitches, but state Comptroller D. Clark Partridge said he doesn’t know how much longer it will hold.

“We’ve done a very good job of avoiding failure,” Partridge said. “When does that string snap?”

The office handles state finances through the Arizona Financial Information System, or AFIS. In 1992 the department spent $3.2 million on the COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, program developed in 1959 to run the system.

Read more

January started the year, as most Januaries do, with the publication of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. The 2011 edition is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. The 2012 edition will be available in a couple of weeks. As always the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook  includes its annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. And each year, it gets downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals.

February saw the launch of the new series of Virtual IMS user group meetings. The user group is now sponsored by Fundi Software and hosted at www.fundi.com/virtualims. The first speaker was Jim Martin from Fundi Software, whose presentation was called, “Solving the problem when IMS isn’t the cause”.

In March, everyone seemed to be talking about cloud computing.

April’s meeting of the Virtual IMS user group included a presentation from Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software. His talk was called, “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”.

In May, Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd and I took part in a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’ section of CA’s May Mainframe Madness month. May also witnessed the launch of the new Virtual CICS user group – again sponsored by Fundi – with its Web site at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. Our opening presentation was from Fundi’s Jim Martin talking about, “Solving the problem when CICS isn’t the cause”.

In June, I was asked by ITToolbox to lead a discussion in the Data Center Infrastructure section of their Web site. At the Virtual IMS user group meeting, Gary Weinhold a Systems Engineer and Verna Bartlett Head of Marketing with Data Kinetics talked about, “MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications”.

In July, I was selected for the Destination z (www.destinationz.org/) member spotlight. The Virtual CICS user group saw a presentation from Jeff Geminder, Principal Consultant with CA, called, “Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack”. I was also a guest blogger on the Destination z Web site.

In August, my article CICS Top Performance and Tuning Issues was published in z/Journal. I had a guest blog published on Destination z. The Virtual IMS user group had a presentation from Scott Quillicy, CEO and Founder of SQData. His talk was called, “IMS replication for high-availability”.

For the September meeting, Charles Jones, from the Product Management group at Rocket Software, gave a talk to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. I wrote a guest blog for the Destination z Web site.

October saw a presentation from Rosemary Galvan, Principal Software Consultant – IMS, with BMC. Her talk to the Virtual IMS user group was called, “Database Performance – Could Have, Should Have, Would Have”. I had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

In November, my Mainframe Update blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com was a finalist in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011. Also in November the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey was launched. And Eugene S Hudders, president of C\TREK Corp, gave a presentation to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS Performance – Tuning LSR Pools”. I also had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

And finally, in December, I had an article entitled, Ways to Save Money and Improve IT Services published in z/Journal. The final speaker for the year at the Virtual IMS user group was Suzie Wendler, a Consulting IT Specialist in the IBM IMS Advanced Technical Skills organization, who talked about, “IMS V12”. I chaired a webinar for SQData entitled, “How Important is Continous Availability of Critical Applications to Your Company?”And there was a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

What else, well apart from a full year of writing and consultancy work,  I was made an IBM Champion for the third year running.

Looking forward to 2012, we have the launch of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook in January, and a presentation from Andrew Smithson of IBM Hursley on CICS Transaction Gateway V8.1 for the Virtual CICS user group.

If you do celebrate it, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll be back blogging in January.
Trevor Eddolls

But how about if you could hold up your phone in front of the mainframe or some x86 server, and on screen would appear statistics about usage and performance? You could then take appropriate action to resolve hot spots and capacity issues. All just a dream? Apparently not.

Beverley Head’s blog at IT Wire (www.itwire.com/cloud-computing/51364-bmc-sniffs-out-next-generation-tools) from last week suggests that BMC is exploring how it can harness gamification and augmented reality techniques in the next generation of its systems management tools. Beverley reports Suhas Kelkar, a chief technology officer for BMC, describing the server example I gave above. Suhas adds: “If someone comes across an intelligent solution they should add it to the knowledge base. But hardly anyone does it. But what if you gamify the system and reward people for doing that?”

So there we have it… Augmented reality is the appearance on your phone of information about server capacity. And it could be about anything else. Wouldn’t it be great to hold your phone over a cable and read off the upstream and downstream broadband speeds?

Gamification – a new word, so try to drop into conversations, if you want to sound up-to-date – then is the fun part of using software. The part that is all too often missing!

Interestingly, I found an article about gamification from back in May this year at www.dnitza.com/2011/05/21/gamifcation-making-fun-of-the-web/. Daniel Nitsikopoulos talks about “Gamification: Making fun of the web”. He asserts that: “Gamification is one of the newest and I believe one of the biggest movements in the creative world today. It is the concept that you can apply game mechanics (elements that make games fun, engaging, and in some cases competitive) to things that aren’t typically considered a game, or even fun! From work, to health, to socialising, to cooking, to just about anything!”

So if BMC is looking at gamification and augmented reality, you can bet CA Technologies is as well. And that other big software supplier, IBM! But I would bet that the really exciting stuff is going to come from smaller companies. And I would also predict that these smaller companies will one-by-one be swallowed up by the existing software giants.

It definitely gets my vote as a direction I’d like technology to move in. Some equivalent to Google Goggles that not only identifies what you’re looking at (the Web server, or the z/Linux LPAR, or whatever) and provides current performance information. And then makes it fun to resolve any problems that might have been identified. Maybe when you look at the x86 server, it appears in red if there are issues. Then the length of time you take to resolve the problem is entered onto a leader board. And at the end of the week you can see who is the fastest techie in your team! Or perhaps the only green screen you’ll see will mean ‘game over’!

Once established, computer languages tend to fit that model. It is not simply that they have been used to create applications which continue to work, the software engineers’ coding skills do not disappear instantly either. Although there cannot be many around who were in at the genesis of Cobol in 1959.

Read more…

And here we are. It’s almost November 2011, and both are about to come to pass.

The zEnterprise 196 and the Business Class version, the zEnterprise 114, mainframes come with the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension. Initially this supported AIX on Power blades and Linux on x86 blades. This fit nicely with IBM’s model of the universe because it owns AIX and Linux is, of course, open source – ie it doesn’t belong to anybody. The Unified Resource Manager (URM) controls the operating systems and hypervisors on the mainframe and the blades. But now – the previously unthinkable – IBM promises that it will have Windows running on its HX5 Xeon-based blade servers for the zBX chassis before the end of this year.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition will run on the PS701 blade servers in the zBX enclosures. The zBX extension can have 112 PS701 blades or 28 HX5 blades.

This is clearly important for those sites that use mainframes or are ready to upgrade to mainframes and still have a big Windows-using population. It’s interesting that so many people consider Windows to be the de facto computing platform. I recently had a conversation where Windows laptops were given the metaphor of rats or beetles – they just turn up everywhere – and Linux was given the metaphor of a stealth operating system or a hidden shadow – it was everywhere, but you didn’t see it. Why stealth, well because Linux turns up behind the scenes on routers, on TiVO boxes, on supercomputers, as the precursor to Android on smartphones, making movies at Pixar and Dreamworks, in the military, governments, everywhere!

After Windows on IBM hardware, the next thing we hear is that Virginia M Rometty, a senior vice president at IBM, is going to be the company’s next CEO – starting in January. “Ginni”, aged 54 (as all the releases inform us), succeeds Samuel J Palmisano, who is 60, and will remain as chairman.

Ms Rometty graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in computer science, joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. She moved through different management jobs, working with clients in a variety of industries. Her big coup was in 2002, when she played a major part in the  purchase of the very big consulting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. PwC staff were used to working in a different way from IBM’s and managing that culture shift was down to Ms Rometty.

In 2009, Ginni became senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy.

You’ll recall that Sam Palmisano took over in 2003 from Louis V Gerstner Jr, who’d joined IBM from RJR Nabisco in 1993 and helped turn round an ailing IBM. The previous incumbent had been the lacklustre John Akers.

I suppose with Siri on iPhones and the much less serious about itself Iris on Android, we’ve moved some way towards being able to talk to a computer – even if it is a smartphone. Still no sign of Scotty being beamed up, though!