As well as mainframes, Linux, of course, runs on desktops and servers. The Mac OS is based on Unix, but Android – found on millions of smartphones and tablets – is based on Linux.

So what divisions am I talking about? The division between big iron and little? Well not really. In fact, interestingly, the people at William Data Systems have come out with a way of monitoring Linux whether it’s on a mainframe or server somewhere else in the world. As long as it has an IP address, they have a way of monitoring it (using z/OS as the hub).

No, the first division I want to look at is the division between the USA (or North America, I should say) and Europe. The recent Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey (still freely available at www.arcati.com/newyearbook12) came up with some interesting results. The survey found that  70% of European sites surveyed didn’t have Linux, whereas only 28% of North American sites in the surveyed didn’t. That’s a huge difference. And if you were IBM, you might well be wondering why Linux isn’t selling into Europe so well as North America.

Let’s speculate. Is it that North America is well ahead of the curve in terms of take up of mainframe Linux? Is it that mainframe Linux is priced differently either side of the pond so it encourages the take up in the USA but not Europe? Or could it be that IFLs are marked up or down depending on whether the customer is EMEA-based or not? Are IFLs being bundled in with upgrades or not depending on where in the world you’re based? I have recently had some nudges and winks over prices, and it could well be that European mainframe users are being charged double what their US-based counterpart might expect to pay. I’d be interested to hear what figure people, who’ve recently negotiated with IBM, have haggled them down to. You might also wonder whether now is a good time to buy shares in SuSE, who have about an 80% share of the mainframe Linux market. Will we see it suddenly explode in Europe? Or not?

The other division that’s recently cropped up with Linux is how users navigate. I guess we’re all pretty much familiar with using drop-down menus to access what we want – and we can probably use them to find our way around familiar applications without even thinking about it. Even very young childen take to that way of navigating like it was second nature. But just recently we’ve seen the introduction of Heads Up Displays (HUDs) for Ubuntu’s Linux.

What you get is a sort of semi-transparent area at the top of the screen, which acts in some ways like the ribbon with Office. HUD provides a search style interface that uses a Vocabulary User Interface (VUI). Users start to type or say a command, and the HUD starts a smart look-ahead search through the application and system (indicator) menus. By combining fuzzy matching with a learning function, the HUD begins to ‘recognize’ the actions of each individual user.

If you want to give it a go, HUD will be available in Ubuntu 12.04 towards the end of April.

Now I’m guessing that, like Microsoft’s ribbon, and Marmite, users will either love it or hate it. The idea that it will use voice indicates to me that we’re back to the original Star Trek computer idea – a computer that you can talk to. This was an idea that went away for a while because, to be honest, voice reconition software just wasn’t up to the job. But now we’ve had Siri on iPhones for a while, and people are coming back to the idea that talking to a computer isn’t such a silly idea after all.

I’ve only spoken to one person who’s used the HUD and he was singing its praises. But he is very familiar with Linux and the Ubuntu distro, so maybe he had a clearer idea of what to ask the HUD to do for him – in terms of getting any work done – than, for example, I might have.

Perhaps one day we’ll see a HUD on mainframe Linux. And perhaps we’ll see more mainframe Linux sites in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Or will the divisions continue?

At least that’s what IBM is saying, as second-year student Nathan Voth placed second in IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest.

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[Simcoe.Com]

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.

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I recently bumped into William Data Systems’ Tony Amies, who took the time to show me some of the things he was working on. And one of those things was making trace much, much, more user friendly.

Tony showed me WDS’s ZEN product, which, as you may know, allows lots of network monitoring information to be collated and viewed from anywhere using a browser. Information can appear as coloured boxes, which once you clicked on them display more-and-more information in a clever drill-down manner. Fairly quickly, you can identify the component that has exceeded some predetermined threshold.

WDS has a number of products in the ZEN family and you can use buttons on the browser to switch between them – giving you information about different aspects of performance. ZIM the ZEN IP MONITOR can detect error conditions, then ZEN TRACE and SOLVE (ZTS – which used to be called EXIGENCE) can be used to start, stop, and view traces. Now that has got to be so much easier than in the Old Days!

Tony showed how a TCP trace could be carried out in seconds, explaining that there were lots of commands embedded in it. Tony explained how network tracing can be so difficult. For example, using Enterprise Extender, which allows SNA applications to run over TCP networks, results in encapsulated messages. Tony demonstrated software that was able to look inside the message to see what was there – in terms of different types of header. He then explained how this works with FMH5, UDP, IP, APPN, HPR, and more. He explained that sites using the Cisco load balancing GRE tunnelling protocol can also be opened to see the true header for the message. All very clever stuff – and no manuals in sight.

In fact, on a number of occasions a right mouse click on some information in the display would produce a pop-up box explaining exactly what some term or other actually meant. So there was no need for any manuals. The display could show delays, highlight response time problems, and the TCP window size.

Tony also showed me a piece of software that drew a diagram of a Sysplex Distributor – which shows the IP addresses and links on a mainframe system. The software also highlighted where there were issues. And, like the rest of the software we looked at, you could drill down to find exactly where any problem were. In fact, Tony was sure that this would allow customers to identify potential issues before their users did. Behind the scenes, information from netstat and other commands were being used to drive the display.

We talked about customers being able to build business service views of what was going on their system and how useful that would be for each of their customers. That kind of bespoke requirement wasn’t something that Tony could necessarily build into the software, but all it requires is a knowledge of REXX to make it happen. And most z/OS sites have at least one person who code in REXX.

Lastly, we talked about problem resolution when you have two or more systems that don’t seem to be talking to each other. Currently, you need to log into each system and run traces to find out which of the systems has the problem. Tony plans to implement a ‘grouptrace’ feature that allows the user to tell the software to run a trace on these two (or more) systems. The results will come back from both systems and be visible from the browser. The results will be displayed in timestamp order and it will be possible to see on which of the systems the problem is. As easy that.

Too often we’d be sunk without a trace facility. Now we have an example of a way to be able to use trace across multiple systems and simply click to drill down to identify the problem.

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I’ve been helping companies on both sides of the pond solve their data security problems for many years now. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: when I go into an organization that runs Windows, there’s little question of the need for data security. The organization knows it and so do I. When I visit a company whose IT infrastructure revolves around a mainframe, however, the mindset is often quite the opposite. In fact, the biggest data security misconception I encounter is the belief that the mainframe environment is inherently secure. Most IT staff view the mainframe as just another network node. Why? Because it’s universally perceived as a closed environment and, therefore, invulnerable to hackers.

In some cases, it’s the mainframe IT pros who hold this conviction. In other instances, it’s the executive management team. Lack of management attention allows “bad practices” to continue. I can tell you this without reserve: data stored in mainframes needs protection just as much as sensitive information stored on a Windows server or anywhere else. And, as systems continue to support more data, users, applications, and services, effective security management in the mainframe environment becomes significantly more difficult.

News flash: mainframes can be hacked!

For that simple reason, mainframe security should not be taken for granted.

Even though the mainframe is a mature platform, there is a real shortage of mainframe-specific security skills in the market. And, the few mainframe security practitioners who are out there spend a lot of time implementing configuration and controls within their environments as well as putting into place security systems like RACF, which provide access control and auditing functionality. As for other security measures, in my experience, the mainframe people know about encryption, but they’re not terribly aware of newer data security techniques like tokenization as it relates to protecting data within the mainframe environment and beyond.

Tokenization is a data security model that substitutes surrogate values for sensitive information in business systems. A rapidly rising method for reducing corporate risk and supporting compliance with data security standards and data privacy laws, it can be used to protect cardholder information as well as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI).

In fact, for companies that need to comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), tokenization has been lauded for its ability to reduce the cost of compliance by taking entire systems out of scope for PCI assessments. And, even in companies that do not deal with PCI DSS or other mandates, tokenization has proven effective for managing the duplication of data across LPARs and for facilitating the usage of potentially sensitive data for development purposes.

Too often, compliance audits skim over mainframe control weaknesses and there are also fewer mainframe-specific security guidelines. But this does not mean that significant risk is not there. You can apply a risk-based, defence-in-depth approach within the mainframe environment by using stronger mainframe host security controls and by using tokenization to protect the data itself.

To beef up data security on a mainframe, here’s my advice:

1. Bring in mainframe security experts to identify and remediate risks, and to develop and enforce security policies and procedures.
2. Develop in-house capabilities and skilled professionals across the mainframe platform to support security initiatives.
3. Evaluate available security configuration and administration tools – there are some really good ones out there.
4. Apply an in-depth security strategy that includes secure access and authentication controls, and use them appropriately.
5. Adopt encryption and tokenization to protect sensitive information. Through their proper implementation, it’s really not that hard to achieve a true high level of protection within the mainframe environment.

Protecting sensitive and/or business-critical data is essential to a company’s reputation, profitability, and business objectives. In today’s global market, where business and personal information know no boundaries, traditional point solutions that protect certain devices or applications against specific risks are insufficient to provide cross-enterprise data security. Combining encryption and tokenization, along with centralized key management, as part of a corporate data protection programme works well – including in mainframe-centric environments – for protecting information while reducing corporate risk and the cost of compliance with data security mandates and data privacy laws.

Don’t be fooled: your mainframe isn’t inherently secure. Doing nothing is no longer an option!

Thanks Peter for your guest blog.
And remember, there’s still time to complete the mainframe user survey or place a vendor entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012.

Eddolls, blog, mainframe, security, Peter, Goldberg, Liaison, Technologies, Windows, hacked, RACF, encryption, tokenization, PII, PHI, PCI DSS, audits

When IBM introduced the zEnterprise in July 2010, the company also announced plans to deliver additional general-purpose blades for the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension including IBM System x-based blades running Linux in 2011. IBM also suggested it would support Windows, and in April 2011 it confirmed its plans to deliver Windows support on z/Enterprise.

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The cause was complications of heart disease, his daughter Sarah McCarthy said.

McCarthy was instrumental in developing the first time-sharing system for mainframe computers.

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Its epitaph was written long ago. Universities rusticated mainframe from their curriculum decades back, thinking that skinny personal computers will drive out the bulky box that needs almost a whole room and all the paraphernalia, not to speak of a dedicated team of eternally confounded operators, to run it. But now, the storied PCs are on their way out, but the ‘big iron’ is firmly stay put, though a lot slimmer and trimmer.

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