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.

The truth is that IBM is not the controlling influence it once was, but that’s a good thing. No longer does it decide what customers want and try to sell it – it now listens to its customers. Another good thing.

In the 1970s, IBM was the king of computing with the combined revenues of the BUNCH significantly less its own. The BUNCH were Burroughs (still around as UNISYS), UNIVAC (still around as UNISYS), NCR (which was acquired by AT&T for a time and eventually sold its computer manfacturing business to Solectron), Control Data Corporation (now called Syntegra), and Honeywell (whose computer division became part of Groupe Bull).

During its lifetime, we’ve seen the birth of Hewlett-Packard (72-years-old), Intel (43-years-old), Apple (35-years-old), Google (12-years-old), Facebook (7-years-old), and other companies that have become kings of their not-so-small niches.

IBM itself was (obviously as we’re celebrating 100 years) founded in 1911, but was then called the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation. It originated with the merger of four companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Corporation, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company. The name International Business Machines didn’t arrive until 1924 (so more partying in 13 years time!). Bundy Manufacturing first appeared in 1889. The Tabulating Machine Company arrived in 1896.

The famous Thomas J Watson Sr joined the company in 1914 and soon became president. In 1956: Tom Watson Jr took over as CEO. Through the 1960 we get the System/360, VM, IMS, CICS, and many other things that we’re still familiar with today. In 1981 IBM invented the Personal Computer.

The early 1990s were a bad time as IBM announced its first loss. CEO John Akers talked about breaking up IBM into smaller companies that could compete better. In 1993, Lou Gerstner took over the reigns and things started to improve. In 1995 IBM acquired Lotus and its Notes software. 1995 also saw the launch of the much-admired ThinkPad laptop computer. And 1996 gave us DB2.

But over time, IBM has moved away from opportunities. It sold off its Lexmark printing business in 1991. It sold its networking business to Cisco in 1999. And it sold its PC business to Chinese-based Lenovo in 2005. But it’s still a big company, In 2011, Fortune ranked it as the 18th largest in the USA, and the 7th most profitable. Forbes ranked it as the 31st largest in the world. And it has thousands of patents under its belt.

The zEnterprise 196 hardware shows that IBM is planning for a long future. It allows all the good things about mainframes to be spread across other platforms. Plus, people are slowly grasping the amazing things they can achieve with zLinux on mainframes. Big Iron isn’t rusting away!

And IBM always had a fun side (honest!). In 1997 the Deep Blue computer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess. And in 2011 a computer called Watson won the Jeopardy game show.

Happy birthday Big Blue.