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?

People may fondly remember WordPerfect or VisiCalc, or may have tried OpenOffice and other alternatives to Microsoft, but for most organizations, the de facto standard has been MS Office.

And then, as the world became aware of cloud computing, those freethinkers at Google gave us GoogleDocs – an online equivalent for the basic Office functions. And the big advantage was that you could access your files from whichever computer you were on (provided you had Internet connectivity). There was no excuse about bringing the wrong memory stick and not having a copy of the document. I use the GoogleDoc plug-in to Office so that my files are stored in the cloud in case I need something at a client’s site.

Of course, Microsoft also has a cloud-based version of its Office suite called Microsoft Office 365.

But now IBM has thrown its hat in the ring. It has announced the beta of IBM Docs, which is tied into its SmartCloud for Social Business Suite. So how does IBM hit the ground running with its own Office suite? Well, it got its hands on Lotus Smartsuite in 1995, when it also got Lotus Notes.

IBM Docs allows organizations to collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. The plan is that there will only be a Web-based solution – no need for any browser plug-ins. In addition, its LotusLive has been rebadged as SmartCloud for Social Business. This provides users with easy access to social networking, file sharing, meetings, e-mail, calendars, and instant messaging.

The Web site at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/lotus+greenhouse/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs says: “IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite for working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations – together – in the cloud. With IBM Docs there is no desktop software. You only need a browser and an account, and you are able to easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM Docs is simple yet powerful – letting you get started quickly, but delivering the advanced features you need.

Once you’ve signed up, you can create and share documents, you can comment on documents, and you can assign parts of documents to teams to complete. In effect, everything you would look for in a cloud-based Office equivalent. Does it provide workflow features like Microsoft’s SharePoint? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Will it work? It will be interesting to see. The linking with social networking is something that many enterprise organisations will find beneficial. There’s certainly room for another heavyweight to enter the fray. And it should be beneficial for us users if the big players offer more-and-more facilities for us to use as a way of keeping our interest and our business.

I’m sure we’ll be getting far more information about this initiative (and it is still in beta), but I thought it was worth noting now. Personally, I’d like to see a cloud version of the Adobe suite – InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, etc.

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

Firstly, it was at Whittlebury Hall again – which is a magnificent location just over the border from Buckinghamshire into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning and the facilities are excellent. It is in the countryside, so if you’re travelling by train, there’s a long taxi ride to get there. If you travel by car, there’s a huge car park.

The exhibition hall is big, but not so big you get lost in it. By having lunch and coffee in the hall, there were plenty of opportunities to engage with vendors and chat to other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and make new friends. The quality of the coffee and food was good – which translates as excellent when compared to some venues!

But the point of GSE is not the food, it’s the presentations. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I was torn between the CICS and IMS streams. In the end, I split my time between them. I watched Circle’s Ezriel Gross present on Using CICS to Deploy Microsoft .Net Winforms with Smart Client Technology – which was really fascinating. I’m sure we’re going to see more sites integrating their Windows technology with the power of mainframe subsystems. Ezriel made quite a complicated integration seem straightforward and obvious.

Next I watched IBM’s Alison Coughtrie talk about IMS 12 Overview. Another knowledgeable speaker with a lot of information to get over in the time. I certainly think I have a clearer idea of what’s new, and perhaps a small insight into where IBM is taking the product.

After lunch it was Neil Price, who works for TNT Express and chairs the IMS group for GSE, with a presentation entitled Memoirs of a HALDBA. I was so impressed with Neil’s real-life descriptions that I’ve asked him to speak to the Virtual IMS user group. Neil could have gone on for much longer than the time allowed. And I could happily have gone on listening.

Next up in the IMS stream was IBM’s Dougie Lawson. Dougie is another fantastically knowledgeable IBMer, who you may have come across when you’ve had an IMS problem. He talked about The Why and How of CSL. A real bits and bytes expert, who could have talked much longer.

I felt it was time to sit in on the CICS stream and the session I chose was IBM’s Ian Burnett talking about CICS Scalability. Yet again, a fact-filled presentation that would be hard to criticize. I felt my knowledge about CICS (and I used to edit CICS Update) making more sense and falling more into place.

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – as they say. And the evening presentation was How To Cope With Pressure & Panics Without Going Into Headless Chicken Mode from Resli Costabell. A mixture of psychology, NLP, and audience participation made this a memorable session. If you get a chance to see her anywhere – don’t miss it!

After that there were drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Attachmate/Suse and Computacenter, followed by dinner sponsored by EMC and Computacenter. Both were very enjoyable in their own way, and they were an opportunity to chat more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. Obviously, I was telling vendors about sponsorship opportunities with the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and asking users to complete the user survey.

In conversation, I asked a few of the vendors how business was going. No-one admitted that double-dip recession was taking them out of business, but most suggested that they were keeping their heads above water and business generally was flat – but there was some business being done.

An IBMer suggested that over 30 z196s had been sold in the UK and eight of the new z114s. So, that’s good news for them.

My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. I bumped into Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) during the day as he rushed around making sure everything was going smoothly. And that’s why the conference works so well, because people like Mark work so hard to ensure it does.

Well done everyone who organized it and spoke at it. And if you missed it, go next year.

Eddolls, blog, Guide, Share, Europe, Whittlebury Hall, Circle, Ezriel Gross, IBM, Alison Coughtrie, Neil Price, TNT Express, Dougie Lawson, Ian Burnett, Resli Costabell, CICS, IMS, Attachmate/Suse, Computacenter, EMC, Mark Wilson

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!

Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacentre, EMC, Attachmate, Suse, CA, Novell, Compuware, Intellimagic, RSM Partners, Velocity Software, and Zephyr. And there will be 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.

There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, Software Asset Management, Tivoli User Group TWS, Tivoli User Group Automation, MQ, New Technologies, zLinux, and the single-session Training & Certification.

That means that at this year’s conference there will be 126 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology. This is slightly less than last year because two of the Tivoli streams that were included last years have been dropped because they were so poorly attended. This year, there will be 12 streams of ten sessions over the two days, plus five keynotes and that one training & certification WG meeting. In all, there are going to be 85 speakers delivering this training.

There is still time to register, and the organisers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.

There are also 16 students attending this year, who are taking the mainframe course at UK universities. The majority of students are from the University of Western Scotland (UWS), but there will also be some from Liverpool John Moores University and possibly some more from other UK universities. The organisers have prepared a series of 101 sessions on mainframe architecture and infrastructure that will give these students as well as trainees and those unfamiliar with parts of the infrastructure a basic understanding of the mainframe and how it works.

Many GSE member companies are taking advantage of the five free places they get to send their staff to the conference. This would cost non-members £1000 in early-bird prices, and more than compensates member companies for the recent rise in the GSE membership fee to EUR 840.

You can find out more details about the conference at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/invite.html.

If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.

I’m not talking about some sci fi shrink ray wielded by some fearsome purple-coloured alien, I’m talking about the use of emulation software to make one lot of hardware successfully interpret instructions designed to be used on completely different hardware – and vice versa. The mainframe programs think they are running on a mainframe and continue quite happily – totally unaware of the work being performed by the emulation software.

Fundamental Software Inc (FSI) gave us FLEX-ES, which ran on Intel chips and allowed developers to test their mainframe applications on their PCs. The PC itself ran Linux and FLEX ran under that – emulating a range of mainframe hardware devices including terminals and tape drives. Fundamental also sold hardware allowing real mainframe peripherals to connect to PCs.

In 2000 a company called T3 launched the tServer based on FLEX-ES.

UMX Technologies also offered Intel server emulation – using UMX’s Virtual Mainframe software. The company offered Windows compatibility as well.

Then there was Hercules, an Open Source software implementation of  mainframe architectures. Hercules runs under Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OSX. Hercules was created by Roger Bowler and was maintained by Jay Maynard. Jan Jaeger designed and implemented many of the advanced features of Hercules, including dynamic reconfiguration, integrated console, interpretive execution and z/Architecture support – according to their Web site. IBM stopped licencing its operating systems for Hercules systems, so users were left with running older public domain versions of IBM operating systems or illegally running newer versions.

Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) developed Open Mainframe servers, Open Systems servers, and NEC D-Series storage arrays. The company’s System64 product line consolidated z/OS, Windows, and Linux operating systems in one secure operating environment based on Intel Itanium 2 processor technology. At the time, Platform Solutions had a strategic partnership with T3 Technologies. In 2008, IBM took them over.

Sim390 was an application that ran under Windows and emulated a subset of the ESA/390 mainframe architecture. The emulator supported most TCP/IP operations (via socket calls using an emulated IUCV interface), and contained a Telnet 3270 (tn3270) server for remote log-in (with IP address filtering), as well as local 3270 sessions. It was possible to run it on a very small machine, such as a Pentium 75MHz with 16MB memory. So says the Sim 390 Mainframe Emulator home page.

But now you don’t need to worry about litigation, old Web sites (and older emulators), or potentially dodgy bits of software. You can have the IBM System z Personal Development Tool (zPDT), which enables a virtual System z architecture environment on x86 and x86-compatible platforms.

The IBM zPDT consists of software that is authenticated and enabled by a USB hardware key, loaded on to the Intel and Intel-compatible platform, running Linux. The zPDT comes with one, two, or three virtual engines, which can be defined as System z general-purpose processors, System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), System z Application Assist Processors (zAAPs), System z Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), and Integrated Coupling Facility (ICF).

As well as the current IBM operating systems and software, it also supports a variety of real and emulated hardware devices such as disks, tapes, printers, card readers,etc. System z customers, service providers, business partners, and ISVs can get the simpler version as part of the Rational Developer for System z Unit Test (RDz-UT) offer.

So now you can get your hands on a very small mainframe.

You’ll remember that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems early last year for $7.4 billion. Since then, IBM has been hoovering up customers. In August, market researchers IDC were saying that IBM had grown its Unix revenues by 15 percent in the second quarter and its market share by 6 percent. Adding that Oracle had lost share.

IBM claims that in the second quarter, its Power Systems unit acquired 334 customers from competitors, with 210 of those coming from Oracle. And, just to show that they are on a war footing and it’s not just friendly rivalry, IBM says that its formal migration program, which entices customers to move to IBM systems, has gained 7,210 server and storage customers from rivals since its inception in 2006.

There is a third player on the pitch – HP – which has been experiencing pretty dire times itself recently. IBM’s saying it’s acquired 110 users from HP. HP recently announced that Meg Whitman, the former CEO at eBay, will take over from Leo Apotheker, who’s only been there a year. Why dump Apothekar? No other reason than the company losing half it’s market value in the time Apothekar has been in charge!

There were even rumours (and, who knows, it might still happen) that Oracle would scoop up HP and add it to its own portfolio. Others suggest that the problems Oracle experienced with Sun’s SPARC hardware business may convince it to keep away from HP’s Itanium. Perhaps IBM might buy HP? That last sentence should come enclosed in <start rumour> tags!

But after a longish period of haemorrhaging its Sun SPARC users and having to put up with IBM’s suitably smug grins, Oracle has now announced its high-end SuperCluster system powered by its new T4 SPARC chip. With an estimated 50,000 SPARC customers, it’s a business well-worth hanging on to.

The SuperCluster T4-4 is a general-purpose system offering a claimed 33 percent more price/performance than IBM’s largest Power servers and (again claimed) more than 50 percent more price/performance than an Itanium-based Integrity server from HP.

The SuperCluster is powered by Oracle’s eight-core T4 chip, which Oracle claims offers five times the performance of the current 16-core T3. The SuperCluster also includes the capabilities of Oracle’s existing Exadata database system and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box offering, both of which are powered by x86 chips from Intel.

The SuperCluster runs the current Solaris 10 operating system or the new Solaris 11, and will run any applications that its SPARC customers might run.

We can only wait and see what IBM will produce when it comes out of its corner. It certainly knows that the fight is back on.

This whole change in staff structure is also being encouraged by the advent of the zEnterprise hybrid machines with their zBX blades running everything from AIX to, potentially, Windows. A consequence is that a mainframe specialist could be dealing with a Linux error message, or a Windows SharePoint guru might be trying to understand what’s going on inside CICS. What can you do to help them?

Or let’s suppose in a more traditional mainframe environment, for whatever reason, you lost some of your top technical people. Perhaps they got jobs elsewhere or perhaps they retired early, but suddenly you find yourself with a huge knowledge gap. Maybe you can transfer someone across from the distributed team. Or maybe you can recruit one of the new generation of youngsters who are learning the benefits of mainframe computing. But whatever you do, there will be a fairly long period of time during which anything out of the ordinary occurring is going to leave everyone scratching their heads and searching Google – whereas, previously, your in-house expert knew exactly what to do. So, in this situation, what are you going to do?

Let’s not worry too much at this stage about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets. Let’s simply focus on the problem. How can any organization, irrespective of how its IT team is constructed, ensure that appropriate expertise is available at all times to whichever staff members are available?

Obviously you can have the manuals, and some could be on the IBM mainframe portal, but that doesn’t give you speedy access to the necessary information. A Google search will reveal hundredsof pages of results, but it takes a degree of expertise to sift through those and find the correct one quickly. And someone without any expertise could spend a very long time reading solutions to completely different problems before ever finding the right one. Not a satisfactory way to provide IT services to customers – whether internal or external to the organization.

So what would be a good solution? How can these issues of staff working outside their comfort zone be dealt with in a way that is good for the business? And what kind of a solution will still be able to ensure those business-critical mainframes are being supported in a year’s time, in five year’s, or even further into the future?

This is where a new breed of solutions that can address this coming challenge are positioning themselves. One of these, Softlib with its iSolve product (www.softlibsw.com/mvs.aspx), allows an organization to combine all its IT-related information into a single virtual library. That means users – your harassed staff – have to search in only one place, not as previously in many places, to find a solution to any problem. And once you have a single location for information available, you can allow product champions and other IT-literate staff access to it – which should result in more empowered and satisfied users and fewer calls to the Help Desk.

It makes sense to organize the information in this single virtual library using themes, so CICS information might be one theme, IMS another, Linux a third, etc. The information in the library starts from IBM and third-party software vendors’ manuals, and can be supplemented with information from newsgroups and other online resources. Plus, you can add your own technical expertise.

Access to the information can be from a Web browser or a terminal server. It can be hosted locally, or as a cloud-based resource. The advantage of the cloud route is that the information is looked after by Softlib and they already have access to a huge number of the resources you’ll need. So you can start using the facility almost immediately. Plus the online documentation is automatically updated when new information becomes available. Other benefits include knowledge usage analytics that can help address missing or outdated knowledge, and seamless integration with CRM, bug-tracking, Service Desk, content-management applications, etc.

All in all, Softlib’s iSolve product has a lot to offer most mainframe sites, and certainly provides an answer to the question of what to do if you restructure your IT customer support and need to extend the working expertise of your staff onto other platforms such as AIX and Windows. It also offers a solution to the problem of losing key mainframe experts in a mainframe-only environment.

Today I want to pose the questions: how much does an IMS development/test system cost? And how many development test systems does a site typically have installed?

It’s a bit like asking: how long is a piece of string? Obviously every piece of string has a length, but it is unknown, a quantative answer can’t be given. And by implication, whatever else is being discussed will contain a degree of indeterminate uncertainty!

Our experience at iTech-Ed (where we administer the Virtual IMS user group) is that a single IMS development test system can cost an organisation between US$1,000,000 per year and $2,000,000 per year (and possibly more in some cases).

There are some sites that run their development systems on dedicated machines that can be larger than many average-sized organizations’ production systems.

However, there is an additional complication. We believe that, although IMS is a huge revenue earner for IBM, they will waive their fee for software for organisations that are development shops and don’t use it for production.

We also estimate that the personnel costs for installing and maintaining IMS development systems can amount to about half a million US dollars per year.

And the number of IMS development/test systems can vary hugely from 1 or 2 true development systems (plus test, QA, etc) in smaller shops, to larger customers, who may have any number from around ten to perhaps 30+. We know of some users with 300+ test IMS regions, but the bulk of the bell-shaped curve is skewed to much lower values. The reason we believe the average is ten or slightly above is because of the amount of administrative effort these test systems take to maintain.

The waters can be muddied further by the fact that organizations can negotiate deals on price with IBM, but are then discouraged from sharing information about those prices with others.

Our conclusion is that the cost to the organisation of running a development system depends on the size of the installation. US$1-2M is a good estimate of the cost for each IMS development/test system, with 10 being a reasonable estimate of, on average, how many development/test systems exist.

And, of course, if you have any further information on this, we would be really interested to hear from you.