Thursday, December 10, 2015

The IBM i OS Contains Everything Needed to Create Web Services

October 2014 | by Tim Rowe

Leveraging Web services for your IBM i applications allows you to continue to use your applications of today while also enabling you to repurpose key components in other applications or as the conduit between your UI and your back-end data and key business logic.

Web services can be a key component to a modernization project on IBM i. A “service” is a callable interface/method/routine that executes some business logic. It can be complex or very simple. What makes this different is this that it’s callable from the Web, providing a highly reusable interface that can be called from anywhere.

On IBM i, using Web services has never been easier. The OS includes an integrated Web services (IWS) runtime environment. The IWS is utilized today by thousands of IBM i users for a wide array of production services. In June 2014 IBM shipped the new Liberty and JAX-WS based runtime environment. This new technology base is built on the latest industry technologies to ensure a solid base for the future. The IWS server has been built and designed with the RPG or COLBOL developer as its primary user. The IWS support not only contains the necessary runtime environment for running Web services in an enterprise production environment, it also has wizards to help RPG and COBOL developers quickly and easily create and host Web services over back-end ILE programs with virtually no knowledge of the Web side of things. The best part about this support? Because it is part of the IBM i OS, you don’t need to purchase or install anything.

Getting Started

To get started with the IWS support, it’s recommended that you have the latest HTTP PTF and Java* PTF group levels installed. This will ensure you have access to the new Liberty-based IWS engine as well as any other goodies. This support applies to all currently supported releases of IBM i. Once your PTF group levels are set, (again this is not necessary unless you want to leverage the new Liberty-based server, which I highly recommend) you can create your Web services runtime hosting environment easily by walking through the create wizard found in the left navigation pane of the Web Administration GUI (open a browser, enter http://hostname:2001/HTTPAdmin) as shown in Figure 1 (right). Once your server is created and running, which should only take a couple of minutes, you are ready to deploy your first Web service.

When it comes to creating a Web service over your RPG or COBOL programs, the hard part lies on the ILE side, where the real work needs to happen. Because you are creating a service callable from anywhere, the RPG or COBOL program needs to conform to three rules:

You have to be using an ILE version of RPG or COBOL. The older versions are just not supported with the IWS-based support.

Your function that you are creating as a service must be a stateless callable program or service program. It can’t be dependent on an input or other things.

When you compile your code, you must specify the Program Call Markup Language (PCML) option as either a program header option or on the create program command. The PCML is a special object that’s embedded with your compiled program and tells the IWS support what the input and output parameters are for you program.

Once your ILE code is set, the fun part can begin. Creating your Web services is easy. From the Web admin GUI, click on the Manage Deployed Services link. Within this interface, click the Deploy button to start the Deploy a service wizard. This wizard consists of several steps; most are for more advanced features. You really only need to care about a few:

Specify the ILE program or service program object that contains your back-end function.

Define a name for your service. The wizard provides a default value based on the name of the program you specified, but I would recommend specifying a meaningful value, as it will be beneficial later when you are trying to remember what you just did.

Specify what functions you want to expose within this Web service. You can do this in several ways: one large Web service with many functions exposed or an individual Web service for each function you want to expose. I personally am a big fan of simplicity, and would create a simple Web service for each function.

R Update the input and output fields. You will notice the fields are already defined, but likely they aren’t completely accurate. If you’re returning an output structure, for example, it will likely be marked “input/output.” It’s best if you can change that to output and then be sure to designate the correct structure return size. This ensures that the IWS wrapper code handling the call back and forth between the world of the Web and the ILE program can process that data efficiently.

Specify the user ID that this ILE program will run against.

Specify the library list that will be used. The library list can easily be updated at a later time, so here you could specify test data library to get started and then update with the production library later.

R Click on “Next” on any additional screens and hit “Finish.” Within a few seconds the wizard will create the Web services wrapper and deploy it into your Web services runtime environment.

At this point you are set and ready to go! Within the deployed service interface, is a link to the Web Services Descriptive Language. That is the object you will need to send to the caller of your Web service. Try it out for yourself; click on the Test button to launch the IWS testing interface, specify your input values and verify your Web service is working as expected.

Helpful Wizards

Getting starting creating and hosting Web services for the IBM i has never been easier. A complete set of wizards help guide you along the path. For those that are wondering, the IWS support also has a complete set of callable scripts and interfaces to give you the ability to automate or easily move these services from one system to another.

Tim Rowe is the Business Architect for Application Development responsible for all middleware and infrastructure needed for applications on IBM i. He has spent the past 8 years as an architect for the IBM i Web integration team.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Why You Might Want To Encrypt Your Syslogs Now

Why You Might Want To Encrypt Your Syslogs Now
Corrected: June 19, 2015

by Alex Woodie

Every day millions of IBM i server events are packaged up in the syslog standard and sent offsite for safekeeping and analysis. In many cases, the syslog files are sent in plain text across the wire because, hey, they're just boring old log files, and what could anybody ever do with those, right? Wrong, says IBM i security software company Raz-Lee Security.

Syslogs are a bread-and-butter data format for IT professionals around the world. Just about every device in the data center uses the syslog format to transmit data about what it's done. All sorts of IT activities are documented in syslog, from debugging applications and general systems management to real-time network alerts and security auditing.

In the security space, syslogs are the de-facto standard for sending system events to the all-important security information and event management (SIEM) products that do the hard work of analyzing and correlating activity occurring across different servers, networks, databases, switches, and various other systems. No platform is an island these days--not even the venerable IBM i server--and SIEM products like IBM's QRadar, Hewlett-Packard's ArcSight, LogRhythm's Security Intelligence, RSA Security's enVision, and Splunk's Enterprise Security are critical assets in the ongoing war against cyber criminals.

Security software companies plying the IBM i waters are no stranger to these SIEM products, and most of them are equipped to convert IBM i events--such as QAUDJRN system journal events, message queues, and user-related information--from the native IBM i format into syslog and send them across the wire to a central SIEM server.

Eli Spitz, Raz-Lee's vice president of business development, says the company decided to use TLS to encrypt syslog files at the request of customers.

"We've been asked by a number of customers, not a large number but some very large and important customers," to encrypt the syslogs, Spitz tells IT Jungle in an interview. "One of the customers is a pharmaceutical company based in Eastern Europe. They said 'We have to have encryption in syslog to be compliant with FDA regulations.' That was after we received a number of requests."

Helping customers comply with Food and Drug Administration regulations--in this case, rules that require tamper-proof lot tracking at pharmaceutical manufacturers--is certainly a good enough reason. But would companies in other industries have a reason to encrypt their syslogs?

Yes, says Raz-Lee CTO Schmuel Zailer. While you're not going to find personally identifiable information (PII) in the server logs, there are other pieces of data contained in the log files sent from production IBM i servers to SIEM and servers that could be of value to cybercriminals.

"The SIEM server collects information that's coming from the IBM i, which means your line is exposed and everybody can understand what is going on on the IBM i if you just listen to that line," Zailer says. "So you must encrypt it. And if you encrypt it, you hide it."

Raz-Lee's iSecurity suite not only sends data from QAUDJRN and other message queues; it can also upload data from the database journal, Zailer says. This is dubbed database activity monitoring (DAM), a relatively new discipline in the IBM i community, and one in which Raz-Lee has a partnership with McAfee.

For customers who choose to replicate contents of the database journal to a SIEM server via syslog--such as one large insurance company that sends thousands of database events per second--that poses an unacceptable security risk. "We send over the net information of the database updates [which] means that the database is exposed," Zailer says.

Encryption is a major theme for Raz-Lee this year. The Israeli company is gearing up to offer PGP encryption in iSecurity. It's also planning to beef up its field-level encryption offering with a major update later this year. "Encryption is emerging to be a major theme," Spitz says.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

HelpSystems Adds Security Expertise, Managed Services, and Software with Acquisition of SkyView Partners

posted Jun 2, 2015

SkyView team of industry experts, led by Carol Woodbury and John Vanderwall, join HelpSystems. Companies create powerful combination to help organizations improve security on IBM i, UNIX, and Linux.

Minneapolis, MN, June 2, 2015—HelpSystems, a leading provider of systems and network management, business intelligence, and security solutions today announced the acquisition of SkyView Partners, Inc.
By adding SkyView to HelpSystems, customers can now take advantage of a deeper bench of security experts, an innovative approach to ongoing security services, and a broader range of security products.
“At a time when demand for system security is growing and security needs are constantly changing, the SkyView team’s experience is a great fit for HelpSystems and a compelling benefit for our customers,” said Chris Heim, CEO, HelpSystems.
Numerous recent CIO surveys have identified security as a top priority for CIOs in 2015, making SkyView’s service-oriented expertise and world-class support from HelpSystems a powerful combination that will benefit all IBM i, AIX, and Linux customers.
“As we looked to expand our global security services to more customers, we sought out a security-focused company we could complement with services and we found just that in HelpSystems. Our entire team looks forward to joining the HelpSystems family,” said Carol Woodbury, President and Co-Founder of SkyView Partners, Inc.
“By combining SkyView’s services and tools with cutting-edge technology from the HelpSystems security offerings, we can help more organizations secure their systems,” said John Vanderwall, CEO and Co-Founder of SkyView Partners, Inc.
About HelpSystems
HelpSystems, LLC is a leading provider of systems and network management, business intelligence, and security and compliance solutions. HelpSystems software reduces data center costs by improving operational control and delivery of IT services. The company provides managed services around system security, with experts monitoring customers’ compliance reporting. Founded in 1982, the company has 15 offices worldwide and more than 9,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, HelpSystems sells its solutions directly and through strategic partners worldwide.
HelpSystems brands include: Robot, SEQUEL Software, PowerTech, Halcyon, Skybot, AutoMate, Safestone, Bytware, ShowCase, InterMapper, CCSS, and RJS Software. Learn more at www.helpsystems.com.
Mike Devine
Vice President, Marketing
+1 952-563-2798
mike.devine@helpsystems.com

http://www.helpsystems.com/newsroom/helpsystems-acquires-skyview-partners

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

IBM i Marketplace Survey-HelpSystems

IBM i Marketplace Survey

Find out how nearly 350 of your peers are using the platform.

We speak with IT professionals regularly about their IT infrastructures and platform changes, and we saw the need for a deeper understanding of the state of the IBM i platform. With no other source for this information, we teamed up with IT Jungle and PowerWire to gather it ourselves.
The first annual IBM i Marketplace Survey reveals how IBM i is being used and how it relates to users’ broader IT objectives.

http://www.helpsystems.com/ibm-i-marketplace-study

The IBM i Future: Hints from DB2

April 13, 2015

In a previous post about the future of IBM i, I shared some of the primary messages we give to customers who ask us things like, “Show me a roadmap for IBM i for the next five years” and “Is IBM going to support IBM i in the future?” Typically, these questions get asked by CxO types in companies—CTOs, CIOs and CEOs who don’t have much experience with IBM i and its predecessors, or who have been depending on the platform for a long time, but who have had no reason to pay close attention to the blogs, whitepapers and conference sessions we’ve been creating for the customer base. The messages from that post are often enough to calm the anxiety of CxOs, particularly if we get to deliver them in person.

However, there is more than one approach to demonstrating IBM’s strategic commitment to the IBM i and its customer base, so today I’m going to take another of those approaches, and this approach might be more meaningful to people who have more specific technical knowledge than is typically required of a day-to-day CxO. What is it?

Look at the recent past. Specifically, look at the investments IBM i development is making in technological enhancements, and ask yourself whether these investments give you an indication where the platform is headed. Today, I’ll talk about just one area of IBM i, but it’s an important area, since it’s the core of the operating system: DB2.

DB2 and the Data-centric paradigm: For several years, we’ve been talking about the benefits of a “data-centric” approach for application design. In case you’re not familiar with it, “data-centric” means that you define, in the database, how your data should be treated, so that you don’t have to ensure every application and management method you have for the data is synchronized properly. Hmmm. Maybe that’s not clear enough. Let me give you examples.

In IBM i 7.1, we made it possible to do column-level encryption, defined at the DB2 column level. By doing this, we ensured you could enforce a security policy that required specific information was always encrypted, without having to go into every piece of code, and knowing that every interface into your DB would be protected. This is data-centric encryption. Similarly, in IBM i 7.2 we introduced Row/Column Access Control, which is also data-centric. It gets defined for the entire database, no matter how the data is accessed. And when 7.2 TR2 and 7.1 TR10 get announced, there’s another DB2 feature that allows more data-centric management, reducing the complexity of managing your DB2, by having DB2 do things for you.

In each of these instances, we’re guiding the solution community toward a data-centric approach, because ultimately it makes it easier for customers, and it provides more opportunity for us to optimize DB2 for our customers. We see a future where people will use DB2 more and more, as they have in the past, but they will want to avoid complex and error-prone methods of securing, managing and designing their database. And we’re investing in that future.

First on DB2 for i: Furthermore, some of the features we’re putting into DB2 for i are features that other members of the DB2 family will get, but they don’t have them yet. Regular expression support from TR1/TR9 was one example where the IBM i DB2 implementation was the first DB2 to support it, and the feature I hinted at above is another example of a DB2 feature that will be delivered on IBM i first. So, IBM i is not just investing, it’s remaining a full partner with other DB2 family members, doing functions that support the future of database use before anyone else.

Integration of XML: XML, of course, is a way to describe data. DB2 stores data. XML is a big deal. DB2 is big deal. Of course, if you’re an operating system like IBM i, built around DB2, and you want to enable yourself for the future, you figure out how you’re going to work with XML, or not. In the context of investing for the future, realize that we had a choice. We could have allowed XML support to remain a job for application developers. Integrating the support into DB2 would provide significant value to developers, and it would support that “data-centric” strategy I mentioned before, but it also would mean we were committing to supporting a pretty extensive data description technology well into the future. So what did IBM i decide to do?

At first, the IBM i DB2 first added support to store and use XML in a very general way. Then, more than five years ago, over the course of several mid-release deliverables and a major release, DB2 on i incorporated advanced XML support integrated directly into the database. It was one of the major enhancements in 7.1, and has been extended several times since then.

XML is still necessary, of course. Plenty of people use it. But these days, it’s not the only “big deal” in data description. XML is powerful, but pretty complicated when comparing it to at least one other popular technology. (Do I hear someone in the audience asking about JSON? Yes, I thought I did.) So, what are we going to do? Hmmmm. I guess we could do nothing. If IBM i didn’t have a future, doing nothing would probably be best. Why tie ourselves to another growing new data-related technology if we can’t continue to support it? On the other hand, since IBM i does have a future—well, you can expect more news in this area.

More: Other aspects of DB2 show continued investment, for the future of our customers, but those aspects might cross over into other future blogs, so let me just say that Services through SQL has been a focus of IBM i for quite some time (Dawn May wrote about it here: http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Blogs/i-Can/March-2015/IBM-i-Services/ ) and then there is all the support we have created to help users Modernize the use of DB2, which is covered extensively in the IBM i Modernization Redbook.

In closing (for today—not forever) let me reiterate: there are many ways to talk about the future of IBM i and each of those ways might be more effective to certain groups of people. If you are a technical person and you are asked by your executive if IBM is saying anything about the future of IBM i, then I suggest you point them to the previous blog and the resources it mentions.

On the other hand, if you are a technical person and you get the same question from another technical person, information about the technical investments being made in IBM i might serve you better. And if DB2 isn’t the right technology to talk about, well, then you can wait for me to write about other parts of IBM i. Or, better yet, think about the new things you’ve seen us announce over the past few years and develop a list of things that means the most to you. Because when you’re face-to-face with a doubter, the best position you can take is one that you believe in, and you do that best with facts that mean something to you.

Until next time, I’ll keep heading into the future. I look forward to seeing you there!

Posted April 13, 2015 | Permalink

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Look Ahead With IBM To 2018

Look Ahead With IBM To 2018
Published: March 16, 2015

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The world today is a much different place from the one that the AS/400 was launched into nearly three decades ago. Back then, it was exotic to be moving from basic accounting systems running on batch oriented machines to real-time transaction processing and database querying using relational database technology. It was also a big deal to be moving away from homegrown software to packaged applications tailored to specific industries. Software is far more complex and so are the systems it runs across, and IBM reflects the complexity of the market it serves.

Ever since it nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, IBM has been obsessed--many would say correctly--with continual self-transformation. The company did far too much navel-gazing back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the AS/400 business was launched and growing and an important part of the revenue and profit picture for Big Blue, and IBM missed many opportunities.

If anything, IBM is perhaps a little too hair trigger to dump a business and chase the hottest new thing through acquisitions and a little bit of research and engineering internally, but IBM does not have anything even close to a monopoly in any part of the IT business these days (excepting mainframes and IBM i platforms, if you want to have a very tight market definition) and it has to chase growth where it can find it.

The question you have to ask is how IBM is aligning with your business and how you might be aligning with IBM's business. IBM has been giving Wall Street some insight into where it will be in 2018, thirty years after the AS/400 was launched and something that feels more like a millennium in IT time.

By now, you all know the mantra of the markets that IBM is pursuing with its "strategic initiatives."

Come on, chant it along with me as we could all have perhaps done at IBM's recent Investor Briefing event for Wall Street analysts. Let's say it together: Cloud, Data, Mobile & Social, and Security. (IBM actually pronounces it with an ampersand, which is a neat trick.)

These strategic businesses represented about $25 billion in revenues in 2014, comprising 27 percent of the company's revenues from the year, up from 13 percent in 2010.

"That $25 billion is a big business, even for IBM," Schroeter explained. "You have to have a B at the end to be relevant, but this $25 billion is absolutely relevant for us and for our clients."

Schroeter noted that the mix of that the mix of software in the revenues for these strategic imperative markets was around 50 percent, which is much greater than the percentage of software revenues for IBM at large. "So we have growth above the level of the market and the ability to scale even by our standards and the ability to craft a solution that is high value." IBM's growth rates in these combined social, mobile, security, big data, and cloud segments were roughly double the industry average from 2010 through 2014, too, so IBM is pretty sure it is running its business right.

Hardware, Schroeter noted, was about 10 percent of that strategic imperative pie in 2014, and services was around 40 percent.

To make his point, Schroeter said that eight years ago, IBM identified analytics as a key growth area, and now that business generates $17 billion in sales for the company. (He did not say what the baseline was eight years ago or how much money IBM had spent acquiring assets like Cognos, SPSS, Netezza and many others to buy a big chunk of that revenue growth.) IBM's hardware take for its analytics biz is about 10 percent, software is about 55 percent, and services is around 35 percent. This market is pegged at a $315 billion opportunity, and growing at around 7 percent per year between now and 7 percent. IBM's growth in the analytics business is keeping pace at 7 percent growth last year.

When it comes to cloud, there is no hardware sale at all, with the $7 billion cloud business last year being around 30 percent software and around 70 percent services. (There is plenty of hardware cost in this business, mind you.) IBM's software-as-a-service products, of which there are over 100 these days, have an annual run rate of about $3.5 billion, and are one reason why the cloud business at Big Blue is growing at 60 percent year-on-year. The cloud market opportunity that IBM is in love with has around a $400 billion total addressable market in 2018, and is growing at 23 percent compounded annually between now and then.

The engagement business--which includes mobile at $1 billion in sales, social at around $1 billion, and security at more than $1.5 billion--grew at more than 35 percent in 2014. At this pace, IBM will gain market share in this engagement business, which it pegs at $290 billion in 2018 and growing at 10 percent across the industry.

Looking out ahead, after making its forecasts, IBM is telling Wall Street that it can push $40 billion in revenues in these strategic initiatives by 2018, which will represent more than 40 percent of its total revenues. That is another way of saying that IBM will grow to be an approximately $100 billion company again by 2018, which is not huge revenue growth, but the strategic initiatives will fill in the gaps. Ginny Rometty, IBM's somewhat beleaguered chairman and CEO, has told Wall Street that scaling up the SoftLayer cloud and the applications that run on it will actually boost its earnings, but IBM has not said much about how profitable these other areas are within its strategic imperatives.

The interesting tidbit that Schroeter revealed in his presentation at the Investor Briefing was that 80 percent of IBM's customers buy all three of the elements of its product portfolio--hardware, software, and services.

Schroeter talked up how the mainframe continues to be strategic in core industries like banking, and he talked about how Citibank uses IBM System z and Power Systems iron to run virtually all of its applications, and that the bank is also a big user of its systems software and middleware. And to show the relationship between services and the Power Systems business, he explained that IBM Power Systems machines are behind about 550 million subscribers in the telecommunications industry in India, and amazingly, that all of this Power iron is delivered through a set of strategic outsourcing agreements with the big telcos in that country. (Why IBM has not mentioned this before is a bit of a mystery.) By the way, those Power machines are supporting about half of the telco subscribers in the entire country, which are mostly using mobile phones supplied by Bharti Airtel, Vodaphone India, and Idea Cellular.

Looking ahead, IBM believes that its "annuity like" software revenue stream--meaning subscriptions for software and support contracts--accounts for 70 percent of its revenues per year. IBM can count on it more or less like clockwork so long as customers don't shift their systems quickly. (Which very few enterprises can.) That annuity-like software business is growing at 3 percent a year, but the SaaS portion is growing at more like 70 percent. Larger customers are not doing software transactions the way they used to do in the past; they want subscriptions.

"For hardware, we have been saying for a while that our model is stable and profitable," explained Schroeter. "We have made tremendous, tremendous progress in turning what was a $1.7 billion decline in profit in Systems and Technology Group in 12 months, and we made a profit in the fourth quarter and we see pretty good growth coming out of that portfolio in 2015." IBM now has Power8 out for the first full quarter and the new System z13 mainframes ramping, too. As for storage, more of the value is shifting to software and away from hardware, both Rometty and Schroeter said in their presentations.

While this is all technically true, it is also a bit off the mark. Functions that are now sold as separate items in software are packaged as separate software features in storage arrays, and frankly, this is a change in packaging that is meant to aggrandize Software Group and hurts Systems and Technology Group. The same is true of the past two decades of Global Services taking a slice of what is really systems revenue.

If IBM wanted to show the real strength of the System z and Power Systems businesses, it would talk about them as a complete stack, with revenues for these platforms marked as such and software and services sales for other company's systems being kept in a separate set of buckets. I don't care about IBM's books, per se, but when IBM's executives and customers are making decisions based on the categories IBM chooses when it classifies its revenues and profits, it starts to matter. IBM is a systems company--80 percent of its customers buy all of its segments--and its bookkeeping and presentations should reflect that. Only then can the company, its customers, and its investors make sound decisions. My guess is that if IBM did that, it would show that System z and Power Systems sales have been subsidizing sales for software and services on other platforms, and that would raise all kinds of hell.

As far as IBM i customers are concerned, the message coming out of IBM is that the Power Systems business is being transformed such that it is all "high value" and has an intellectual property component, too, thanks to the OpenPower Foundation, which is opening up the Power systems stack to take on the hegemony of the X86 platform in the datacenter.

I will be attending the OpenPower Summit, the very first one, in San Jose this week, and I will be listening very carefully to how the Power ecosystem is expanding after being opened up. I will also be pressing IBM and its partners to open it up in ways that benefit the IBM i platform directly, rather than indirectly just by the strengthening and widening of the Power platform outside of Big Blue. OpenPower has been limited to Linux thus far, and I think IBM i and AIX should be brought into the fold. There is no technical reason why AIX and IBM i can't be ported to a bare metal OpenPower machine or a virtual one running OpenKVM.

Maybe what IBM needs to do is make a new AS/400. I will ponder that one my trip out to San Jose.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Five IBM i Facts That Will Surprise Your CIO

Five IBM i Facts That Will Surprise Your CIO
Published: February 18, 2015

by Alex Woodie

Trying to keep the IBM i relevant in your organization? It probably seems like an uphill battle at times, especially if you have a CIO who knows next to nothing about the platform. Here are five fun facts that may help save the platform at your organization, or at least get the CIO to give it a second look before he kicks it to the curb.

Fact 1: IBM i on Power is cheaper in the long run than Windows or Linux on Intel

The sticker shock associated with the acquisition of a new IBM i server can be damaging to the cardiovascular system of an otherwise healthy CIO. It's not uncommon (but it is rare) for a single symmetric multiple process (SMP) server to have a price tag approaching $1 million, whereas the incremental cost of adding another X86 processing node to one's rack is dropping near the $100 mark. These are the two extremes. This dollar disparity is seldom so clear cut, especially in light of recent price cuts on entry-level Power machines, but IBM's all-in-one approach (server, operating system, database, and hardware maintenance) puts it at a budgetary disadvantage compared to X86's piecemeal build-a-system approach, which looks inexpensive until it's added up.

Outside the user base, it's mostly unknown that the IBM i platform has an ace up its sleeve in the form of long term total cost of ownership (TCO). Not only is IBM's RISC hardware more powerful and reliable than equivalent X86 servers, but Big Blue has also automated much of the administration out of its servers (dedicated database and security administrators are a rarity on IBM i). This translates into significantly lower personnel costs over the long run. In 2012, IBM hired the firm ITG to run the numbers, and the three-year TCO came back as follows: $480,200 for a typical IBM i setup, $862,200 for a typical Windows setup, and $1,118,300 for a typical Linux setup. Even the CFO can appreciate that.

Fact 2: IBM i runs modern graphical applications, including mobile apps

The IBM i server is a victim of its own success. Its superior architecture, systems, and applications--first implemented and designed decades ago--are still running the business of thousands of companies around the world. You just don't find that kind of longevity with other systems, and this success should be hailed. But because many of these older AS/400 or iSeries systems (dare we mention System/36 and System/38 ancestors?) feature text-based "green-screen" interfaces, the uneducated CIO is prone to giving an ear to people who point and shout, "Look how outdated and yucky that old computer is!"

Show grandpa some respect, child! Yes, the green screens are long in the tooth, but the good news is you don't have to use those if you don't want to. (Surprisingly, to outsiders, many experienced users prefer green screens due their superior speed over mouse-driven interfaces). IBM has done a decent job exposing other ways to interface with the system, particularly with the RPG Open Access API and the recent addition of a REST interface for Web services. But the most visible work has been done by the community of IBM i software vendors and business partners, who offer all the tooling needed to develop first-rate Web and mobile user interfaces. Grandpa has some legs left in him. Watch him run.

Fact 3: IBM i blends proprietary and open source technologies

It is true that, at its heart, the IBM i server is a proprietary machine. As a developer, you cannot get access to the System Licensed Internal Code (SLIC) or Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI), which to this day remains trapped deep in the IBM i well. Bit-twiddlers who are accustomed to having every switch available to them will not feel at home with this machine, which epitomizes so much of IBM (both good and bad).

But instead of worrying about the proprietary layer, prospective business users should be thankful for it. Think of it as the equivalent of a thousand tiny IBM engineers right in your server, toiling away at boring stuff, such as making sure that MRP system from 1975 will run on the latest operating system and Power processors (which it will--quite well thank you). Besides, IBM supports loads of open source software higher up in the IBM i stack, everything from the Apache Web server and MySQL to freaking Node.js!

Fact 4: It is virus- and hacker- resistant and takes serious abuse

No computer architecture is completely secure, but good luck finding a business system that offers security features as strong and complete as the IBM i. The high level of security possible on the IBM i stems from several design points, most notably the object-oriented nature of the operating system itself, which prevents any given piece of code from being executed unless it's a recognizable object (if only Windows had worked this way!) IBM calls it "virus-resistant," which means there has never been a documented case of malware infecting an IBM i server, although it can harbor and disseminate Windows viruses through a Windows-like file system.

The system's role-based security mechanism is also among the most advanced of all business systems. When it's properly set up and configured, unauthorized users and applications have no way to access data that they are expressly forbidden from accessing. There is a reason major banks, healthcare companies, retailers, and governmental agencies continue to rely on the IBM i server to house their most important applications and data.

IBM's midrange server also has a reputation for putting up with physical abuse. While IT Jungle doesn't condone flooding your server, throwing it down a flight of stairs, leaving it running for years, running over it with a forklift, letting a tornado get it, or covering it up with drywall, IBM i servers have been known to put up with all of these indignities and continue to function.

Fact 5: The IBM i server is beloved by its users

Do not underestimate the power of the IBM i user community to support the computer they have grown to love. If you could somehow take the fanaticism that you see for Apple's consumer products and translate that into an equivalent for business computers, you would have something that looks like the IBM i user base. What is so fascinating about the IBM i phenomenon at the end of the day is that it is a business computer. It runs boring accounting systems, but in a freakishly efficient sort of way.

The IBM i server is an odd duck flying against the winds of standardization and homogenization, and that's one of the reasons that the IBM i community stands out from the pack. To the administrators, developers, analysts users, and business partners who have worked with it, the IBM i server represents how practical and elegant solutions to business problems can be attained. Yes, it's a little weird sometimes (see: EBCDIC run), and IBM keeps changing the name of it, to the great exasperation of the users (do not confuse allegiance to IBM i as loyalty to the company that bears its name). But for those who have come to see how the IBM i platform delivers simplicity where others revel in complexity, it's a lesson they will never forget.

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh021815-story01.html

RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC's Earnings Miss

Published: February 18, 2015

by Alex Woodie

Depending on where you live in the world, there's either a shortage or a surplus of RPG programmers at any point in time, a dynamic we have covered here in IT Jungle. But rarely has the availability of IBM i programming talent so publicly affected a company as it did last week, when the CEO of Computer Sciences Corp. blamed his company's $230 million-plus revenue shortfall in part on a shortage of RPG coders.

Mike Lawrie, the president and CEO of CSC, said "execution missteps" related to personnel recruitment were partly to blame for a revenue shortfall in the company's third fiscal quarter ended January 2. The publicly traded Virginia company, which develops an IBM i-based insurance application (among many other products and services), reported revenue of $2.95 billion. That was 7 percent below the Wall Street consensus of $3.18 billion and 8 percent below what it brought in during the same quarter last year.

Lawrie, a former senior IBM executive who spent 27 years with the company before leaving in 2004 to head Siebel Systems, says about $25 million to $40 million of that shortfall can be attributed to the difficulty in finding and hiring RPG programmers to implement insurance applications for its customers.

"We were, this quarter, in a major rollout with an insurance company that required some very specific skills, RPG," Lawrie said during a Q&A with securities analysts, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call. "RPG is not a programming language where a lot of people are learning it today, so there is a finite supply. We had difficulty recruiting and getting those people on-boarded in time to be able to bill all the work that was under contract in the quarter."

RPG, of course, is the most popular programming language for the IBM i server. While the server platform supports other languages, including COBOL, Java, PHP, EGL, Node.JS, and Ruby, the vast majority of existing applications were written in the proprietary procedural language that IBM first rolled out as Report Program Generator in 1959.

Nobody in the industry is predicting demand for RPG skills to hit zero, considering the large number of existing applications still running critical applications for companies in every industry. But the tightness of the market for RPG programmers apparently surprised CSC.

"I think this [difficulty in recruiting RPG programmers] is a result of a much tighter labor market," Lawrie said while pointing out the projects require some very specific and specialized skills.

CSC has taken steps to fix the problem, including working with partners who have the programming skills the company needs. It also raised the salaries being offered for the open positions.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Power Systems Inspire New z13 Mainframe

Power Systems Inspire New z13 Mainframe
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011915-story04.html

Published: January 19, 2015

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the old days, the mainframe and midrange divisions of IBM rivalled each other almost as much as they took on competition from outside the walls of Big Blue. But since the mid-1990s, when the company first started converging its system lines and made sure they could all run Java and its application server, the different system units of IBM have been collaborating and converging. Now, after selling off its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall, IBM is down to two system divisions within a single IBM Systems group.

The first machine to come out of the new IBM Systems group, which is being led by Tom Rosamilia, familiar to the IBM i community as a former general manager in charge of the Power Systems division as well as the System z mainframe division, is the System z13 mainframe, which was announced in New York City last Wednesday to much fanfare. The System z13 machine looks to be coming out a little earlier than many had expected, and I think that IBM actually moved the announcement up at some point in recent months. IBM's System z techies were set to divulge all of the feeds and speeds of the new eight-core z13 processor at the heart of the new mainframe at the International Solid State Circuits Conference that runs from February 22 through 26. IBM did not provide much in the way of details specs for the new z13 chip, but Mike Desens, vice president of System z development in the new IBM Systems group, gave me some insight into the new processor and the systems that wrap around them. And as has been the case in the past, the Power and z processors are designed by a single processing team and are borrowing technologies from each other. This does not, however, mean that IBM is creating a converged processor that can support either Power or z instruction sets. IBM has not done that, to date, and to do so would be a Herculean engineering task. It is far easier to have two different chips that share common elements wherever they can.

The new z13 chips are implemented in the 22 nanometer process at the fab in East Fishkill, New York, that is now owned by GlobalFoundries. The System z13 machine makes use of processors with six, seven, or eight working cores and mixes and matches them to get a varying amount of active cores across the product line. There are five different models, which offer scalability from 30 to 141 total cores that are configurable by end users in the system; the largest machine, the System z13-NE1, actually has 168 physical cores in its refrigerator-sized cabinet. (This 22 nanometer process is the same one used to make the Power8 processor, which comes in a variant with six-cores that are put two per socket into machines and another with a dozen cores on the same die.)

Like other chip manufacturers, IBM uses the chip manufacturing process shrink to add more transistors, and therefore more features, to the chip. In the case of the z13, IBM had to keep one eye on boosting the single-threaded performance of its core z/OS workloads and the overall scalability of the box to run lots of virtualized workloads while at the same time goosing the performance of the chip for in-line analytics for transaction processing or making generic Linux workloads run faster. The clock speed that IBM chooses for each System z processor generation is set based on the thermals and throughput constraints of the design, and as has been the case with the Power chip family, sometimes clock speeds go up and sometimes they come down as IBM is goosing the performance. With the Power7 chips, IBM was able to double the performance while radically goosing the core count from two with the Power6 to eight with the Power7 while at the same time cutting the clock speed because of a radical redesign of the core. With the z13, IBM is similarly dropping clock speeds and yet boosting single-threaded performance.

To be specific, the z11 chips, which had four cores running at a top speed of 5.2 GHz, was implemented in a 45 nanometer process when it came out in 2010. A single z11 core delivered about 1,200 MIPS of raw computing capacity running at full throttle, as gauged by the mythical measure of mainframe oomph. The z12 chip came out in the summer of 2012, and it had six-cores clocking in at 5.5 GHz, with each core delivering about 1,600 MIPS of performance. The z12 chip was etched in 32 nanometer processes, and IBM used the process shrink to goose the clock speed by 6 percent to boost the core count by 50 percent. The z12 chip had a new out-of-order execution pipeline and much larger on-chip caches to further increase single-threaded performance. The new z13 chip implemented in 22 nanometer processes runs at 5 GHz, mainly to cut back on heat, and yet offers about a 10 percent performance bump per core thanks to other tweaks in the core design. This includes better branch prediction and better pipelining in the core, just to name two improvements.

The z13 chip also has much larger caches, which IBM feels is the best way to secure good performance on a wide variety of workloads that are heavy on I/O and processing. Specifically, the z13 core has 96 KB of L1 instruction and 120 KB of L1 data cache. The L2 caches on the most recent generations of mainframe chips are split into data and instructions caches, and in this case have been doubled to 2 MB each. The on-chip L3 cache, which is implemented in embedded DRAM (eDRAM) as on the Power7 and Power8 chips, has been increased by 50 percent to 64 MB shared across the six cores. And the L4 cache that is parked out on the SMP node controller chip in the System z13 machine has been boosted to 480 MB, a 25 percent increase. The System z13 tops out at 10 TB of main memory, three times that of the predecessor zEnterprise EC12 machine.

All told, says Desens, the changes in the cache hierarchy smooth out the SMP scalability of the system, and a top-end System z13 will have about 40 percent more aggregate MIPS than the largest System zEnterprise EC12 from two and a half years ago. I estimated that zEnterprise EC12 machine at a 75,000 MIPS of total capacity, and that puts the new System z13 at 105,000 MIPS.

To give you a sense of what that might mean in terms of Power8 performance, IBM's own performance documents from the Power4 generation say that to calculate the rough equivalent performance on IBM i workloads, take the MIPS and multiply by seven and that will give you an approximate ranking on the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) test that IBM uses for OS/400 and IBM i database and transaction processing work. That means a top-end System z13-NE1 model would be rated at about 735,000 CPWs. A 256-core Power 795 using 4 GHz Power7 chips had about 1.6 million CPWs, and Power E880 with 64 Power8 cores running at 4.35 GHz delivers 755,000 CPWs. Roughly speaking, the Power E880 is delivering 12,000 CPWs per core while the new System z13-NE1 is delivering around 5,200 CPWs per core, a least based on my MIPS estimates and the MIPS-to-CPW ratios. Everything comes down to cases, and the important thing is that both the Power8 and z13 systems offer lots of capacity. (IBM has sophisticated Parallel Sysplex clustering to lash multiple z13 machines into a single compute engine, too, and IBM has not really talked about its DB2 for i Multisystem clustering for about 15 years. But as I have said before, it should.) The other thing to remember is that the performance numbers for the Power 795 and Power E880 have four-way and eight-way SMT turned on, respectively, and this significantly boosts performance on thread-friendly workloads. Like by a factor of 50 percent moving from two to eight virtual threads, according to the internal IBM data that I have seen. IBM will very likely increase the SMT virtual threading on future System z processors, and will probably get to eight-way at some point, perhaps with the z14, perhaps with a z13+ if such a thing is ever announced.

Some z13 workloads are going to run a lot faster than these raw performance estimates imply, and that is because some technologies that have been in the Power chips for years are now making their way into mainframe engines. First, IBM has implemented simultaneous multithreading in the z chips for the first time. SMT is a hardware virtualization technique that allows for a single physical pipeline in the processor to be virtualized, allowing for compilers to schedule instructions and data movement into the pipeline more efficiently. The SMT in the z13 chip is two-way, meaning that it presents two virtual pipelines for the physical pipeline in the core; IBM did two-way SMT in the Power6, four-way SMT in the Power7, and has eight-way SMT in the Power8. As is the case with the Power chips, this SMT is automatically and dynamically configurable based on the workloads. For software that likes threads, these virtual threads can really boost performance. IBM has also added SIMD--that's single instruction, multiple data--vector math units to the z13 chip, also the first time it has done so.

The two-way SMT helps Linux workloads run up to 32 percent faster than on z12 chips, says Desens, and the combination of SMT threading and SIMD units in the z13 can help Java8 applications get as much as 50 percent more throughput per core. (Those fatter caches and wider pipes into them help a lot here, too.)

The sales pitch for the System z13 machine is interesting in that Big Blue is talking about how a single box can process 2.5 billion transactions per day, and that mobile computing is driving up transaction volumes on an exponential scale. Now that we can look up anything at any time, we do, and this is driving up traffic on back-end databases and transaction processing systems for the companies that are part of our lives such as banks, insurance companies, and such. The ability to use the various kinds of computing to do risk analysis and fraud detection while transactions themselves are being composed and processed is not something that is unique to the System z mainframe. All of the hardware pieces are there to do it on the Power Systems platforms, too. The question is this: Will IBM's marketing point this out, and will it similarly peddle its Power-based systems?

Sunday, January 11, 2015

IBM Reorganizes To Reflect Its New Business Machine

Published: January 12, 2015

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue did a lot of changing last year, and CEO Ginni Rometty started off this year by making some organizational and personnel changes that reflect the new shape of its company and the opportunities that it sees ahead of it in the global economy that is also undergoing wrenching change. Information technology and the economy have been changing each other for so long that it is hard to say what is cause and what is effect, but what can be said is that IBM has spent more than 10 decades adapting to such changes.

In a memo to IBM employees that was sent out on January 5, Rometty explained the organizational changes as well as the rationale behind them.

"A year ago we laid out our strategy, and said that IBM's investments, acquisitions, divestitures--and our own practices as IBMers--would be reshaped by our strategic imperatives of data, cloud and engagement, underscored by security," Rometty wrote. "The past year has strongly validated our strategy, as clients embrace and invest in these new technologies. Our industry is rapidly re-ordering. And IBM has been moving aggressively--evident in a long list of 'signature moments' through 2014. They included the formation of IBM Watson; the global expansion of SoftLayer's cloud pods; the launch of Power8; the creation of our cloud platform-as-a-service, BlueMix; our $3 billion investment in next-generation semiconductor R&D; the acquisition of Cloudant; the launch of Watson Analytics; our divestitures of x86 servers and semiconductor manufacturing; our enterprise mobility alliance with Apple; our cloud partnerships with SAP and Tencent; and our Big Data partnership with Twitter."

While IBM mashed up Software Group, its very profitable software arm, with Systems and Technology Group, its sometimes profitable and sometimes money-losing hardware unit, back in July 2010 during a massive reorganization that set the stage for Rometty's rise to the top of Big Blue, the company did not organize itself into vertical stacks as it talked about its financials. Software Group and Systems and Technology Group remained distinct businesses, with their own segments and profit and loss statements. With the sale of the System x division to Lenovo Group, which closed in the United States in October and in Europe last week, IBM has seen fit to start talking about its systems business as a whole.

To that end, the new IBM Systems group will include Power Systems and System z mainframe servers, IBM's various tape, disk, and flash storage products as well as operating systems and middleware as a single unit. Tom Rosamilia, who was heading up Systems and Technology Group, will lead the IBM Systems group. The interesting bit to me is that IBM will finally show revenue for systems that actually reflects what it really does derive from its systems business--something it should have done a long time ago. IBM sells integrated stacks of servers, storage, and software to a very large portion of its customers, and if it wanted to show its strength in this regard, it should have perhaps changed the way it reported its revenues many years ago. It will be interesting to see how IBM accounts for the sale of middleware, database, and application software that is not tied to its own systems in some fashion.

As part of the reorganization, IBM is also appointing Steve Mills, the long-time leader of the Software Group and the executive chosen to run the combined software and systems units in recent years, as an executive vice president in charge of software and systems. The name change is significant in that Mills is the only executive vice president--all of the other top leaders are senior vice presidents. Even though software assets will be embedded in various IBM groups (including a new IBM Cloud group) and in vertical stacks that also have their own managers (such as the new IBM Healthcare group that was also created), Mills is being tapped to keep track of all of the software assets as a whole and keep everything humming. "We will also look to him to play a leadership role in our most significant technology partnerships and relationships involving clients, countries and our industry," Rometty said.

With Systems and Technology Group gone, IBM Research has to go somewhere, and it will be a free-standing unit led by Arvind Krishna, who is being elevated to senior vice president and director of the R&D arm of Big Blue. He succeeds John Kelly, who now has the position of senior vice president of solutions portfolio and research. Krishna was most recently general manager of development and manufacturing in the Systems and Technology Group, and he led the team that created the Power8 processor and who ran IBM's database business for many years as well as having key technical roles in Software Group and IBM Research.

In his new role spanning research and (I just hate this word) solutions, Kelly is manifesting something that has been happening with IBM for the past two decades, and that is the increasing connection between the research and development that IBM's scientists and researchers perform and a tie to solving specific business problems for customers. Indeed, Kelly is the bridge between IBM Research and three new cross-platform business units. They are: IBM Analytics, led by Bob Picciano; IBM Commerce, led by Deepak Advani; and IBM Security, led by Brendan Hannigan. All of these divisions, Rometty explained, will have an analytics component, will have software assets tied to them as well as professional services. Each unit, as Rometty put it, "will offer hybrid cloud delivery, and each unit will support open platforms and global ecosystems." I think that means the stacks IBM creates will be available on IBM's own systems as well as those of others and on its SoftLayer cloud and very likely other big clouds.

In some ways, these new stack groups resemble the IBM Watson group that was formed last year and that is being led by Mike Rhodin. IBM is also forming another industry-focused unit called IBM Healthcare, which Rhodin will create using the hardware, software, services, and research available across IBM.

All of the executives of these units as well as Krishna report to Kelly in the new organization chart. Picciano has been general manager of IBM's Lotus groupware business, overall software sales, and development and support for the DB2 database running on Linux, Windows, and Unix platforms, among other jobs. Deepak Advani was CEO at statistical analysis software maker SPSS before IBM acquired it and has most recently been in charge of management tools for systems and cloud. Hannigan was CEO of Q1 Labs, which IBM acquired in October 2011 and which is the basis of its former security division. Rhodin was also a general manager related to software before taking the IBM Watson role, and headed up IBM's Software Solutions Group, which peddled Smarter Commerce, Smarter Cities, business analytics, and social business stacks to customers. Before taking over various IBM system units over the past year, Rosamilia was in charge of IBM's very successful WebSphere middleware business.

The last big change that was announced for 2015 is the creation of the IBM Cloud group, which will be headed up by long-time IBM executive Robert LeBlanc. The SoftLayer cloud, the Cloud Managed Services (CMS) tools derived from SmartCloud and OpenStack, and the BlueMix commercialized version of the open source Cloud Foundry tool will be put into this new group. LeBlanc has been in charge of IBM's Tivoli systems management and WebSphere middleware lines in the past, among many other high-level jobs. It looks like Rosamilia and LeBlanc report directly to Rometty, but that is not clear from her message to employees.

If you are sensing a theme here, aside from change, it is that software has been the route to a senior position at IBM.

"As you can see, IBM software has become an essential element in every part of our company," Rometty said in her note to IBM employees. "Indeed, it is so because our software portfolio is the foundation of the world's core business systems and powers the expanding array of cloud-based solutions we are bringing to clients."

I can't wait to see the new financial presentation reflecting these new groups and units, which IBM will probably use when it reports its fourth quarter 2014 financial results, which should come out by the end of January if history is any guide.