BMC makes mainframe predictions at AFCOM
Last week at AFCOM I sat down with Ralph Crosby, the chief technology officer for BMC’s mainframe business, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of the mainframe. We talked about virtual mainframe sprawl, better WebSphere performance and predictions for a new zLinux platform.
Virtual mainframe sprawl. Crosby says people are running into mainframe virtual sprawl. Much like the folks managing the x86 environment, mainframes are proliferating in their own way. There are still shops out there that are provisioning a new logical partition (LPAR) every decade, but the bigger companies that are now using the mainframe as a consolidation platform are pushing on companies like BMC, IBM and CA to come up with tools to deal with those demands.
“Tools on the mainframe are very robust, but they weren’t designed for what the demands are today,” Crosby said. “IBM is talking about is consolidating thousands of servers onto zLinux — it’s got automation written all over it.”
The z10 boosts WebSphere on big iron. The new z10 IBM mainframe computer announced earlier this year is going to allow people to leverage WebSphere much better than before, according to Crosby. He said some mainframe customers had been using WebSphere, but the problem was that it was CPU-intensive — it took lots of cycles to run. “The z9 was OK, but you could run WebSphere on your laptop faster,” Crosby said. “The z10 is significantly faster on CPU capabilities and WebSphere is going to be a lot easier to deploy. A lot of WebSphere is going to AIX and Solaris platforms — IBM would like to see people bring that back to the mainframe.”
SAP on zLinux. A few years ago, IBM made a push to get SAP on the mainframe, enabling SAP’s application server to run on big iron. But that didn’t work and IBM discontinued it. Crosby says we’ll likely see a big push to run SAP on zLinux.
Oracle Unbreakable Linux for mainframe. Oracle has been trying to get a toehold in the mainframe for years, Crosby said. “They’d love to get their hands on the big licensing dollars.” With the acquisition of BEA and the development of Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Crosby says the time is right for Oracle on zLinux. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see them go in this direction in the next year or two.”
What do you think of these predictions and trends? Leave a comment.
Posted: April 9th, 2008 under Mainframe operating systems and management.
BMC understands how efficient virtualization on the mainframe is. From a Green energy efficiency perspective running zLunuz on a z10 scores a 10. Performance + Energy efficiency + ease of deployment makes it easy to see more apps Big iron for its advantages.
Comment by David F. Anderson PE — April 10, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
Our 300 mip zOS site is going to SAP. IBM would not even offer a competitive BID for a z10/Linux against their AIX group. IBM does NOT seem to be serious about keeping z sites on z. Perhaps there is a certain mips level, but we will be leaving the Z world in the near future.
Comment by John Mattson — April 14, 2008 @ 10:42 am