At the beginning of this year, Redmond Magazine announced its Editors’ Choice Awards, handing VMware ESX the trophy for being “most reliable.” In second place? The IBM mainframe.

Why am I mentioning it now when the awards were handed out in January? Well, because I didn’t know of them. A couple colleagues were down at a VMware virtualization forum in New York City recently, and VMware was touting its awards from the magazine, and specifically noting how ESX beat out the mainframe in reliability.

Please keep in mind that this is a magazine focused on the Microsoft IT community, not the IT community as a whole. So for the mainframe, which doesn’t run Windows (yet), to even make it on this list is something. I’m pretty sure the mainframe was the only non-Microsoft related product that placed in any category. Anyway, here are Redmond Magazine’s descriptions for each.

On VMware ESX: “The least stable part of ESX is usually the administrator. The code is virtually bomb-proof.“

On the mainframe: “They’ve been running for more than 50 years, and probably will for another 50.”

Not everyone thinks ESX is “bomb-proof.” On the other end of the extreme spectrum, John Toigo said during a speech last year that ESX was “shoddy” and full of bugs. So the truth is probably somewhere in between. More reliable than the mainframe? That’s questionable, although maybe understandable coming from a Microsoft-focused magazine.

James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk, has a great post on CICS over at the Mainframe Typepad blog. His basic thesis: CICS is becoming a cash-cow because IBM is invested in SOA-ing it to death instead of in expanding the features of CICS itself:

What happens if you want to change the underlying enterprise data model, for example? You can’t do that without changing the code. You can service-enable all you want, but SOA is as much about component and service isolation, enabling flexibility and portfolio maintainability, than service reuse.

Governor, who lists IBM as one of RedMonk’s clients, adds that down at Impact 2008, an IBM conference on SOA held in Las Vegas earlier this month, it sounded to him like IBM was too interested in, as he wrote it, “extending existing investments” instead of trying to find “net new customers for the box.”

“Leverage existing workloads? I am most interested in net new workloads on Z - and I don’t just mean Linux-based,” he wrote.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that I’m always asking IBM about. New mainframe customers, especially in the United States, can be hard to find. It seems that IBM is investing in existing customers in the U.S. and then grabbing new customers outside the U.S. Whenever I ask about new mainframe customers, IBM always falls back on the BRIC acronym — Brazil, Russia, India, China. Hoplon Infotainment is one of IBM’s most-often touted new customers because a) they’re a new customer; and b) they do online gaming on a mainframe, which is a novelty all its own.

But as much as IBM talks about BRIC when it comes to new mainframers, it seems like they’re throwing bricks in the U.S. There may be some American companies new to the mainframe, but overall for new customers, IBM seems focused overseas.

Many mainframers to this day continue to lambast former technology writer Stewart Alsop for saying in 1991 that the mainframe would be dead in the next five years. Most people know that IBM’s big iron is thriving today. But without Lou Gerstner, who knows whether Alsop’s prediction may have come true.

As Frank Hayes writes in his Computerworld column, Microsoft is now in need of a Lou Gerstner to save its organization. As you probably know, Gerstner was CEO of IBM from 1993 until 2002 and is credited with turning the company around. Part of the company’s plans before Gerstner got there was to split into so-called “Baby Blues,” and most people in the organization felt that the mainframe would be going away. Hayes writes:

When he got there, Gerstner found a company that literally didn’t believe in its own future. The mainframe business — the core of IBM — was collapsing. Other business units were busy trying to turn themselves into stand-alone companies that could be spun off. The big blue ship was sinking, and everyone wanted off.

What Gerstner did was hold the ship together, but he did it by changing the entire culture within IBM:

What mattered was this: Gerstner led IBM to change. He had to. He understood that IBM’s old way of doing business just wouldn’t work any longer. With a plummeting stock price and 100,000 laid off, change was the only option.

Microsoft, Hayes said, is now at that moment, teetering on the edge of obscurity. Why? Because the core of Microsoft is Windows, and Hayes says that Vista is so bad that it could break the customer lock-in that Microsoft has had over users for years.

Vista breaks applications. It breaks device drivers. It breaks the strongest reasons for customers to stay with Microsoft. It actually threatens to break Microsoft’s customer lock-in.

That’s the one change Microsoft can least afford. And it’s the change Microsoft is actually plunging headlong into.

Hayes writes that he hopes Microsoft can right its ship in the same way that Gerstner righted IBM’s and kept big iron alive, thereby turning Alsop into a goat that the mainframe community cherishes like a household pet.

Novell has announced some discounts for users that want to run its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on a mainframe. Novell already has about 80% of the mainframe Linux market, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) having the other 20%, and so Novell is trying to expand upon its dominance in the area.

With the new Novell pricing, a three-year subscription to SLES on the mainframe will cost what a two-year subscription now costs. And a five-year subscription will cost what a three-year subscription costs now.

There is a catch — isn’t there always? The discounts only apply to users who are coming to Linux on the mainframe through consolidation of distributed servers, or for renewing SUSE Linux on mainframe customers. Although I would guess that probably covers a large chunk of the users who run or would run Linux on the mainframe.

A one-year subscription for patch and upgrade for Novell SUSE on the mainframe is about $12,000. RHEL starts at $15,000 per license per year on the mainframe.

The Novell announcement continues its push on the mainframe. Earlier this year, it came out with a starter kit that lets mainframe users try out SUSE Linux on that platform for free, giving still-skeptical users a chance to try out Linux on big iron.

Software giant CA has filed an affidavit from a New York University computer science professor that it claims shows irrefutable proof that Rocket Software stole source code from its IBM DB2 management software.

CA initially filed a $200 million lawsuit against Rocket Software in U.S. District Court in New York last August, saying the Newton, Mass.-based Rocket stole its intellectual property. It said the property was obtained through Rocket Software employees that previously worked for Platinum Software, a company CA acquired in 1999.

The affidavit filed last week was from Benjamin Goldberg, an associate professor at NYU hired by CA to compare software source code between the two companies. He claimed to find striking similarities, including the exact same comments in the code down to the number of question marks in particular sentences.

“The fact that all of the data labels in the source code files in Sealed Exhibit B are virtually identical eliminates any explanation for the similarity other than copying because the chances of this happening at random are astronomical,” Goldberg said in a statement.

CA said it couldn’t compare the source code until now because Rocket only made it available earlier this year. CA wants a court injunction preventing Rocket from selling its DB2 management software. If that were successful, Rocket could very well go out of business.

A person who answered the phone at Rocket, which is an IBM business partner, said the company had no comment. In a statement Rocket posted to its website last August, it said that it “believes that the claims are meritless, and will defend the litigation vigorously.”

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.

ORLANDO - One session at the conference for Share, a user group for mainframe and other large systems users, compared building a data center out with Intel-based Linux servers with a mainframe architecture that has virtual Linux servers. Keep in mind that this was at the Share conference, so the bias was clear: Scale up beats scale out. But the number-crunching exercise was still interesting examine in terms of hidden costs you might not expect from scale out.

First, the session was by Mark Post, a technical support engineer for Novell who does a lot of work around Linux on System z. He spoke about a specific project he was involved in with a previous employer, which he didn’t name. He also stressed that Novell was not involved with this project at all. That company did consulting for a client looking to build out an Intel-based Linux infrastructure. He then compared that with an estimated build-out for a z9 mainframe. Here’s the 3-year breakdown:

The only issue I might take with Post’s assessment is software. Post mainly looked at database and operating system licensing costs, but didn’t compare other third-party software costs; for example, systems management software from CA or BMC. One of mainframers’ biggest complaint is third-party software costs, which can often run them millions of dollars depending on what they have.

Still, even if you’re talking a couple million more on the mainframe side, it still shows a savings over the Lintel build-out. For a more complete breakdown of the figures, check out Post’s presentation.

ORLANDO — The award for Best Session Title here at the Share large systems user group conference goes to one called “‘Pimping’ Your FICON Ride: How Advanced Cisco Features Enhance Your SAN.” Here’s the full description (funny emphasis by me):

Join the FICON team at Cisco to discover how you can pimp your FICON ride. We’ll show you how we can non-disruptively supercharge your current MDS chassis to 8Gbps, integrate FICON VSANs to isolate workloads, enhance your cascaded links with FICON port channels, initiate QoS for workload prioritization, and allow you to securely extend your FICON links over optical, dark fiber or FCIP. All this performance is nothing without control, and we’ve got the integrated dashboard and plush leather recaro seating to ensure your FICON ride is ready for the autobahn!

There is nothing more illin’ in this world than some hot, fierce I/O throughput. You know what I’m talking about, fo shizzle. Wait, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Word!

IBM is expected to introduce its new mainframe next Tuesday. They’re holding an event in New York City, during which they’re expected the roll out the new version of big iron as well as preview z/OS v1.10, which is expected out in September.

I had thought that maybe IBM would make the announcement in Orlando, where the Share user group is holding its conference. But it looks like it will happen in NYC. I’ll be there and snapping pictures when they roll the new machine out. In the meantime, here are some details on the new z10.

Arcati, a U.K.-based mainframe publishing company, has just come out with its annual Mainframe Yearbook, which acts as a guide for mainframe z/os users. Trever Eddolls, a freelance mainframe technical writer, announced the book’s availability on his Mainframe Update blog. The 150-page book includes:

• Technical assistance articles such as “Modernizing mainframe systems: Extend versus migrate.”
• The results of a mainframe survey of 100 users taken in December.
• A 64-page directory that lists the company information for more than 100 mainframe vendors.
• A media guide (yes, SearchDataCenter.com is in there).
• A glossary of terminology.
• A final section that includes timelines for mainframe hardware and software, as well as technical information tables on all the z9 mainframe models available today.

If you’re a mainframer, this is a publication that could serve as a great reference guide for the whole year.