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.

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 — 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.

Jim Porell at the Mainframe Typepad blog has an interesting post pondering whether Windows will be the next operating system to run on System z.

Now that Linux is on the mainframe and Solaris is getting ported to it, it seems natural to speculate that other OSs will make their way there as well. With IBM pushing big iron as an ideal consolidation server, the more operating systems on there the better, right?

Well, it turns out that this thought is nothing new. Back in 1994, folks at IBM started looking into this possibility but found that running Windows natively on the mainframe was not possible due to the difference in endianness between the mainframe and what Windows was used to running on, x86.

However, there is a way to get Windows applications to the mainframe, namely by using software from a company called Mainsoft that converts .NET applications to Java bytecode, which can then operate on System z.

But Porell points to eclipse.org, an application development group, as being the possible way to go when it comes to Windows application development on the System z:

If you really want cross platform deployment from the Windows desktop environment, eclipse.org is an open standards group comprised of a number of leading tooling vendors to facilitate rapid application development, good tool integration and provide a flexible choice for platforms to which those applications can be deployed. Leveraging this tool set will facilitate exploitation of mainframe technology and is highly recommended to deliver the best qualities of service for software running on System z.

Timothy Sipples, who works in the IBM software division, has a post over at the Mainframe Typepad blog about Web-like interfaces for mainframe users.

The post is partly a discussion of mainframe interfaces (Screen Definition Facility II or SDF II and 3270) and partly a pitch for WebSphere Dashboard Framework, which Sipples likens to SDF. The bottom line, Sipples said, is that Web interfaces have been on the mainframe for decades.

Most business users want graphical Web interfaces, so if you’re not delivering them, who (what) will? I directly interact with a mainframe every day, but I cannot remember the last time I used a 3270 terminal emulator. The face you present to your users is critical, just as the face your company presents to your customers determines your business success.

There’s nothing wrong with terminal interfaces per se, and many users are quite productive with them. I have a guess that many blog readers happen to like this traditional user interface, but what you use and prefer shouldn’t influence the service you deliver to most business users.

The features and benefits of the WebSphere Dashboard Framework are displayed in a demo on the IBM site.