In most things, using three systems is more difficult than using two systems. This is true for disaster restart programs as well, so it caught our attention that Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. recently released a two-site configuration of its Geographically Dispersed Disaster Restart (GDDR) product. The company already had a three-site version on the market, apparently “cutting their teeth” on the more challenging configuration, and now making the product available to more  shops with smaller, two-site infrastructures.

Like it’s older sibling, the two-site version of GDDR provides a high level of availability in mainframe environments. The product “enables customers to automatically restart host mainframe systems, critical applications and EMC Symmetrix DMX storage systems to minimize the impact of unplanned or planned outages and enhance information availability and protection,” according to EMC’s press release.

This two-site version competes with IBM’s Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex. While IBM sells GDPS as a service engagement, “EMC sells their offering as a product, with services strongly recommended, but not required,” noted Jim Baker, a research manager at IDC Corp. According to Baker, “This means that every change [in GDPS] is cause for a reopener with regard to the professional services price,” while EMC customers know what the costs are up-front with GDDR. And, depending on their sophistication levels (”Very, very sophisticated users,” Baker stressed), customers can implement GDDR without EMC’s assistance.

Another key difference is where the failover control comes from. IBM’s GDPS has K LPAR, meaning that its logical partition is inside the sysplex it controls. Instead, EMC’s GDDR “uses a heartbeat mechanism amongst the entities and can control failover from outside the sysplex,” Baker explained.

While companies that currently run GDPS would have to weigh the pros and cons of switching over to GDDR, Baker believes that the release of a product that competes with GDPS will give customers leverage over IBM.”Competition is a beautiful thing,” said Baker.

GDDR is intended for very large companies that have sysplex in multiple locations and use mainframe-only technology.

“This is a huge step forward for EMC in the mainframe business,” Baker said. “There is still a sharp EMC focus on the mainframe, where most of the world’s transactional data still resides.”

This post was contributed by regular columnist, Robert Crawford. On the opposite end of our normal content, which provides helpful tips to smooth out your operations, this post is offered up for a bit of comedy. We encourage you to share your comments or your own practical jokes in the comments section at the end.

[Update: For those of you who missed the tongue in cheek nature of this post, it is in fact, a joke. Please don’t try this at work. — Matt Stansberry, Editor]

Work is getting to be too serious. Between the demand for 100% availability and doing more with fewer people, there is little room for those “water cooler” moments we used to enjoy. I say it’s time to revive joy in the workplace and build team spirit. This column suggests some practical jokes that will engender mirth and leave everyone in stitches.

Remap the 3270 emulator keyboard

When a colleague leaves his or her workstation unlocked our first temptation is to send a scathing e-mail to the CEO. But some situations call for something more subtle. Instead of a career-ending missive simply reprogram the victim’s 3270 keyboard mapping.

There are a lot of creative ways to do this. My favorite is to shift every key one to the right so that typing, “logon” will actually be “;phpm” on the screen. Keyboard macros also offer possibilities where a joker could map“left-shift-F1” to type, “tso delete sys1.linklib” and hit enter.

Rename ISPF profile dataset

The lowly ISPF profile dataset (ISPPROF) looks innocuous enough as a simple, 80 byte record library. However, over years of use it accumulates a user’s preferences, job card text, PF key assignments and favorite datasets. Most of us don’t realize how lost we would be without this saved information until it’s gone.

Make someone’s day by deleting his or her personal ISPPROF library. Be sure to stand near your victim’s cubicle so you can hear the hilarious exclamations of disbelief as he or she scrambles to recover. For extra points, be sure to delete any backups in Hierarchical Storage Manager (DFHSM).

DD Dummy a DBMS archive file

Each database management system (DBMS) from IMS to DB2 has an archival process that copies active log records onto tape or other media for safekeeping. Normally these archives aren’t needed except for database recoveries.

Someone with access to the archival JCL could alter the archive output dataset to DUMMY. The records are then copied off of the active logs, but are not saved. The records will soon be gone for good when, in a few hours, the DBMS comes around and overwrites the allegedly archived log.

Imagine how hard your database administrators (DBA’s) will laugh when they have to do a production database recovery only to find they have no records to do so. This also works in cases where a DBMS has to go into the archival logs to emergency restart.

Replace stand-alone dump (SAD)

SAD is the failure data capture tool of last resort designed to gather storage dumps when the system itself is so damaged it can’t recover. System-wide failures are rare nowadays but strict uptime requirements mean any full LPAR failures must be diagnosed on the first occurrence.

Messing with SAD isn’t easy as not everyone is prepared to do the type of primitive, low level programming required. However, a study of SAD’s structure and flow may allow a lesser programmer to cause mischief by replacing a CSECT or two.

There are a couple of variations on this joke. One tactic might be to replace the SAD prompts with questions such as, “What was that IPL volume again?” Another opportunity is to leave the prompts alone and execute enough code to keep the processor busy for the amount of time a SAD usually takes. But, instead of writing storage contents, fill the dump dataset with cheerful speculations about your coworkers’ personal lives. I’m sure IBM support will also appreciate your wit after a long day of looking at normal dumps.

Reinitialize database volumes

This practical joke comes with plausible deniability. After all, anyone could understand why a simple finger check or brain freeze might cause someone to reinitialize the wrong set of volumes.

What I like about this joke is the slow buildup. You can reinitialize the volumes at 08:00 in the morning. Nothing bad will happen immediately as the DBMS usually has the database datasets along with the necessary extent information. However, once the volumes are reinitialized they become available for allocation and the wide open spaces are too tempting of candidate volumes to System Managed Storage (SMS).

Accordingly, by 10:00 or so other datasets will start to pop up on the volumes. As they appear DBMS reports of missing records and I/O errors will trickle in. Soon the errors will become a flood just about the time the DBA’s realize what’s going on.

At that point you can explain your joke to the merriment of all. Better yet, you have your own topper when the DBA’s realize they can’t recover the databases because you dummied out the DBMS log archive a couple of days ago.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: For 24 years, Robert Crawford has worked off and on as a CICS systems programmer. He is experienced in debugging and tuning applications and has written in COBOL, Assembler and C++ using VSAM, DLI and DB2.

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.