By: Aabha Gandhi - The Daily Star, Kuwait

On a recent visit to Kuwait, Peter Norris, IT consultant with IBM, spoke on in-depth usage of IBM’s z-Series mainframe platform. In an informal conversation with The Daily Star, Norris explained the concept of a mainframe. He said “It’s a machine, which in the past was referred to as the mainframe, it’s a big server that can run lots of different things at the same time. The thing that sets the z-series apart from others in the industry, is that for a UNIX machine or a WINDOWS machine you would buy one box and put one application in the machine, for a second application you would buy another box and run that application on it. We have seen over the years the proliferation of lots of different boxes which then causes the customers huge problems.”
      With the z-Series, this problem has been taken care of, Norris says. “When a client installs a z-Series in his office which is a bigger box, he can run a number of applications. It is a large shared resource which is managed as one big environment and it’s easier to manage one big thing than managing many small things.”
      Earlier the mainframe was very bulky and could almost take a whole office floor, but with technology and innovation the size of the mainframe today has reduced considerably.
      Norris quotes an example and says: “Starting in 1994, IBM came out with a box the size of a table say 1m / 2m and it stands just under 2m tall. It’s a big size cabinet, American sized refrigerator.” On a z-Series platform preferably hundreds or thousands of applications can all run at the same time.
      Ideally these mainframe applications are used by banks and bigger financial institutions for running their operations like call centers etc. They have huge amounts of data which is behind this mainframe and it is highly available and very secure. These banks would also have transactional programs that run on the machine, hence making it very simple for the customer to just go to the bank and open an account or do just about any day-to-day banking activities.
      In April 2004 IBM celebrated 40 years of its mainframes. It all started in 1964 and was then known as the System 360, and over the years IBM has been developing this product and has had a number of re-births. Today it’s called the z-Series. Z signifies Zero downtime.
      1994 was considered a very crucial year since it was then that the mainframe scenario was more or less dying out. IBM has since played a pioneer role in its re-emergence. Norris traces back the scenario and says “We downsized the technology, we moved from what was then the server-chip industry and changed it to C-MOS technology. Now we have put in a lot of process arrangements in this machine, which are a relatively small box, that can support for instance millions of transactions a day. From 1994 to 1996 we started using UNIX system services with the mainframe operating systems. We have also been focusing on reducing the cost, keeping the cost of the z-Series compatible with the high-end UNIX servers. We put specialized processes in the machines. One specialized process runs LINUX and the other runs JAVA. We call it ZAP (z-Series application process). This has been another way of adding capacity to the z-Series machines at relatively low cost and with the ZAP series there are zero software costs and zero additional costs. Finally over the last ten years we have improved the availability of the system and have got it to a point where a cluster of two z-Series machines could be apart; but they could work as one machine and in case something happens to one of them, the workload shifts automatically to the other machine and with this set up of hardware and software we are talking here of maximum five minutes downtime.”
      The progress of the mainframe has taken nearly 10 years. IBM introduced UNIX in 1996, and LINUX on the platform in 2000. Over the last two to three years IBM has been improving the Java support on the machine.
      Another interesting thing with the mainframe is that they have been around for well over 15 years in Kuwait and were there even prior to the invasion. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it had taken away a considerable amount of servers.
      Major clients of IBM in Kuwait are the Government which includes the Ministry of Interior (everything at the airport is handled by the z-Series server) and some of the major banks. Additionally, never in the history of IBM has its mainframe ever been hacked. IBM brands in Kuwait are in partnership with Khorafi Business Machines. Their Brand Manager Shafiq Hamid says: “There has never been a virus and it has never been hacked, which makes it a good enough selling point for the governments.” Elaborating further Norris says: “Things like re-boot don’t happen in the mainframe. We have firewalls in the operating system, we have ZOS (Zero downtime Operating System) with these machines, which have
integrated detection systems and the software knows what is coming from the internet. It blocks all these
challenges. It only allows authorized people, who have passwords or security checks to do things on the
mainframe system.”
      Interestingly, IBM are its only vendor for the ZOS mainframe technology. However, there are other equivalent mainframes available from Siemens, Hitachi in Japan’ etc.
      IBM primarily has four mainframe servers. z-Series are the top of the range servers. Then there is p-Series, i-Series and the x-Series. Also, these mainframes cannot be distinguished on the basis of their prices. For instance, a few of the oil companies here in Kuwait have been running their work on the p-Series which is considerably more expensive than the z-Series. What distinguishishes these servers from each other is their operating systems and some of the hardware.
      IBM’s range of clients for the mainframe worldwide include Mercedes-Benz, World Bank of Scotland, American Express, BMW, Ford, Sony, Philips and a few governments in Europe. 99% of the banks world-wide run on the z-Series.
      Price and cost is another area where IBM has done careful planning Norris says, “Some people when they buy their machine, consider three years or lets say five years on their machines. If something were to happen in year four, what would they do? They would have to buy an upgraded system or buy a new system, so when we take the total cost of ownership, on one side we take these small boxes where technology needs to be refreshed and on the other side, you have this big box where if you want to add a new application you can add to the server if there is spare capacity, with no additional installation cost.”
      Hence the challenge for IBM lies in constantly educating their customers on the servers and how they can utilize their space which is already with them. With the z- Series, you can run the machine at almost nearly100% utilization.
      The future plans of IBM, especially with z-Series, are quite interesting Norris informs, “IBM’s Mainframe Charter of 2004, has three things. It is all about convincing our customers that there is a solid future to the machine. Some of my competitors have been saying that the mainframe has been dying out, so what we said was that we are doing three things which are as follows:- innovation, followed by value and the third one is community.”
      By innovation IBM means that they are making significant investments to bring new versions of the hardware and software to the market place. Value is another important factor and hence the pricing is going to be very competitive. The third is community. This involves skills and applications. Many people are interested in specialized applications which may run on windows or may run on LINUX. The question is will they run it on z-Series today? IBM has been talking to its third party software vendors to bring these applications to the same platform.
      IBM in the area of skill has already got over 100 universities signed up world-wide that are teaching z-Series classes. These universities are teaching students how to operate the new z-Series mainframe, how to program and operate ZOS and how to use LINUX on the mainframe.
      The challenge with IBM now is to see roughly around 20,000 skill sets in the industry around the world by 2010. Universities in Warrick, Edinburgh and Dublin are among the few universities that are teaching these courses. University of Poland and University of Lisbon have just recently installed brand new mainframe machines. University of Kuwait also has the z-Series machines and Norris informed that, “we had a discussion with the concerned people here on what additional workload can be put into the machine to exploit the value of the machine.”
      In the last two years IBM has significantly seen an increase in sales of the z-Series machines. 90% are already existing customers. These customers already have skills in the operation of z-Series and they are now just growing their utilization very fast. What they are putting in as extra growth are UNIX based workloads and Java based workloads. Hence this has been driving the growth for the last two years. Last year, the marketplace for z-Series grew by 15%. But other server sales were flat. If the z-Series component is taken out of it, servers more expensive than a quarter of a million US Dollars are in the marketplace, z-Series has about 35% of that marketplace. So that 35% has grown to 15%, which means that the remaining 65% of the mainframe scenario may have declined for the whole thing to average.
      IBM feels that an area of improvement is that of applications. There are some applications where certain big banks or certain telecom companies run their applications in the UNIX window space, which is very important for those industries and those applications have not as yet been put into the z-Series or the ZOS. Hence the challenge for IBM is to now look and identify those applications and then go and talk to the third party software vendors and convince them of the business case, to put their applications on to the z-Series
server mainframe platform.