The Mainframe Environment an Awesome Place to Work Main Points

Slide 1 The Mainframe Environment An Awesome Place to Work

Mike Myers Lindsay Edwards Mentor Services Corporation

Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation Slide 2 Objectives of Presentation The main objective of this presentation is to instill interest in the mainframe environment in order to encourage: • Faculty members to embrace it and sell it to the student community • Students to see it as providing an interesting and viable career path At the conclusion of this presentation each participant should be able to describe at least 4 aspects relating to the following factors which make the mainframe environment an awesome place in which to work:

Size Speed Power Sophistication Fun

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” Attributed to Mark Twain 1897

Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation Slide 4 The “Death” of the Mainframe “A fairly well accepted notion in computing is that the mainframe is going the way of the dinosaur.” Forbes, March 20, 1989 “The mainframe computer is rapidly being turned into a technological Dinosaur...” New York Times, April 4, 1989 “...the mainframe seems to be hurtling toward extinction.” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1993 “Its the end of the end for the mainframes.” George Colony, Forrester Research, Business Week, Jan. 10, 1994

“The future sure isn't what it used to be.” Yogi Berra

 High end commercial systems have unique requirements

 Cannot really be met using blade systems

 Assembled from low cost commercial components and corresponding software

 Operating systems, subsystems, IDE, etc.

 Will always be a separate and unique “mainframe” product line

 Other systems will implement existing mainframe features

 Mainframes will implement new and advanced functions to meet customer requirements

 Has been the trend for the last decades.

 New technologies were first introduced on mainframes

 Adopted later – sometimes decades later – on other platforms.

 I/O control units, virtualization, and the coupling facility are particular examples. Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation Slide 6 The Reality “Mainframes feature many software and hardware characteristics not available on any other server platform.

On the other hand, we know of no Unix or Windows server characteristics not available on mainframes, including all modern Java, Web Services, and SOA, developments.” System z and z/OS Unique Characteristics Wilhelm G. Spruth WSI Technical Report WSI-2010-03 Version 1.0, April 8, 2010, Page 7

So what makes the mainframe environment such an awesome one in which to work?

• Introduced in 1964 as the IBM System / 360

• “..the most important product announcement in company history…” Thomas Watson Jr.

• “…IBM’s $5 billion gamble..” Fortune Magazine

• Introduced concept of compatibility and scalability across entire range of products

• Standardized input and output interfaces.

• Era of separate machines for business and science was over

Honeywell

Control Data Corporation (CDC)

The value of general purpose, scalability and backward compatibility So How “Big” is the Mainframe? Slide 10 zSeries Hardware Summary

Up to 262,144 CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP locally attached CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP I/O units

CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP RAID Storage Units Switch Up to 64 CPs plus 13 as RAID Storage Units spares or for SAP use

Memory Optical Storage Units Up to 16EBytes Switch Virtual Addresses (64 Bit Instruction Address) Virtual Tape Storage Physical limit is 1,520Gbytes

I/O Channel Subsystem Up to 1024 High Speed Paths Switch Intranet support up to 256K local I/O devices & Internet

Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation How “Fast” is the Mainframe? Slide 11 zSeries Hardware Summary 1024 Channels. If 50% ESCON & 50% FICON then theoretical maximum is CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP 70GBytes/sec or 35GBytes/sec given CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP a 50% utilization factor

CP CP CP CP CP CP CP CP RAID Storage Units Max speed of a 64-way processor Switch is 29,590 MIPS or 5,042 MSU RAID Storage Units

Memory Up to 16EBytes Optical Storage Units Virtual Addresses Switch (64 Bit Instruction Address) Virtual Tape Storage

I/O Channel Subsystem Up to 1024 High Speed Paths of from 17 MBytes (ESCON) to 120 Switch Intranet MBytes (FICON) per path & Internet

Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation How “Powerful” is the Mainframe? Slide 12 Virtualization • IBM developed virtualization in 1967 with CP-67 – A software solution to virtualization – Provided for a “Preferred Guest” and a number of other “Guest” operating system images running on the one processor complex – Time sharing among guests • Processor Resource / System Manager (PR/SM) released in 1985 with the IBM Model 3090-E Processor – A microcode solution to virtualization – Provided for a number of Logical Partitions – An operating system image loaded into each image – Each image can own or share processing units and I/O channels – Each image owned its own physical memory Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation

How “Powerful” is the Mainframe? Slide 13 Virtualization Each LPAR can support up to 65,636 local I/O zSeries CPC devices to a max of 256K devices Copyright © 2011 Up to 60 LPARs supported for the CPC Mentor Services Corporation ICF Who LinuxLinux LPARs are “IPLd” Linux Knows z/OSz/OS z/OS ? either manually or z/OSz/OS automatically z/OSz/OS

Operator performs POR from HMC

PR/SM is IMLd PR/SM How “Powerful” is the Mainframe? Slide 14 The zSeries Operating System (z/OS) Environment z/OS JES CICS manages the CICS OLTP zSeries CPC Multiple regions CICS processing of support DBMSUp to 60 LPARsCICS supportedJob Entry tens of thousands of CICS Subsystem thousands of (JES)ICF DBMS Who batch jobs users and CICS LinuxLinux Linux Knows per day thousands z/OSz/OS z/OSz/OS CICS ? z/OSz/OS transactions/sec z/OS CICS z/OS DBMS CICS DBMS DBMS Multiple regions support thousands of database calls per second Channel Subsystem PR/SM Offloads I/O Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services processing Corporation Channel Subsystem from CPU How “Powerful” is the Mainframe? Slide 15 • In 2007, IBM and banking application vendor Financial Network Services (FNS) conducted a benchmark test

• Could the System z Mainframe process 380 million Bank of China accounts simultaneously?

• Largest core banking benchmark in the history of computing

• Experts accomplished the goal – 9,445 business transactions/second on a single System z9 mainframe system – Real-time across a number of mixed workloads based on more than 380 million accounts with three billion transaction histories Silvio Sasso GSE z/OS Expert Forum Switzerland # 67, September 25-26, 2007

Parallel Sysplex Participating CPC1 Applications can be cloned between Blueplex z/OS z/OS z/OS LPARs for z/OSz/OS z/OSz/OS load sharing, balancing & redundancy Coupling Facilities CPC2

Blueplex z/OS Pinkplex z/OSz/OS z/OSz/OS z/OS z/OS

Coupling Participating Facilities Applications share memory in Coupling Scalability Facility Redundancy Pinkplex Availability Copyright © 2011 Mentor Services Corporation Availability and Reliability Slide 17

 “Mainframes enjoy very high reliability and availability

 Very little hard data are available, but general agreement, that mainframe hardware and software feature indeed superior high reliability and availability characteristics.

 IBM claims an availability for a large mainframe configuration of 99.999 %.”

 Equates to downtime of 5 minutes/year, or less than 1⁄2 hour during an assumed lifetime of 5 years. System z and z/OS Unique Characteristics Wilhelm G. Spruth WSI Technical Report, WSI-2010-03, Version 1.0, April 8, 2010

 Processors dedicated to specific functions

 IFLs, zIIPs, zAAPs, ICFs, Crypto, SAPs

 Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex

 Provides dynamic hot site disaster recoverability

 WebSphere

 Platform for the development of Web-based environments

 Work Load Manager

 Provides for the specification of business goals and the active monitoring and adjustment of processing to meet these goals

 Security

 Host a Web Site  Networking

 HTTP 5.3 Server  TCP/IP Cloud Computing

 Ported Apache Server  VPN

 Networking & Firewall security  Create Web Pages

 HTML  Storage Area Networking

 XHTML  RAID

 DOM  Design

 JavaScript  Performance  Images, Applets, Objects & Cookies

 Run a UNIX Shell Environment

You can even write Assembler if you must!