Scale Enterprise Systems – for Better Business Computing
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Bringing Open Systems and Open Source Software to Large- Scale Enterprise Systems – for Better Business Computing Chu J. Jong and Kyoungwon Suh School of Information Technology, Illinois State University Normal, IL 61790, U.S.A. [email protected], [email protected] abandoned their business. In the meanwhile, the mainstream Abstract - Open systems and open sources have made computing industry moved to client-server based systems, significant contributions to the information technology field. followed by workstation based systems, and distributed The importance of their implementation along with the cluster systems. Today, a few mainframe manufacturers exist number of IT shops using open systems and open software and IBM is the one still actively producing improved continue to increase. The growing number of open software mainframe systems [2]. challenges the traditional mainframe based enterprise systems which mainly host propriety applications. Mainframe Mainframes maintained their long popularity until 1980s engineers realized the inevitable trend of openness and started because they not only offered better resource sharing but also to accept open applications and implement open systems to provided maintenance free services to their clients. In users’ host those applications. Moving toward the open systems and mind convenience, security, and robustness are always high open sources not only reduces the cost of software on their priority list. Mainframes are mainly designed for development life cycle but also improves the quality of the centralized computing environments in which users connect service. However, there exists a gap between the mainframe to their computing facility via a remote device. Information system programmers and the open system programmers. To (applications and data) are stored in a central area to serve bridge the gap, we need to bring the openness to the who logon the system. Users who have the access right to the mainframe computing field by educating both programmers mainframe computing facility will be able to perform tasks to the fundamental differences between the two systems. In this accomplish their business objectives regardless when they paper we present our efforts of bringing them together by need and where they are located. Mainframe users normally integrating the open systems/sources courses into the leave the supporting and maintenance jobs such as backup, mainframe computing education environment. Our initial security, recovery, upgrades, virus detections, and even attempts to bridge the gap include two open systems open printer cartage replacement to their centralized system sources course proposals and an internship plan for our administrator. Open-ECS development. Mainframe systems cannot be easily replaced by other kinds Keywords: mainframe, enterprise computing, Open-ECS, of computing systems mainly because they are backed by ECS many legacy business applications. According to recent studies, there are 200 billion lines of code written in COBOL that are currently used in today’s business applications, with 1 Introduction several billion lines of new code added annually [3, 4]. These applications, which are mainly used by major corporations for During the past two decades mainframes were their daily business operations, are called legacy software and announced to be dead many times and many people simply their hosting systems are called legacy computers believed that the good old days of mainframe computing were (mainframes). The emerging commodity computing systems gone. The history of mainframes [1] dates back to the 1940s. and the glories of Internet revolution forced mainframe First-generation computers were made of vacuum tubes. In systems to move out the mainstream computing. Mainframe the 1950s and 1960s, transistor and multiprocessing programmers and technicians were quieted by the technologies made evolution changes in the computer overwhelming fun stuffs such as parallel computing, internet industry, which became dominated by mainframes. In the late applications, game development, web services, and so on. In 1970s, mini-computers such as the PDP-11 started to take a late 1990’s, blowing of the inflated internet bubbles brought small portion of the computing market but that did not sustain people out of the hypes. People started to realize that a solid long and quickly were replaced by microprocessor based machine which runs forever is the one showing the real workstations in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, the Internet beauty, and mainframes continue surviving. revolution further weakened mainframe systems. Most mainframe manufacturers ran out of resources and eventually Though the demand for mainframe systems does not diminish fall semester 2006, ITK has offered three ECS courses: significantly, we expect to fall short on the personnel who Introduction to Enterprise Computing Systems (three times); can develop applications for mainframes and maintain Operating, Data Communications, Networking, and Security mainframes in near future. The studies of local and national of Enterprise Systems (three times); and System Information Technology (IT) business indicate that current Programming and System Administration in Enterprise mainframe system programmers and system administrators Computing Systems (twice). Online course offerings are also are reaching retirement age; yet there does not exist younger under consideration. programmer equipped with sufficient knowledge to fill the gap for operating mainframe systems [5, 6]. We expect that 2 Objectives the demand to replace these employees will be high. In addition, a study of global computing markets shows that The major goals of the ECS program are to fulfill the mainframe usage continues to rise. From both economic (e.g. demand for mainframe IT personnel, to educate engineers on power, space, installation, and maintenance costs) and the Integrated Large-scale Enterprise Computing Systems business integration (e.g. centralized computing and storage (ILECS), and to develop the next-generation ILECS. An system with distributed recovery strategy) aspects, the Integrated Large-scale Enterprise Computing System is made number of integrated mainframe systems will continue to of a group of computing entities (including mainframes, grow in both major corporations and small to medium size servers, storages, and peripheral devices) which are businesses. interconnected by a network forming a virtual centralized computing facility. It is a computing system comprised of a Although these are good indications that the old mainframe set of computer technologies (hardware, software, and programming is coming back, we strongly believe that the practices) used in integrated large scale systems. These new business computing systems will have a shape of integrated computing systems are mainly for transaction- mainframes integrated with open systems. The evolutional based businesses and are widely used by service oriented growth of IT already changed the way that people enterprises for their business operations. communicate and the manner in which they purchase goods and services. In particular, it has required businesses to adapt The goals of ECS program have been carefully examined to their operational strategies to fast changing IT trends. These ensure their feasibility and deliverability. They should be phenomena have made a greater impact on transaction-based implemented in a sequence of manageable steps. One step of businesses, which use mainframes to conduct their daily the goal, educating engineers on the ILECS, is to emphasis operations. Based on our study of various mainframe the college education on the multi-platform computing computing paradigms, we believe that the integrated systems integrated into mainframe based systems, in computing systems composed of mainframes, multi-platform particular the IBM zSeries mainframe, for enterprises. servers and workstations, high-speed network, and heterogeneous storage devices will be widely used by In order to integrate multi-platform systems into mainframe enterprises to conduct their daily businesses. Based on this computing we need to bring the open systems and open belief, we have developed a series of courses for the sources into the mainframe enterprise environment, which is Enterprise Computing Systems (ECS) program at Illinois the main focus of this paper. We started with an education State University (ISU), which include two undergraduate and plan for the Linux operating system (the most popular open a graduate sequences, plus a graduate certificate program. source operating systems) when we started offer our first ECS The aim is to fulfill the demand of mainframe IT personnel, course in fall 2006. At the end of 2007 a Linux course educate engineers on large-scale enterprise computing development strategic team was formed, and later it became systems, and prepare students take the challenges of the the open systems and open sources integration steering growth of future integrated large-scale enterprise computing committee. The goal of this committee is to develop a systems. curriculum for open systems and open sources in the area of mainframe-based enterprise systems. We named the course Starting at the end of 2004 the School of Information and curriculum development Open-ECS. The goal of Open- Technology (ITK) at ISU met with local and regional ECS is to oversee the future demand of integrated large-scale companies regarding how to address the demand, produce enterprise computer for better