Re: Article for z/Journal
In May, I said: I'm doing an article for Bob Thomas' z/Journal http://www.zjournal.com/ about next-generation mainframers, industry and educational outreach initiatives for students and young professionals, opportunities and obstacles for people exploring this career area, etc. www.ibm.com/university/systemz is interesting if you've not seen it. A long-time and common topic on these lists (and I've cross-posted this note to several) is the graying of mainframers and how there is or will be a shortage of people to use/support/enhance big iron. I'm interested in what you're seeing -- in industry, schools, user groups, etc. -- regarding new generations of mainframers. --- The article is the cover story in the August/September z/Journal issue -- cover shown on http://www.zjournal.com/ and PDF file http://www.zjournal.com/index.cfm?section=articleaid=823# linked from http://www.zjournal.com/index.cfm?section=articleaid=823. I appreciate the many people who responded with comments, observations, and personal stories. The article is much too short to include more than a small sampling of what I received. The synopsis given, This article describes how IBM, SHARE, and others are trying to overcome an aging mainframe workforce and introduce a new generation to the benefits of mainframe computing, is accurate. Note what the article is NOT about: outsourcing, offshoring, age discrimination, unemployment, etc. Those weren't what z/Journal wanted covered, though they're important topics and may be the subjects of future pieces. Again, thanks for the many responses received. -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Article for z/Journal
Alan, your remarks are probably accurate from the perspective of server consolidation. The get off the mainframe mantra goes well beyond server consolidation. In my opinion, IBM has done a very poor job combating the source of the get off the mainframe mindset that permeates areas of the industry. Those CIO's, CTO's and CFO's to whom you refer are getting their information from consultant and research organizations such as Gartner and Hackett. Even in the Enterprise Architecture community, there is no dialogue on the mainframe, although the vast majority of participants in the EA commuity do have challenges around their mainframe systems. The organizations that can support an Enterprise Architecture effort are the ones that have mainframes. I will share a coworkers experience at the last big Gartner conference in Orlando where not only she but our CTO and CIO were present. The last words out of the keynote speaker's mouth was Oh, and get off those mainframes! Later in that same day, she attended another much smaller attended session late in the afternoon where Gartner said, Yeah, but all the big banks and retailers are not getting off the mainframe. Incidentally, our organization is the latter with 40 years of investment in mainframe systems. However, the CTO and CIO never heard those remarks. Those same Gartner folks have said that if you run 500 or less MIPS, it is a no brainer decision, get off the mainframe. If you are running 1500 or more, not a snow balls chance in you know where of getting off it. The folks in the middle, Gartner had no answer answer other than figure it out for yourself. The get off the mainframe contingent uses plenty of FUD around the skills shortage problem to their advantage. For us, it isn't so much a shortage as not wanting to pay what two or three decade veterans expect to be compensated for that experience. It may just be my organization, but IBM used to be really great at marketing to the upper echelons of organization's management. IBM could be doing more in these influential communities to promote the sustaining business value of organization's past investment in the mainframe and selling it to organization's management. I say it could be more, because, frankly, I've seen none. This of course is probably not the right forum for this discourse, but it is the only one I have to share these perspectives where IBM is present. If there is one, I would sure like to know where it is. Harold Grovesteen Alan Altmark wrote: On Thursday, 05/03/2007 at 12:03 AST, José L. Ramírez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Let's hope that IBM can revive the mainframe so that it can continue to be the best server in the data center... All anyone (even IBM) can do is make the case that 50 virtual servers will be more cost effective than 50 real servers, for all the reasons that have been quoted here, especially if you already are invested in the mainframe. IMO, if your CIO/CFO/CTO team aren't faced with a power/temperature/space/expense problem, they have no incentive to look at server consolidation and virtualization (on any platform). I.e. if they aren't experiencing viscerally perceptible growth, they don't have a problem to solve. Of course, don't try to paint server and desktop technology with the same brush. That's a good way to sink the whole effort. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Article for z/Journal
I'm doing an article for Bob Thomas' z/Journal http://www.zjournal.com/ about next-generation mainframers, industry and educational outreach initiatives for students and young professionals, opportunities and obstacles for people exploring this career area, etc. www.ibm.com/university/systemz is interesting if you've not seen it. A long-time and common topic on these lists (and I've cross-posted this note to several) is the graying of mainframers and how there is or will be a shortage of people to use/support/enhance big iron. I'm interested in what you're seeing -- in industry, schools, user groups, etc. -- regarding new generations of mainframers. Does your employer court/train young professionals for mainframe careers? Do you work with younger colleagues? Is there a generation gap or is there solidarity within mainframes? Do you have younger relatives working on mainframes? If so, did you influence their career choices? Do user groups adequately educate new folks in this technology and culture? Are your mainframe areas of interest reflected in industry/educational initiatives? If YOU are a non-graying mainframer -- what led to this career path? How do you like it so far? What future options do you see for yourself? Anything else? This will be a relatively short article so I likely won't be able to use everything contributed, but it's an interesting topic so I might explore it more later. I'll appreciate all comments/feedback -- and please reply directly to me as well as to the lists where you see this; since I get list digests it's a pain extracting nuggets from the daily mailings. Thanks for helping... -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Article for z/Journal
I am a graying mainframer. I worked for IBM for 28 years as a hardware servicer, marketing system engineer, and a mainframe contract employee. I am concerned that three universities in my area were deeply involved in mainframe systems education in the past but now focus only on Microsoft products. There is no effort in this area to educate students on mainframes and their potential. I currently work for a state agency that provides data processing services to other state agencies (similar to a service bureau). Although the core applications (finance, welfare, labor) are still housed on the mainframe, there is a concerted effort by the CIO to move all applications to a client/server/web environment. To him this means everything will run on an Intel platform with a Microsoft operating system. Everyone in my work section is 40 years old and up. We recently had five employees leave. One passed away, three retired and one reassign to another area (help desk). Only two people have been recruited to replace these employees. The replacements have been mainframers from other agencies. These agencies have been moving to Intel servers for all new applications. Microsoft has done a great job in marketing their products as the future of data processing. They did this by capturing the education of future programmers and data processing employees in the universities. The personal computer has helped by enabling everyone to think he is a computer expert if he can load and run software on his own machine. The bulk of the people in the data processing industry have little or no contact or exposure to the mainframe. They have no concept of the potential of a single mainframe processor. Their concept is to run each application on a separate server regardless of the interactions of the numerous applications in each and every organization. Whatever happened to having a single source of data so that the data is in sync, up to date and accurate? Some of this has been caused by the cost of mainframe software and the time required developing applications. In today world this is no longer the case. We have desktop development tools for mainframe applications. We can even develop web applications that are more reliable and faster than their Microsoft counterparts. CICS, IMS, and DB2 are still great application environments. Today's application developer just is unaware of their potential and versatility. Thanks for the opportunity to vent my frustrations. Ruddy A. Melancon IT System Specialist - ISD State of Alabama Suite 102 64 North Union Street Montgomery, AL 36130 Office 334.353.7275 Fax 334.240.3177 When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. -Original Message- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gabe Goldberg Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 9:22 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Article for z/Journal I'm doing an article for Bob Thomas' z/Journal http://www.zjournal.com/ about next-generation mainframers, industry and educational outreach initiatives for students and young professionals, opportunities and obstacles for people exploring this career area, etc. www.ibm.com/university/systemz is interesting if you've not seen it. A long-time and common topic on these lists (and I've cross-posted this note to several) is the graying of mainframers and how there is or will be a shortage of people to use/support/enhance big iron. I'm interested in what you're seeing -- in industry, schools, user groups, etc. -- regarding new generations of mainframers. Does your employer court/train young professionals for mainframe careers? Do you work with younger colleagues? Is there a generation gap or is there solidarity within mainframes? Do you have younger relatives working on mainframes? If so, did you influence their career choices? Do user groups adequately educate new folks in this technology and culture? Are your mainframe areas of interest reflected in industry/educational initiatives? If YOU are a non-graying mainframer -- what led to this career path? How do you like it so far? What future options do you see for yourself? Anything else? This will be a relatively short article so I likely won't be able to use everything contributed, but it's an interesting topic so I might explore it more later. I'll appreciate all comments/feedback -- and please reply directly to me as well as to the lists where you see this; since I get list digests it's a pain extracting nuggets from the daily mailings. Thanks for helping... -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Article for z/Journal
Hi, I have been working with mainframes for about 12 years (I'm 32)... I started as an application programmer and the moved to system programming about 8 years ago... What I'm seeing is something similar to what Ruddy described. In my company we are running all the core systems on the mainframe but a decision has been already taken and now everything is going to be migrated to a .NET MS environment. What runs on a singe z890 will require at least 50 Intel servers and counting... For the last three years I have working directly with zVM and zLinux and we have been able to show management some of the benefits of an environment like this, but as Ruddy said, MS has a great marketing team... we even tried to start using Open Office on the desktop but as soon as MS saw the move they convince management to continue using MS Office. Part of the problem is that people still think the mainframe is a BIG machine with green terminals... we have done an experiment here in the data center in which we ask people to identify the mainframe in the server room, almost nobody is able to identify the z890 and some people believe the mainframe is the air conditioner unit... Let's hope that IBM can revive the mainframe so that it can continue to be the best server in the data center... -Jose -Original Message- From: Melancon, Ruddy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 11:18 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: Article for z/Journal I am a graying mainframer. I worked for IBM for 28 years as a hardware servicer, marketing system engineer, and a mainframe contract employee. I am concerned that three universities in my area were deeply involved in mainframe systems education in the past but now focus only on Microsoft products. There is no effort in this area to educate students on mainframes and their potential. I currently work for a state agency that provides data processing services to other state agencies (similar to a service bureau). Although the core applications (finance, welfare, labor) are still housed on the mainframe, there is a concerted effort by the CIO to move all applications to a client/server/web environment. To him this means everything will run on an Intel platform with a Microsoft operating system. Everyone in my work section is 40 years old and up. We recently had five employees leave. One passed away, three retired and one reassign to another area (help desk). Only two people have been recruited to replace these employees. The replacements have been mainframers from other agencies. These agencies have been moving to Intel servers for all new applications. Microsoft has done a great job in marketing their products as the future of data processing. They did this by capturing the education of future programmers and data processing employees in the universities. The personal computer has helped by enabling everyone to think he is a computer expert if he can load and run software on his own machine. The bulk of the people in the data processing industry have little or no contact or exposure to the mainframe. They have no concept of the potential of a single mainframe processor. Their concept is to run each application on a separate server regardless of the interactions of the numerous applications in each and every organization. Whatever happened to having a single source of data so that the data is in sync, up to date and accurate? Some of this has been caused by the cost of mainframe software and the time required developing applications. In today world this is no longer the case. We have desktop development tools for mainframe applications. We can even develop web applications that are more reliable and faster than their Microsoft counterparts. CICS, IMS, and DB2 are still great application environments. Today's application developer just is unaware of their potential and versatility. Thanks for the opportunity to vent my frustrations. Ruddy A. Melancon IT System Specialist - ISD State of Alabama Suite 102 64 North Union Street Montgomery, AL 36130 Office 334.353.7275 Fax 334.240.3177 When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. -Original Message- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gabe Goldberg Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 9:22 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Article for z/Journal I'm doing an article for Bob Thomas' z/Journal http://www.zjournal.com/ about next-generation mainframers, industry and educational outreach initiatives for students and young professionals, opportunities and obstacles for people exploring this career area, etc. www.ibm.com/university/systemz is interesting if you've not seen it. A long-time and common topic on these lists (and I've cross-posted this note to several) is the graying of mainframers and how there is or will be a shortage of people to use/support/enhance big iron. I'm interested in what
Re: Article for z/Journal
I have been working on computer systems for over 40 years now. Anything from mainframe software development to mini-computers to PCs to embedded software development. It seems to me that although people think that the mainframe is going away...it's not obvious to me that the statement is totally true. Certainly, the main system that I work on here is mainframe based. There are other systems that we talk to that are distributed. Several of those were migrated over the last few years from a variety of platforms to HP Superdomes. The last one that was migrated HP had to build a superdome specifically for this installation (as they are not made anymore). This type of thing does not happen in the IBM mainframe world. IBM has had a migration path for many years to allow upgrades. If you look around the CICS Listserver, it becomes obvious just how many different corporations are using mainframes in significant ways. We have recently installed z/VM here (a z/OS shop only up till now) to enable some XML front end work to go on running under Linux. z/OS will still not go away here. The inbound XML transactions will still be processed by the existing mainframe applications. We process almost 7M transactions per day through the IBM mainframes with significant database processing at the back end. Kevin -Original Message- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gabe Goldberg Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 10:22 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Article for z/Journal I'm doing an article for Bob Thomas' z/Journal http://www.zjournal.com/ about next-generation mainframers, industry and educational outreach initiatives for students and young professionals, opportunities and obstacles for people exploring this career area, etc. www.ibm.com/university/systemz is interesting if you've not seen it. A long-time and common topic on these lists (and I've cross-posted this note to several) is the graying of mainframers and how there is or will be a shortage of people to use/support/enhance big iron. I'm interested in what you're seeing -- in industry, schools, user groups, etc. -- regarding new generations of mainframers. Does your employer court/train young professionals for mainframe careers? Do you work with younger colleagues? Is there a generation gap or is there solidarity within mainframes? Do you have younger relatives working on mainframes? If so, did you influence their career choices? Do user groups adequately educate new folks in this technology and culture? Are your mainframe areas of interest reflected in industry/educational initiatives? If YOU are a non-graying mainframer -- what led to this career path? How do you like it so far? What future options do you see for yourself? Anything else? This will be a relatively short article so I likely won't be able to use everything contributed, but it's an interesting topic so I might explore it more later. I'll appreciate all comments/feedback -- and please reply directly to me as well as to the lists where you see this; since I get list digests it's a pain extracting nuggets from the daily mailings. Thanks for helping... -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Article for z/Journal
On Thursday, 05/03/2007 at 12:03 AST, José L. Ramírez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Let's hope that IBM can revive the mainframe so that it can continue to be the best server in the data center... All anyone (even IBM) can do is make the case that 50 virtual servers will be more cost effective than 50 real servers, for all the reasons that have been quoted here, especially if you already are invested in the mainframe. IMO, if your CIO/CFO/CTO team aren't faced with a power/temperature/space/expense problem, they have no incentive to look at server consolidation and virtualization (on any platform). I.e. if they aren't experiencing viscerally perceptible growth, they don't have a problem to solve. Of course, don't try to paint server and desktop technology with the same brush. That's a good way to sink the whole effort. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
