Mainframe offers big bucks

                    You wouldn't think crash courses can bring big bucks, and so quickly. But that's what crash courses in Mainframe computing are doing today.

       Mainframes are high-end servers are creating a huge requirement for talent across companies in India. And the reason is simple: A high-end Mainframe machine is like this one box that replaces over 70 servers.
            Typically, annual license for any branded server could cost upto $4,000 per annum. IBM's largest System z machine contains 54 processors in one box. Each of these processors runs at 540 mips (million instructions per second).
            Although there are other servers with more processors, the processor speeds and the mainframe architecture, which support massive, large-scale operations are the key differenciator.
           As more companies begin to understand the value of mainframes, the requirement for mainframe experts is expected to increase exponentially. Within 7 months after launching Mainframes in India, IBM has sold six machines to some of the top names in the business.
Companies adopting mainframes need to have a certain size and scale of operations. An entry-level mainframe with 7 processors is designed to replace about 40 servers.
Today, India has close to 3 lakh mainframe experts spread across various companies. Out of which IBM has highest, then TCS alone is said to have close to 15,000 mainframe professionals.
           According to N Ram Subramani, founder and CEO of Maples (one more good name for mainframe), an IT infrastructure solutions consulting firm, a one-time licence fee for each Mainframe machine could vary between $3.2 million to $9 million, while annual software and maintenance fee can cost a little over $1 million.
              IBM's latest Z990 machines, which it is offering for under Rs 90 lakh per machine for the first five customers in India as a promotional move, can replace nearly 100 servers.
"Unix has remained a religion in this country (Mainframes run on Java). Such initiatives are to erase false notions about mainframes," says Sreenath Chary, business unit executive, IBM SystemsZ.
       "A mainfame professional today commands a full 100% premium when compared to a Java programmer. IBM is looking at top educational institutions to introduce mainframe as part of the syllabus." 

                    Mainframes-related work from US too is heading towards India. Two reason for it as  "will result in mainframe projects moving to India. Problems concerning H1B visas are beginning to take its toll. Nearly 71% of US companies run on mainframes.
          Experts in this segment are mostly over 50 years of age and the younger generation is not taking up mainframes. Today, you pay $80-100 per hour for a mainframe expert in US, while offshoring it to India can cost $25-35. So, it is natural for more mainframe work to come to India for remote management."

   This is the reason why most of the IT firms prefer India for expanding their business.....

 

Source: TOI , IBM w3

Mainframe feature for students

Hello friends….

      Worried @ your career?  I can suggest one good option, not good according to me it’s a best, ….that is MAINFRAME .

                    After the event like 9/11, it is very important for all organizations so keep their data safe, specially its challenge in front of bank & trade centers.  Most of the organizations, not most I can say almost all,  are maintaining their data in mainframe.  If we are talking about all world data then “More than 70 percent of the world’s data still resides on mainframes. The market is growing in terms of revamping the older mainframes and adding new features and software to the oldies. Also, the new mainframes are smaller, cheaper, more powerful and e-business ready, so the market is growing steadily.”

            Now for maintaining this data, it is very important to find mainframe skilled workers in feature.  As I mentioned in one of my last post that about 70 to 80% mainframe workers are going to retire in next 5 years. So its again very big challenge for IT firms like IBM, HP etc to find the new skilled individuals. By keeping this thing in mind, IBM has  already taken few steps for this.

     IBM is now working with over 250 universities around the world to provide mainframe courses. The help comes in:

• The creation of course material covering all the basics including ISPF, JCL, VSAM and Assembler, that all go back to the original 360 days, as well as the slightly newer z/VM, CICS and DB2 and finally the newer boy on the block, Linux.
• The provision of mainframe resources either on the campus or as a shared worldwide resource so that student can try it for real and begin to understand the power and complexity of the environment.
• Internships of six months or a year in IBM as part of a university course.

                          In India also, IBM have Mainframe labs in some of the top engineering institutes & universities. The only thing is that, it will be little costly, because mainframe ID cost very huge per hour.

        

         So frnds….start thinking about your career, take the right steps from today………good luck.

Why people don't like to buy Mainframe

Hello friends,

After lot of observations & reading I understood why people don't like to buy Mainframe, The Three Stupidest Reasons Why Not to Buy a Mainframe are

1. Mainframes cost too much.

2. We don’t have the skills needed to operate a mainframe environment.

3. Mainframes are old technology.
   After learning how some of these people are actually running their IT environments, I’ve come to believe that these are three truly stupid reasons not to adopt mainframe technologies.

1. Mainframes Cost Too Much?

Even though a mainframe can now be purchased for about $100,000 (the cost of some rack systems), IT buyers still believe that mainframe hardware is too expensive.

Really it is very costly, But we need to look at the advantages provided by mainframes over other IT infrastructure that is being normally used. Think about following advantages of mainframe

a. Management:

           Defiantly for operating the mainframe system we need skilled workers, but need less number of administrators because thousands of people work on the same server, Lets have look on following Example

A company serve 162 different customers-and over 3 million users-with six mainframe administrators." If you’re running a distributed computing environment, imagine how many IT systems, storage managers and administrators you’ll need to serve 3 million users! That number may well exceed 100 people. Now figure the cost for employee salary and benefits for all of those people, and suddenly mainframe pricing looks comparatively inexpensive.

b. Security:

             As I explained in the last post that the mainframe server is not hacked yet. It is highly impossible to hack the mainframe because the tight security provided by RACF, a security client.

c.  Consolidation/virtualization, reduced power consumption and real estate savings:

       By using the mainframes server it is highly possible to save manpower, power consumption & floor space. This is because virtualization is made possible by using mainframe. If we use mainframes then we may achieve 50 percent reduction in monthly Web hosting costs; an 80 percent reduction in data center floor space needs; significant power consumption savings; and huge savings in middle ware costs. Further, this executive saw a 50 percent reduction in hardware and OS support effort. 

2. Skill Issue with mainframes: 

                  The people using UNIX/Linux and Windows IT shops honestly believe that they don’t have the internal skills to operate a mainframe environment, and that is acceptable

          From last few years IBM has already taken an initiative for mainframes education. That is I am talking about IBM’s mainframe education initiative at this time was called the “zSeries Scholars Program” But, over the past two years, IBM has greatly expanded this program as part of its “Academic Initiative Program”, a program that now serves over 200 schools and universities around the world. And the company has set a goal, as part of its mainframe charter, to help the industry add 20,000 new mainframe skilled individuals by 2011.

3. Mainframes Are "Old Technology"

                   Though mainframes is the older technology, but it is not possible for any computer & server to provide service like Mainframes, So though it is old, that is like Gold. Anyway we can interface mainframes to the latest web technologies & able to program mainframes using very modern languages like JAVA, J2EE instead of using COBOL. But the is easiest language & all banks who have mainframes use it. Now it is highly impossible to replace those codes with newer one, Because those programs contain lakhs of lines of code.

Summary Observations

                   IT buyers who look at mainframe TCO should find that mainframes are less expensive to operate than distributed systems environments, in part because of reduced staffing needs. Taken with the fact that mainframes are clearly not old technology, these three arguments hold no ground against exploring the possibility of mainframe implementation.

Which Operating system is not Hacked Yet? ......That is mainframe

Hello friends,

The only operating System & server which is not hacked yet, & not possible  in feature also is MAINFRAME. That is why almost all the banks, Insurance companies, & those who are dealing with money, use to prefer mainframe only. That is the most secured server in the world. 

        As it is most secured. on the other hand it is very very much costly. In the survey it is found that banks spend nearly 70% of their expenditure on IT infrastructure.

                 Windows is an operating system started off as being meant for one user only, and they could run only one program at a time, and it was written to manage real devices in the PC, that is, it was limited to what the PC had.

                       When it was realised that this approach meant that programs which required more hardware capacity (like memory) could not be written, special routines that virtualised hardware had to be written. However, the underlying operating system files etc were all open to anyone who wanted to install software, that is, any programmer could overwrite system software causing malicious or unintended damage.The operating system grew organically and tries to mimic multi- user environment, virtualisation and allowing multiple programs at the same time etc, but this has been developed as additions and not designed from ground up. Hence the stability issues and issues of hacking because the entire system software etc was open for anybody to overwrite with their own code.

                                Mainframe OZ (zOS) on the other hand was written ground up to be virtual,multi user system, multi program system. The hardware was always virtualised and programmers do not deal with physical limitations of the system.

 Next, Operating system files and production code always was protected by the creation of a strict discipline and the creation of special libraries from which they could be run. This is controlled by system programmers.

          Application programs never replace operating system files unlike in Windows or UNIX (to a lesser extent).

         This created this environment never to be hacked to date.

                   If you want proof of this claim, consider what you can find by searching news archives and trade journals, looking for references to mainframes and data loss, hacking, security breaches, and similar topics. Recent research included checking the archives of ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, and The Wall Street Journal for reports of unauthorized access of any traditional mainframe environment via userid/ password exploitation, corruption of a mainframe-based networking resource, or contamination of a mainframe sys- tem software component.

 

True Facts about Mainframe

Hello Dear Friends, 
     I am herewith some of the true & important facts @ Mainframe, Its Very Interesting & much more demanding. So some of the facts are as  
 
Mainframe facts.....!!!!!

1. All 25 of the world’s top banks still use mainframes, while 71 per cent of global Fortune 500 companies are mainframe clients as well. Additionally, nine out of the top 10 global health insurance providers process all of their high-volume transactions on a mainframe. This shows that, despite incursions being made by software as a service (SaaS) providers, an overwhelming majority of the world’s big business still value the reliability and security of mainframes, particularly for mission-critical functions.

2. Around 63 per cent of mainframe sites in the Asia-Pacific region believe the lack of skills in the current generation of mainframers is a major concern. In Europe, 66 per cent of mainframe sites believe mainframes are already suffering from a serious skills shortage.

3. About 72% of mainframe sites have mainframe staff eligible for retirement. (CA 2011)

4. The mainframes hold approximately " 70 % " of the entire data stored in this planet
5. The latest ones can support over 25,000 users
6. They can support devices spread over 26 miles using fibre optics
7. The size of the "basic" OS is about 14 GB
8. This OS comes in about 57 magnetic tapes, But latest with 4 tapes
9. It takes ATLEAST a month to install and customize a basic mainframe OS configuration
10. It takes around 3 full days for a mainframe to get up and running
11. Basic configuration for development environment costs 8 crores (hardware + Software)
12. A full team of qualified system operators are always required to be on stand by to ensure successful operation
13. Earlier mainframes were provided with cooling pipes through which cold water was passed to cool the system - TCS have one in Chennai facility
14. Recent mainframes have variable speed fans in the cabinet to keep it cool
15. Have u ever heard of a mainframe system being hacked??? Mainframes are one of the most secure data installations ever
16. You cannot buy the mainframe OS, but u'll have to pay a license to use it. The cost?? cool ......1.5 crores a year.
17. Finally, mainframes today r the most preferred data servers for even the most hi-fi of the organizations!
18. So far no virus has attacked Mainframes
      
    So this is how mainframe is...!!!!

DB2 – faster than a speeding bullet?

DB2 – faster than a speeding bullet?

Last week, IBM sent out press releases saying that it has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute. And in case you don't realise just how fast that is, the press releases goes on to inform us that it beats HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35%!

We're told that: "The results place IBM in a unique position as the undeniable leader. With these new clustered results (and with the long-standing single system result), IBM has demonstrated its ability to scale up to handle higher transaction loads and to scale out to optimize more types of workloads than the competition."

This result is the largest ever TPC-C result published (dated 17 August 2010) and was obtained on a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers featuring a storage subsystem with 116TB of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and running DB2 9.7.

Just to rub in the fact that it beats the Old rival, Oracle, the press releases goes on to inform us that: "The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction. IBM's performance is also more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result, 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance."

The new TPC-C benchmark result uses standard IBM software. DB2 9.7 has been around since June 2009, and AIX 6.1 was released in November 2007. IBM says that the selection of software versions reflected levels currently in use by a large number of their clients.

IBM highlights the fact that the IBM TPC-C results on POWER7 technology shows off IBM Storage technology in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs), which enable higher throughput and lower response times. SSDs also provide reliability, lower energy usage, less cooling requirements, and the ability to reduce data centre footprints. The total storage used was over 800TB while the Oracle/Sun configuration had 686.6TB of total storage.

The Oracle/Sun cluster is 71% more expensive based on published price/performance relative to the IBM Power 780 cluster result. The total system cost of the Sun cluster is 26% greater than the total system cost of the IBM cluster. Because of different discount structures, care should be taken in comparing individual price components.

As a result of these differences, the TPC does not allow comparisons using TPC price information on anything other than the total configuration. The IBM Power 780 with DB2 9.7 result yields greater than 10 million tpmC for IBM (a feat Oracle hasn't accomplished) and significantly better price/performance for the IBM solution.

The configuration for this benchmark achieves an estimated consumption of 65.1 kWatts or 6.3 kWatts per million tpmC, 35% better than the Sun cluster energy consumption estimate of 73.9kWatts or 9.7 kWatts per million tpmC.

You get the idea anyway – there's more of the same in the press release. The bottom line is that IBM can now claim to provide performance in excess of double-digits (10 Million Transactions Per Minute), which, they say, no-one else can do.