70% of something is better than..

70% of nothing at all. [With apologies to Double Exposure]

As I’ve said before, I’m an avid reader of Robin Bloors Have Mac Will Blog, blog. I also follow him on twitter where he is @robinbloor. Sadly his blog doesn’t accept trackbacks, but I’ll leave a short comment so he gets to see this.

His latest blog entry, CA:Dancing with dinosaurs comes across as a bit of a puff piece in support of Computer Associates.

On the CA involvement with mainframes, Bloor seems to have overlooked the fact that CA has John Swainson as CEO, and Don Ferguson as Chief Architect. John was previously an IBM VP, Don an IBM Fellow and both Don and John were variously in charge of significant IBM Software Group projects/products.

Personally I’d like to see someone from IBM find/quote a source for that 70% data number. It’s been used for years and years with little or no foundation. Jim Porell quoted this number in some of his excellent and more recent System Z strategy presentations, It’s dated from, I think, 1995.

Secondly, I’d guess it depends what you can business critical data these days. If Google collapsed or had their data centers in Silicon Valley interrupted with the loss of Google docs, YouTube, Google search, Maps and similarly Microsoft and/or Yahoo went offline… I’d suspect the whole notion that 70% of business critical data resides of mainframes would be laughable. Yes, a large percentage of purely text based transactional data is on mainframes and yes the value of those transactions exceeds any other platform, but that is far from 70% of anything much these days… Increasingly these days startups, SME’s and Web 2.0 business don’t use mainframes for even their text based transactional data.

Finally on the Bloor/CA assertion that installing mainframe software is arcane. That maybe, but here I’m still in full agreement of the mainframe folks, especially if you are talking about real mainframe software as IBM would have it, installed by SMP/E. One of my few claims to fame was reverse engineering key parts of the IBM Mainframe VM service process nearly 20-years now. It was then, and SMP/E is now, still is years ahead of anything in the Windows and UNIX space for pre-req, co-req, if-req processing; the ability to build and maintain multiple non-trivial systems from a single data store using binary only program objects. CA are not the first to spot the need to provide an interface other than ISPF and JCL to build these jobs streams.

But really, continuing to label mainframes as dinosaurs is so 1990’s, it’s like describing Lance Armstrong as a push bike rider.

Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst – Sustainability, Quocirca, has written a similar piece with a little more detail entitled Mainframe management gets its swagger.

Visible personal branding and the big company

I’m keeping busy at Dell, currently working on designs for both our 12g and 13g servers. My current motto is less is more, I’m trying to see what I can cut out to simplify things, as well as what can be automated. In my blog catch-up this morning I came across this excellent post, The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

No, it is not another warning about posting compromising pictures on facebook, or blogging about doing outside work while telling your boss you are off sick. It talks about some of the issues and values of creating your own “brand” through social media tools. Now, back when Nigel Dessau and I worked together at IBM UK in the mid-1990’s, Nigel was quick off the mark creating content for, and getting involved with IBM UK and IBM Europes first web sites. I had the chance to work with him on some of the content and low and behold, the first Cathcarts Corner was published almost 13-years ago. Over the years, it moved, grew and contracted, and now is just this blog.

One thing I learned though was indeed the value of the perosnal brand. When reading Jennifer Leggios’ blog posting a few things rang true. One, it is worth thinking through before you launch into “just blogging”. It’s not sufficient to work out what you want to talk about and how you say it, but who your audience are, how you will reach them, your style and much more. Secondly, at many IBM Acadamey of Technology annual meetings, and often at other events, we were told by the business executives how IBM wanted the company to be more recognised for its innovation, for its technical leadership, and yes, they promised action. However despite the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, there are and have never been almost any household names of technical leaders at IBM, or for that matter any major publically qouted company like Oracle, HP in the tech business, but also in other traditional NYSE style big companies GE, General Motors etc. Have there ?

In the second section of her blog post, entitled Workplace Impact, Jennifer talks how the corporation handles the rising, and visible brand that is a key spokesperson. I also worked with one of the tech industries most visible brands, Simon Phipps of Sun, now Oracle. It will be interesting to see where his “brand” goes once things get sorted out at Oracle. While Simon and I worked together at IBM, I was the Linux/Open Source guy, Simon was the Java guy, but he has done a much better job of communicating, and putting the case for open source than I ever could, and in the process created a brand through his blog, twitter and other contributions. I can’t see he’d have had the same success at IBM.

The point that Jennifer makes is it’s how the company reacts that makes the difference. My IBM UK managers where always very supportive of my personal brand, they definately empowered me. However, at a corporate level, unlike Simons’ experience at Sun, it’s my view that most companies practise what Jennifer describes as “talking out both sides of their mouth”. That is they realise that an engineer or technician that creates a personal brand is both getting distracted from their “day” job through their activities, and secondly, is a risk to the company if their exposure gets them unwanted attraction from competitors, start-ups and analyst companies who might offer them a better deal in order to capture the value from their brand.

I’d never thought about it that way, but it certainly puts into perspective the legions of corporate Vice Presidents who march through the PR sausage machine and come out the other other side talking tech, only to disappear 18-months later when they move on to their next assignment and are replaced by the next [insert name here] VP. The only really famous technical person I can recall from IBM, from a public perspective is Gene Amdahl, and thats more legend than fact. Sure, I’ve known many others, but none outside their narrow specialist area and through personal contact rather than through their notoriety, promotion or brand. Can you name anyone ?

Jennifers article is a long, but worthwhile read on the subject of personal brands, and certianly made me reconsider some of my long held views.

IBM Big Box quandary

In another follow-up from EMC World, the last session I went to was “EMC System z, z/OS, z/Linux and z/VM”. I thought it might be useful to hear what people were doing in the mainframe space, although largely unrelated to my current job. It was almost 10-years to the day that I was at IBM, were writing the z/Linux strategy, hearing about early successes etc. and strangely, current EMC CTO Jeff Nick and I were engaged in vigourous debate about implementation details of z/Linux the night before we went and told SAP about IBM’s plans.

The EMC World session demonstrated, that as much as things change, the they stay the same. It also reminded me, how borked the IT industry is, that we mostly force customers to choose by pricing rather than function. 10-12 years ago z/Linux on the mainframe was all about giving customers new function, a new way to exploit the technology that they’d already invested in. It was of course also to further establish the mainframes role as a server consolidation platform through virtualization and high levels of utilization.(1)

What I heard were two conflicting and confusing stories, at least they should be for IBM. The first was a customer who was moving all his Oracle workloads from a large IBM Power Systems server to z/Linux on the mainframe. Why? Becuase the licensing on the IBM Power server was too expensive. Using z/Linux, and the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) allows organizations to do a cost avoidance exercise. Processor capacity on the IFL doesn’t count towards the total installed, general processor capacity and hence doesn’t bump up the overall software licensing costs for all the other users. It’s a complex discussion and that wasn’t the purpose of this post, so I’ll leave it at that.

This might be considered a win for IBM, but actually it was a loss. It’s also a loss for the customer. IBM lost because the processing was being moved from it’s growth platform, IBM Power Systems, to the legacy System z. It’s good for z since it consolidates it’s hold in that organization, or probably does. Once the customer has done the migration and conversion, it will be interesting to see how they feel the performance compares. IBM often refers to IFL and it’s close relatives the ziip and zaap as speciality engines. Giving the impression that they perform faster than the normal System z processors. It’s largely an urban myth though, since these “specialty” engines really only deliver the same performance, they are just measured, monitored and priced differently.

The customer lost becuase they’ve spent time and effort to move from one architecture to another, really only to avoid software and server pricing issues. While the System z folks will argue the benefits of their platform, and I’m not about to “dis” them, actually the IBM Power server can pretty mouch deliver a good enough implementation as to make the difference, largely irrelavant.

The second confliction I heard about was from EMC themselves. The second main topic of the session was a discussion about moving some of the EMC Symmetrix products off the mainframe, as customers have reported that they are using too much mainframe capacity to run. The guys from EMC were thinking of moving the function of the products to commodity x86 processors and then linking those via high speed networking into the mainframe. This would move the function out of band and save mainframe processor cycles, which in turn would avoid an upgrade, which in turn would avoid bumping the software costs up for all users.

I was surprised how quickly I interjected and started talking about WLM SRM Enclaves and moving the EMC apps to run on z/Linux etc. This surely makes much more sense.

I was left with though a definate impression that there are still hard times ahead for IBM in large non-X86 virtualized servers. Not that they are not great pieces of engineering, they are. But getting to grips with software pricing once and for all should really be their prime focus, not a secondary or tertiary one. We were working towards pay per use once before, time to revist me thinks.

(1) Sport the irony of this statement given the preceeding “Nano, Nano” post!

Whither IBM, Sun and Sparc?

So the twitterati and blog space is alight with discussion that IBM is to buy Sun for $6.25 billion. The only way we’ll know if there is any truth to it is if it goes ahead, these rumors are never denied.

Everyone is of course focussed on the big questions which mostly are around hardware synergies(server, chips, storage) and Java. Since I don’t work at IBM I have no idea whats going on or if there is any truth to this. There some more interesting technical discussions to be had than those generally think they have an informed opinion.

IBM bought Transitive in 2008; Transitive has some innovative emulation software, called QuickTransit. It allows binaries created and compiled on one platform, to be run on another hardware platform without change or recompilation. There were some deficiencies, and you can read more into this in my terse summary blog post at the time of the acquisition announcement. Prior to acquisition QuickTransit supported a number of platforms including SPARC and PowerMac and had been licensed by a number of companies, including IBM.

I assume IBM is in the midst of their classic “blue rinse” process and this explains the almost complete elimination of the Transitive web site(1), and it’s nothing more sinister than they are getting ready to re-launch under the IBM branding umbrella of POwerVM or some such.

Now, one could speculate that by acquiring SUN, IBM would achieve three things that would enhance their PowerVM stratgey and build on their Transitive acquisition. First, they could reduce the platforms supported by QuickTransit and over time, not renegotiate their licensing agreements with 3rd parties. This would give IBM “leverage” in offering binary emulation for the architectures previsouly supported, on say, only the Power and Mainframe processor ranges.

Also, by further enhancing QuickTransit, and driving it into the IBM microcode/firmware layer, thus making it more reliable, providing higher performance by reducing duplicate instruction handling, they could effectively eliminate future SPARC based hardware utilising the UNIX based Power hardware, PowerVM virtualization. This would also have the effect taking this level of emulation mainstream and negating much of the transient(pun intended) nature typically associated with this sort of technology.

Finally, by acquiring SUN, IBM would eliminate any IP barriers that might occur due to the nature of the implementation of the SPARC instruction set.

That’s not to say that there are not any problems to overcome. First, as it currently stands the emulation tends to map calls from one OS into another, rather than operating at a pure architecture level. Pushing some of the emulation down into the firmware/microcode layer wouldn’t help emulation of CALL SOLARIS API with X, Y, even if it would emulate the machine architecture instructions that execute to do this. So, is IBM really committed to becoming a first class SOLARIS provider? I don’t see any proof of this since the earlier announcement. Solaris on Power is pretty non-existentThe alternative is that IBM is to use Transitive technology to map these calls into AIX, which is much more likely.

In economic downturns, big, cash rich companies are kings. Looking back over the last 150 years there are plenty of examples of big buying competitors and emerging from the downturn even more powerful. Ultimately I believe that the proprietary chip business is dead, it’s just a question of how long it takes for it to die and if regulators feel that by allowing mergers and acquisitions in this space is good or bad for the economy and the economic recovery.

So, there’s a thought. As I said, I don’t work at IBM.

(1) It is mildly ammusing to see that one of the few pages left extoles the virtues of the Transitive technology by one Mendel Rosenblum, formerly Chief Scientist and co-founder of VMWare.

Robin Bloor asks what is dynamic infrastructure

Over on his have mac will blog blog, Robin Bloor asks What Does IBM Mean By Dynamic Infrastructure?

Rather than burden his comments section with a long trail of corrections, based on my suppositions, I thought I’d post my answer here and correct it as appropriate.

Robin, You might want to google for IBM Dynamic Infrastructure for MY SAP. or similar, or go look at this redbook. There is also a useful overview PowerPoint from Gerd Breiter, one of the architects and development leads, here

I’d guess the architects/development team for IDI have been moved internally from Systems Group to Tivoli. IDI was an early implementation of on demand and was developed in Boeblingen. As initially envisaged, IDI was a Systems Group initive and the bulk of the early implementation done before on demand, and then carried over and modified as and when possible.

Of course, I’m sure now that this mission is over in Tivoli the thinking and delivery will have evolved. Obviously cloud computing has become as major focus area in the industry since then, and would have to be factored in.

Unless you know better

IBM et clouds

I note from Cotes People over Process Redmonk blog, that Sam Palmisano, CEO at IBM, has given Erich Clemente, Vice President, Strategy and General Manager of Enterprise Initiatives the mission of sorting out IBM’s disperate cloud initiatives.

I worked for Erich for 3-years, he was a great 2nd line, had good vision and great business acumen, as a former Systems Engineer, understood technology better than I think a lot of people would give him credit for.

If I was still at IBM, I’d have loved to work with Erich on this, and helped him carve through the silos, the marketing treacle, the services dilema and the hosting potential. I only hope he doesn’t allow himself to get  tied up in knots by people trying to define global architectures and claims of leading by creating all encompassing standards.

What’s up with industry standard servers? – The IBM View

I finally had time to read through the IBM 4Q ‘08 results yesterday evening, it is good to see that Power Systems saw a revenue growth for the 10th straight quarter,  and that the virtualization  and high utilization rates are driving sales of both mainframe and Power servers.

I was somewhat surprised though to see the significant decline(32%) in x86 servers sales, System x in IBM nomenclature, put down to the strong demand “virtualizing and consolidating workloads into more efficient platforms such as POWER and mainframe”.

I certainly didn’t see any significant spike in interest in Lx86 in the latter part of my time with IBM and as far as I know, IBM still doesn’t have a reference customer for it many references for it, despite a lot of good technical work going into it. The focus from sales just wasn’t there. So that means customers were porting, rewriting or buying new applications, not something that would usually show up in quarterly sales swings, more as long term trends.

Seems to me the more likely reason behind IBM’s decline in x86 was simply as Bob Moffat[IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Systems & Technology Group] put it in his December ‘08 interview with CRN’s ChannelWeb when referring to claims by HP’s Mark Hurd “The stuff that Mr. Hurd said was going away kicked his ass: Z Series [mainframe hardware] outgrew anything that he sells. [IBM] Power [servers] outgrew anything that he sells. So he didn’t gain share despite the fact that we screwed up execution in [x86 Intel-based server] X Series.”

Moffat is quoted as saying IBM screwed up x86 execution multiple times, so one assumes at least Moffat thinks it’s true. And yes, as I said on twitter yesterday was a brutal day in the tech industry, and certainly with the Intel and Microsoft layoffs, the poor AMD results, and the IBM screw-up in sales and Sun starting previously announced layoffs, as the IBM results say industry standard hardware is susceptible to the economic downtown. I’d disagree with the IBM results statement though in that industry standard hardware is “clearly more susceptible”.

My thoughts and best wishes go out to all those who found out yesterday that their jobs were riffed, surplused or rebalanced, many of those, including 10-people I know personally, did not work in the x86 or as IBM would have it, “industry standard” hardware business.

New Year, New Start

Something’s missing on Cathcarts Corner, for the first time in 22-years, there is no IBM in the center of my CV. I’ll be starting in a new position at Dell on Monday 12th of January, as a Director of Systems Engineering, and Distinguished Engineer.

I enjoyed my time at IBM enormously; I got to work with some great people, on some great development and customer projects. My time came to an end though in Power Systems and more recently, data center networking.

In IBM, I’d never been part of a traditional development organization, rather, as my long time mentor and good friend Adrian Walmsley once noted, a poacher turned game keeper.

In my last four years at IBM, every project I’ve worked on has been subject to major compromise, cut-back and delays to accommodate another part of the IBM business, and I found that too frustrating.

My first project in IBM Power Systems was a great learning lesson. We spent 5-months looking at the software requirements for the follow-on processor to the p6. Presented with two processor designs, in the end we decided to go with the obvious one that built on the existing p6 chip, rather than a radical, highly multithreaded alternative.

After that, I failed to get any real software interest, either as platform function, packaging or, importantly in systems, or platform management function. Although some of my core recommendations are being built for the next generations of servers, it was obvious that the Power Systems team were still maniacally focused on dominating the Unix hardware performance at the cost of almost everything else.

I’ve no idea how different things will be at Dell. Unlike IBM Systems Group who have to solve every problem on four different architectures, and for a dozen or so unique machine type-models, Dell have their own challenges. I’m looking forward to helping solve them.

IBM AND JUNIPER NETWORKS FORM STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIP

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum…

Ahh yes, Nathan Lane and Frankie Howerd, they represent the differences between the UK and US, in many ways so different, but in many ways, so the same. I’ve been bemoaning the fact that I can’t blog about what I’ve been doing mostly for the last 5-years as it’s all design and development work, all considered by IBM to be confidential, and since none of it is open source, it’s hard to point to projects and give hints.

And so it is with the project I’m currently working on. Only this time, not only is it IBM Confidential, but it is being worked with a partner and based on a lot of their intellectual property, so even less chance to discuss in public. I’ve been doing some customer validation sessions over the last 3-months and got concrete feedback on key data center directions around data center fabric, 10gb ethernet, converged enhanced ethernet (CEE) and more. There are certainly big gains to be made in reducing capital expenditure and operational expenditure in this space,  but thats really only the start. The real benefit comes from having an enabled fabric that rather than forcing centralization around a server, which is much of what we’ve been doing for the last 20-years, or forcing centralization around an ever more complex switch, which is where Cisco have been headed, the fabric is in and of itself the hub and the switches just provide any to any connectivity, low latency and enable both existing and new applications, both virtualized and enabled, to exploit the fabric.

So following one of my customer validation sessions in the UK, I was searching around on the Internet for a link. And I came across this one. It discusses a strategic partnership between IBM and Juniper for custom ASICS for a new class of Intenet backbone devices, only it is from 1997, who’da guessed. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum…

Virtualization, The Recession and The Mainframe

Robin Bloor has posted an interesting entry on his “Have mac will blog” blog on the above subject. He got a few small things wrong, well mostly, he got all the facts wrong but, right from a populist historical rewrite perspective. Of course I posted a comment, but as always made a few typos that I now cannot correct, so here is the corrected version(feel free to delete the original comments Robin… or just make fun of me for the mistakes, but know I was typing outdoors at the South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery, with open toe sandles on and it’s cold tonight in Austin, geeky I know!)

What do they say about a person who is always looking back to their successes? Well, in my case, it’s only becuase I can’t post on my future successes, they are considered too confidential for me to even leave slides with customers when I visit… 

VM revisited, enjoy:

 

Mark Cathcart (Should have) said,

on October 23rd, 2008 at 8:16 pm

Actually Robin, while it’s true that the S/360 operating systems were written in Assembler, and much of the 370 operating systems, PL/S was already in use for some of the large and complex components.

It is also widely known that virtualization, as you know it on the mainframe today, was first introduced on the S/360 model-67. This was a “bastard child” of the S/360 processors that had virtual memory extensions. At that point, the precursor to VM/370 used on the S/360-67 was CP-67.

I think you’ll also find that IBM never demonstrated 40,000 Linux virtual machines on a single VM system, it was David Boyes of Sine Nomine, who also recently ported Open Solaris to VM.

Also, there’s no such thing as pSeries Unix in the marketing nomenclature any more, it’s now Power Systems, whose virtualization now supports AIX aka IBM “Unix”, System i or IBM i to use the the modern vernacular and Linux on Power.

Wikipedia is a pretty decent source for information on mainframe virtualization, right up until VM/XA where there are some things that need correcting, I just have not had the time yet.

Oh yeah, by the way. While 2TB of memory on a mainframe gives pretty impressive virtualization capabilities, my favorite anecdote, and it’s true because I did it, was back in 1983. At Chemical Bank in New York. We virtualized a complete, production, high availability, online credit card authorization system, by adding just 4Mb of memory boosting the total system memory to a whopping 12Mb of memory! Try running any Intel hypervisor or operating system on just 12Mb of memory these days, a great example of how efficient the mainframe virtualization is!

 

Back in the day – way back

I suggested to @adamclyde we take a twitter conversation about the gray area between personal and corporate blogging offline, into email. In my response to him, like some “grumpy old man“, I started by recalling the good old days when my URL’s were emea.ibm.com/(something) then ibm.com/s390/corner and later ibm.com/servers/corner.

Later I went looking and found some of my webpages from 2000 on the Internet Archive. I was even more delighted find they had some of my old presentations. I didn’t check through all of them, but my V2 Corner is here. I’ve taken one of my better presentations from the Internet archive and posted it on slideshare.

Enterprise Workstation Management - From Chaos to Order

The PDF version doesn’t have all the overlay colors right, and some of the embedded graphics are missing, but it’s still worth looking through for both content and style.

 

If Google can celebrate it’s 10th anniversary by reporting it’s 2001 index, well how about letting me get away with reposting a presentation from 1996 that originated in 1989! The presentation has it’s origins in 1989 as a Lotus Freelance presentation printed on real overheads via a plotter. It covers the management of workstations and PC’s in corporate environments.

This version is dated from June 1996 and was recovered from the Internet Archive. Some of the colored overlays are the wrong colors and some of the graphics missing. I still think its worth taking a look through for both style and content. I got the summary slide wrong, but not by much as we move to what some are calling Cloud Clients

Summers over, time for a t-shirt!

My Power 7 and VM/ESA t-shirts

Over on the mainframe blog, James Governor is talking about start-ups and t-shirt driven development in his latest Redmonk TV. We’ve done the subversive t-shirt thing for years at IBM, both in conjunction with and separately from the SHARE User Group.

When I moved from the UK to the USA, I cleaned out my huge stockpile of t-shirts, both triathlon, running and tech t-shirts and tennis shirts. I kept a few, including the one in the bag on the picture. In the old days getting t-shirts printed couldn’t be done at home and was expensive, so it was common place to keep things obscure, that kept the cost down and the security people away.

The white t-shirt has the IBM 8-bar logo on the left chest, and the numbers 5654-030. Wikipedia currently says that VM/ESA dates from 1988, while that might be true in an intellectual perspective since much of the control program(hypervisor code) came from VM/XA, available in 1988, VM/ESA wasn’t announced until 1990 and the first release 1.0 available in December that year. We wore these VM/ESA t-shirts at that years SHARE meetings, especially at SCIDS.

The other t-shirt in the picture? Well its similarly forward looking, designed and distributed by Richard Talbot around the time Richard and the team got the follow-on processor to P6 through concept. I have a few other t-shirts, maybe we should start a flickr group and post pictures

Graduation, end of an era, legends?

Babe Ruth and Willie Mays of IBM?

I was in New York last week as one of the organisers, and a speaker for the IBM Academy of Technology conference on Virtualization. A great coincidence then, that when the invitation came to attend IBM Senior Vice President, Nick Donoforio’s “Graduation” party, I was able to accept as it was the same week.

I took a slow drive over from Hawthorne Research, across the Tapan Zee bridge and down to IBM Palisades. I’d been there many times before, to attend class and also to present to customers. However, this was possibly the most significant. I knew it wouldn’t bet the last time I’d see Nick. I for one wouldn’t be on him NOT showing up at the IBM Academy of Technology meeting next month. A fact which was later confirmed by current Academy president, Joanne Martin.

No, it was significant because it was the last time I’d get to talk to Nick while we were both employees of IBM. While I owe much of my IBM career to IBM UK employees, most especially Adrian Walmsley and Mike Cowlishaw, also one Larry Hirst, who went out on a limb and hired me in the dark days of 1987. I owe my continued employment, my elevated status, and to some degree my current position to Nick Donofrio.

I first met Nick, as far as I can recall, back in 1990. I still have the video upstairs, but it’s in UK PAL VHS format, and I don’t any of those technologies anymore. Nick was head of I think DSD, or the mainframe division. We had the chance to put him on the spot about the unholy mess that had been the release schedules for VM/XA and VM/ESA. Nick was as good as his word, things got substantially better for the next few years, some of it no doubt at his making, and some not. However, he was the most straight talking Senior IBM Executive I’d dealt with, and left with the words that later came to characterize Nick, “I’m here to help if you need me”. Which later became, “be careful what you ask for”.

A few years later I was working in the Fishkill office on a project for Linda Sanford, to try to give some meaning and structure to the mainframe divisions Client/Server strategy, on my way into the office one morning, when a helicopter landed across the parking lot in front of me. I asked when I got to the building, “oh that was Nick Donofrio”. So it should have come as no surprise then, when I arrived at IBM Palisades, started a slow walk to the building, paused to wait for Linda Sanford and Charles Lickel who came in behind me, when the air was filled with the sound of a helicopter, it was Nick.

I can’t recall what I asked him when I spoke to him at the graduation, I can recall he called me “big fella” as usual when asking how I was, harking back to my size of the late 1990’s. Later Nick revealed he too was once >200lbs, we briefly discussed his time in Burlington. What was clear though was that the legend of Helicopter Nick would always be with me. Back in early 2002, Nick and I spoke about my future career direction. A month or so later I ended up working for George Walsh, my second line manager was Irving, and I wrote an initial analysis of a little known company called ThinkDynamics and the topic of provisioning. I do know that I asked for that job, and so, as Nick would say, “be careful what you ask for”, I couldn’t and haven’t complained. It has though, been a tough six years.

Nick and Irving opened up the Academy of Technology so that non-development type engineers could flourish and be elected as full members, I was one of the early ones in 1999. Nick was also behind the whole Distinguished Engineer recognition and appointment program, and the drive to get the technical community at IBM the recognition it so much needs, all 195,000 of us.

So, farewell Nick, enjoy the family, enjoy the retirement. Is Nick the best technician ever at IBM? I doubt it. There is no doubt in my mind though that Nick is one, if not the most, enthusiastic, inspirational leaders ever in the tech industry, that most people will have never heard of.

Market dynamics and IBM vs IBM

Yet again I find myself handcuffed in terms of what I can say about my current projects, but inspired to respond to long time buddy James Governors blog or twitter posts.

In a blog entry, James takes up the cause of the underdog, in this case, Nick Hortovanyi who is working down-under to sell IBM hardware and software. Nick complains in a blog entry about trying to sell IBM Software and IBM System x servers, while IBM System x are running adverts in the press advertising Windows software and middleware.

So James, you as much as anyone knows that IBM is a big company, measured in small pieces by their own PNLs. Do you hear Power Systems VARs and Partners bleating because System x (x86 servers) advertise and promote Intel Inside and Windows ? Did you hear mainframes complaining about SWG making Windows enterprise ready?

For that matter, when was the last time you recall seeing IBM SWG extol the virtues and scalability of IBM System x Enterprise Servers? The iDataPlex is an awesome machine for running Windows and Linux web infrastrcuture, but you wouldn’t know from IBM SWG advertising. You’d be surprised who pays whom to run these adds, but the x86 marketplace is fiercly competitive and if IBM only sold IBM, we’d be out of that business before you could spell b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s i-n-t-e-l-l-i-g-e-n-c-e.

I’d be more interested and concerned about the support and incentive Nick and his peers were getting to sell IBM products, than what IBM was doing in advertising. If we fail in the former, we fail, period, no matter what advertising we run.

Most Mainframe MIPS Installs are Linux

over on the ibmeye blog Greg makes this observation: “I found this surprising (if true): More than half the mainframe MIPS IBM sells are Linux” and “That seems to go against the trust of IBM’s marketing push.”

I have no idea if the numbers quoted are accurate, but I don’t see the inconsistency.

We’ve been on an Intel and general server consolidation drive for 15-years now. Back in the mid-90’s it was much harder, we were trying to convince organizations to move their Unix workloads to OS/390, aka MVS, aka z/OS, using the Unix Systems Services, but it was a tough sell. Even before that a few of us, primarily in Europe were driving to get customers to consolidated under utilized and unreliable file servers to MVS or VM using either LANRES(for Novell Netware) or the LAN File Services for MS and OS/2 LAN Servers.

I think the current trend to migrate to Linux on the mainframe is entirely consistent with organizations efforts to make the most of the environmental benefits of a large centralized server, along with the ease and openness of Linux. IBM has a massive internal effort, moving something like 3,500 servers.

Can you provide examples of where you think it’s inconsistent Greg?