IBM user group executives from Share were out this week drumming up interest for their upcoming meeting in Orlando, Fla., but also playing up some of the more important aspects of the group's recently released study of its members' mainframe trends and directions.
One of the central results from the study, which had 431 respondents, is that there's a ton of data stored on the mainframe still but too much of it is locked there with no easy way to get out. However, the survey shows there is significant data integration, services work at hand largely utilizing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies. The study showed nearly 23% of respondents were undergoing a SOA project, and another third said a SOA is in the planning or consideration stages. Software vendor AmberPoint released an SOA survey this week that said 47% of SOA environments include mainframes.
With that in mind, what we have here are the four most pressing issues surrounding the mainframe and SOA.
Scripting: While mainframes play a dominant role in hosting an enterprise's data, companies' interaction with that data faces constraints. At least 50% of the companies surveyed use hand-coded scripts to push mainframe-based data to other databases or platforms, according to the study. Such scripting is hard to maintain, particularly if the programmers who wrote it leave the organization, the study notes."Scripting is something users should be aware of but it isn't a surprise nor is it a mainframe-only problem," said Jim Michael, Share's treasurer said. "Unix scripts for example are an everyday issue in many shops."
System strain: The study says SOA can strain systems, because of its heavy use of XML-based messaging which can overburden many servers with parsing requirements. The Java managed programming language is also employed in many SOA environments. Since Java is a managed language, it actually runs within a "container" that adds an additional abstraction layer above the native server interfaces. SOA also invokes services at an abstracted level, which requires additional network interaction and data movement between various systems above and beyond natively run applications, Share said. As a result, organizations developing and deploying SOA may find they require greater hardware capacity - in terms of CPU and network I/O capacity - to handle such additional processing workloads. Rather than acquire more server hardware to attempt to address growing SOA performance issues, mainframes may represent a more cost-effective option for leveraging existing resources. A mainframe system may be better capable of managing increasing SOA workloads with better economies of scale, and provide better scalability, availability, and increased memory.
The ties that bind: Beyond IBM, most vendors' mainframe-to-SOA packages place the mainframe in more of a supporting role for SOAs, versus being a primary hub, the Share survey found. The primary strategies for SOA-enabling mainframes consist of terminal emulation, application integration middleware, adapters, database connectors, and application servers. For example, IBM offers CICS Transaction Gateway, a Java EE connector to CICS applications, as a middleware solution. The company also offers IBM WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), a host integration environment and toolset that supports most major platforms. HATS dynamically transforms 3270 and 5250 screens into HTML, and also creates Web services based on screen process flows. For more comprehensive SOA deployments on the mainframe, IBM offers WebSphere Application Server, a Java EEbased development and deployment environment optimized to support SOA standards. IBM WebSphere Application Server for z/OS is a Java Enterprise Edition and Web services application server for the mainframe. According to the Amber Point survey, nearly all SOA systems include "non-SOA" components. For example, 58% of companies include "non-SOAP" messaging (such as MQ or RMI) in their SOA systems. Packaged applications such as SAP are included in 68% of SOA systems.
Move toward an open community?: While no one is likely to confuse mainframe application development with the open source community just yet, the idea that SOA could promote a community of developers that could share technology is something the mainframe users would like to see.
"SOA could be like the open source community in that mainframe users could share their solutions to common problems with others," Michael said. "Since SOA moves you toward an all standardized service environment the work of the community could benefit everyone."
Michael said groups such as the SOA Consortium, an SOA advocacy group made up of over 80 firms including users such as Bank of America and Fidelity Investments and vendors such as IBM, BEA and HP are looking to establish an SOA community that would enable users to repeat processes that were deemed successful.
But a lot of work needs to be done. In the Share survey only eight percent of the respondents stated that the majority of their services are shared across enterprise units. In fact, close to half, either said that none of their services are shared across more than one business unit, or simply didn't know if any sharing takes place.
Layer 8 is Network World's daily home for the not-just-networking news.
Contact Layer 8
Layer 8 archive
|
|
Flashbacks
Admitted it is a while back when I did work on mainframes but.. Scripting, why? It is great for temporary solutions but.. SOA, where in SOA it says that you have to use XML? Or WEB? It is an implementation problem, not SOA problem. By the way, converting 3270 to HTML (or Tandem 6530 or VT100 or Tektronix or DG) and back is not difficult, world is full sw/hw solutions, some mine. All that said, I'm still a fan of mainframes because if you need raw information processing power, not computing power, and reliability not even Tandem (HP NonStop) or Stratus can do that in most cases. Maybe I'm just an old, biased systems programmer who can write assembler in sleep but living through PC and Unix times has only made me more mainframe believer, virtualization, threading, security, separation of presentation and processing, work load management, redundant hardware, etc long before they came current fad.