IBM is releasing more software to make it easier to program, manage and administer its mainframes in an ongoing bid to attract more customers to purchase its big iron hardware instead of high-end servers.

The move is part of a five-year, $100 million project IBM began in October to simplify use of its System z mainframe. At that time, IBM released a variety of tools and services including a new mainframe management console, better software asset management capabilities and Health Checker for z/OS, a monitoring and configuration tuning tool.

The new enhancements IBM announced for its System z software Tuesday cover security, systems and data management and virtualization.

The vendor made the announcements at the Share conference in Tampa, Fla. Turning 52 this year, Share, an independent IBM user group, is one of the world's oldest user associations. Both IBM and Share have been spearheading a number of initiatives in recent years designed to raise the profile of the mainframe. These include zNextGen, a project to get IT students interested in gaining mainframe expertise and then embarking on careers in big iron, which both organizations see as very important given that many skilled mainframe operators are reaching retirement age.

As part of Tuesday's announcements, IBM unveiled a new version of its database -- DB2 9 for z/OS -- due out in the first half of this year along with a suite of DB2 tools. The vendor is also enhancing its Tivoli monitoring family of availability and performance management tools including Omegamon z/OS Management Console. IBM acquired the Omegamon technology through the June 2004 purchase of Candle. IBM has translated the Omegamon software into Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.

Also new is z/VM Version 5.3, an improved release of IBM's mainframe virtualization software with a focus on expanding the technology's scalability to host more than 1,000 virtual images on a single hypervisor. The vendor has also worked on simplifying the management of Z/VM running on the Linux operating system.

On the middleware side, IBM is releasing WebSphere Developer for System z version 7.0 and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS version 6.0. Both offerings are designed to help users as they adopt the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to development so they can more easily expose their mainframe data as Web services.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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