* Mainframe management for dummies
IBM is on a $100 million, five-year campaign to simplify mainframe management, administration and development (read the story here).
“It takes a lot of time for systems programmers and admins to get up to speed overall in terms of implementing the mainframe,” says John Burg, System Z product marketing manager for IBM. “We are trying to simplify it, make the interfaces less complicated and make it easier to administer and view.”
Burg says IBM aims to reduce the time it takes to get a manager up to speed on mainframe management from several years to one. “What we hear from customers all the time is they really love the mainframe and that it has an incredible amount of sophistication. We aren’t going to take that away, we are trying to make admins more productive earlier,” he says.
Burg believes that IT newbies coming out of colleges and universities are often more familiar with open systems than mainframe environments and that “customers want to make the transition from open systems to mainframe skills.”
One of the ways IBM is simplifying the mainframe is with its HealthChecker for z/OS, which automatically checks the system’s operating system “to make sure it runs optimally and efficiently,” explains Burg. Users can also add their own health checkers into the system for specific applications.
In the area of systems management, IBM has replaced its heritage of green screens with a Tivoli graphical user interface. A Hardware Configuration Manager allows customers to configure the mainframe with a new user interface.
On the application end, IBM has the WebSphere for z/OS, which conforms to the Eclipse standard and Java, as well as COBOL.
“We are going forward with this for the next five years and building interfaces across multiple platforms,” says Burg. “By 2011, anyone with a computer science background will be able to manage and administer the mainframe environment.”
The mainframe simplification program is available now.
