Multifactor authentication (MFA) and data encryption are the best means to reduce the risk of hacking attempts on a platform. However, it’s critically important to understand that an MFA solution targeted to one platform, say a mobile device or desktop as the system of engagement, is probably insufficient to address the security needs of another platform that gets accessed later, such as a system of record.
For the rest of the story, see the IBM Global Security Forum.
IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat has some interesting ramifications for System z. My last four articles on this blog were about Porting an Enterprise App to the mainframe. I provided details on the downside of using the mainframe for Linux. In particular, there are few binaries available and the user has to build their own code instead of acquiring the binaries from others. The main reason for this problem is that IBM has been afraid of being a distributor of open source since they first announced support for Linux in May 2000. This has been especially true for the mainframe. Heaven forbid that someone would make an IP or patent claim against open source code that came from IBM, regardless of the open source license that was distributed.
And even with that difficulty, the open source movement on the mainframe is succeeding very nicely. Rocket Software, where I am now working, has the Ported Tools for z/OS. They provide open source binaries because IBM wouldn’t do that. Better yet, they’ve been keeping those binaries up to date with the open source industry. At one point, there was a Redbook for Open Source on z/OS that included binaries, but those sample pieces of code were removed. This is what motivated Rocket to become the distributor. IBM has also used other sites, such as Marist College, to host any binary versions of code, in order to put a buffer between them and potential IP issues.
Red Hat is the largest supplier of open source code in the world. Most important to me, they include binary distros for the mainframe. This will mean that IBM will become a distributor of open source binaries for the mainframe. Now, if they only take that attitude and apply it to the other areas that they support. For example, the Linux Community team maintains a Github library for open source on the mainframe. Today, it’s mainly about source code changes and leaving it up to the user to build the binary, which can take hours, instead of the seconds needed on x86 platforms to download a binary. Wouldn’t it be great if this acquisition of Redhat led to IBM’s ability to create and post binaries for open source for the mainframe? The unintended consequence of this acquisition could actually make the mainframe even easier to use and deploy. That would be a fantastic next chapter in the amazing mainframe’s legacy!
At the end of 2016 and lasting a few months into 2017, I completed a proof of concept port of a large Enterprise Application that had been running on the Amazon Web Service Cloud to Linux for System z. This was a Docker based application written in Java…so of course, it would be trivial to port. WRONG. While the application is in Java, it called many pieces of open source code. Much of that code hadn’t been ported to System z yet or wasn’t widely adopted. What I thought was a very simple exercise turned into a six month effort.
What I’d like to do, via a series of blog entries, is share my experience in the hope this might help some other organization decide to do a similar porting task. While I’ve been working with mainframes for decades, this was my first Linux porting experience. So I’ll be describing how this experience helped me to Master the Mainframe, though that title seems reserved for university students.
This could be a book, but by breaking it up, it might be easier to understand.
This entry is more about the basic desktop development environment and targeted production on x86 based cloud servers. This is the traditional development environment and primary target of the applications. I needed to fit in and work with this environment before I could ever consider doing the unique activities necessary for success on Linux for System z.
Because of the proprietary nature of the application and intellectual property, I’m not going to name the vendor or application. This overview of the workflow is simplistic, at best, so as to not give away any trade secrets. The vendor is an early start up with an application to handle biometric authentication in a marvelous way. This application has a callable interface to start a request and then, using cloud based services, does some communication with the end-user, does some analytics based on a number of system defined characteristics, logs a number of things for diagnostics, audits and future analytics, provides a go/no-go decision back to the original caller and has a number of applications and user interface applications to manage the cloud deployment. Finally, they have an enormous test suite to emulate and automate the entire end to end workflow.
This vendor was doing all of their development for the x86 platform and originally with any Linux version supported by Amazon Web Services. This included Centos/Red Hat versions. Their first development environment used Maven tooling and pom.xml scripts that targeted deployment into Docker containers. They used Github capabilities to clone and manage the source code libraries within their business.
The first major effort was for me to establish a development environment on my computer and prove that I could work with and build a workable x86 version of the code. My computer of choice was a MacBook Pro 2010 model running the latest MacOS at the time. First thing to do was turn my MacOS into a real developers machine. I installed xcode, Atom, SourceTree, Filezilla and Docker which enabled me to look like a Linux system, edit source files intelligently, manage access to the source files, facilitate cloning of source and execute the code. There were other local variant software that I needed to install using a script that was provided to me. I love the Mac, as did the vendor, who’s entire team used it, so that was really helpful. I then needed a VPN into their system and I was off and running. I used this set up for about two months. One thing I learned, painfully, that the 2010 Mac was SLOOOOOWWWW. What would take 15 minutes to do for them might take me over an hour. So I decided to upgrade to the MacBook Pro Touch Bar quad-core 16GB memory laptop. Now my work completed faster than their 15 minutes, which was a blessing. I can’t stress enough the value of a good starting point on the desktop or laptop for this type of development! It was life changing to me.
The first version of the vendor code used Centos/Red Hat as the target deployment environment. This code runs over 50 Docker containers. Each container is intended to be as small, memory wise, as possible, so it is scalable in a largely virtualized environment. As mentioned earlier, they also used Maven and pom.xml scripts to do their container builds. Each container had a script that would gather necessary pre-requisite open source parts, their Java code and then do the build so there was an executable container. Naming conventions, versioning and more were part of these Maven scripts. 90% of the open source code used was available in a binary form as either an RPG, ZIP or TAR file. Those binaries were either copied into the vendor’s library system or accessed via a URL and dynamically downloaded from the internet during the build process. I’ll get into the System z ramifications of this in the Good and Bad blog entries.
This is the development environment I began my first phase of the port. The prototype I was building was only for a functional test to prove the code could work. We intended to accomplish our test goal with only 40 of the 50 containers being ported. We completed what we thought was a good test level of code after a few weeks of my porting. But then we identified some critical test containers were missing. Unfortunately, the vendor didn’t use the same library management rigor for their test suite and I was going to have to re-base my code.
Unfortunately, that was the tip of the iceberg in changes. I mentioned this was a startup vendor. They had two very large customers that were testing the code when I started. They realized they had a scaling problem, early on. They also realized they had some development inefficiencies. When you get a RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu distribution, there is a lot of software in the package, like getting the z/OS operating system, MacOS or Windows. As such, the kernel of the large distribution Linux systems can start at 250MB and easily be over 750 MB’s. When you add 100’s of virtualized containers, each having that size as the basic footprint, the overall system runs out of memory pretty quickly. However, if the kernel can start at 18MB and run about 50MB, then greater scale is possible. As development of this application began, the Alpine Linux distribution began and it met the small size requirement. The vendor began to rebase all of their test code and as much of the open source code as they could on Alpine to take advantage of this reduced memory benefit. That was and is an excellent business decision on their part.
Maven is a fairly complex environment for building docker containers. It works. Both the vendor and I proved that it could work. However, in addition to open source code, there are now open docker containers that can be leveraged, as is, to be included in place of an open source binary. However, in order to do that with Maven, the Docker definition files of these open containers must be cut and paste and then modified as part of the Maven script syntax. And each time the container definition changes in the open source world, the Maven scripts need to be hand modified. So the vendor dropped Maven as the base for their container build environment and switched to using Docker build definitions directly. Again, I applaud the vendor for doing this. It simplified the development environment, it gave them access to additional open source code repositories and made everything easier to manage.
The unintended consequences of the vendor’s change from Maven to pure Docker and Centos/RedHat to Alpine was I had to start all over on the port. I’m going to save the details of that for the Good and Bad statements as they are directly applicable to System z.
As far as Linux for x86 cloud environments, this vendor has a world-class development environment, working to create the most reliable, secure and efficient application possible. Ultimately, those attributes must apply to System z deployment as well. I’ll be covering that status in the other blog entires.
I provided a simplistic overview of what I intended to port to Linux for System z in Part 1. The original application was built for x86 systems. As such, all binaries are built to run on x86 systems. The Docker containers that these applications run in are x86 binaries as well. So my job was to create the Linux for System z (aka S390X) binaries, with as little change as possible.
I also mentioned that this was a start up vendor with whom I was working. I had done some business work to show them the value of porting the application to System z, but they were neither skilled in, nor able to afford their own System z. So I gave them the challenge to let me prove to them this could be successful and they took me up on it and agreed to work with me.
While a small development organization, they still had over 25 very proficient programmers and testers. I was extremely fortunate to have their lead developer as my mentor. He and I would meet at the same time, for an hour every day to check on progress, educate me or diagnose any problems I might have so that I could make progress for the next day. Most important is he was learning about the mainframe and intrigued by the possibility of business success as I was, so it was a great experience for both of us. I greatly appreciate the time and effort he put in to make this a success.
Where do you find a mainframe? You ask the Community Development team. Eva Yan at IBM was instrumental in approving the vendor and I to get access to Docker containers on the mainframe. Cindy Lee at IBM was fantastic, with her team, to help show me where all the open source for z was available in the community and Martha McConaghy at Marist College, the host for vendor access to the LCDS was terrific in helping me to keep the system running.
Docker is a great place to work with portable code. My development environment was an x86 Docker container environment that pointed to the S390X Docker on the LCDS system as the target deployment environment. I’m not going to spend time giving you the details on the set up, but suffice to say it all works well.
I didn’t mention before that the vendor is on a different continent. So imagine from my laptop, a VPN to the vendor’s libraries where some code is downloaded, merged with code on my desktop, Docker on my desktop puts all the parts together, ships it securely to the Docker on the mainframe image, does the build and sends results back to me. So if this process took 10-15 minutes to do on my laptop, suffice to say, when you add up the networks and bulk distribution of code between systems and do the build, it’s going to take more time than a single system. Doing a single container build, for the first time, was never correct. My mantra, for years, has been “Next time for sure!”. I’d fix what needed fixing, get a little farther the next time, repeat the mantra and try again, until finally, I’d get a successful build. The time or performance isn’t a problem when building a single container. It’s when you build 40-50 containers at once, or as I liked to call it “The Big Bang”. Then it was hours to do the build on the mainframe, instead of an hour on x86. You’d think that was the bad, right? It was good, because a call to Eva, requesting some more memory and processors and I moved to a very competitive deployment environment. For just like my MacBook 2010, which was under configured for this scale of development, the initial Linux system I was given was an under configured virtual machine. With a simple config change, within moments of my request, and literally no down time, I was up on a larger Linux image, due to the magic and wonders of the underlying scalable z/VM server image.
The LCDS virtual images came with RedHat kernel as the base, with some optional software included, but that was all. I need several dozen pieces of open source software to add to my environment to build my S390X binaries. Again, I don’t want to spend the money to buy a supported Linux distro for this Proof of Concept. I’m directed to Sine Nomine Associates, and in particular to Neale Ferguson. He could not have been a better ally in this effort. First and foremost, he pointed to libraries on their servers where I could retrieve many of the binaries that were necessary. It was such a relief to find many of the rpm’s I needed on their website. As mentioned earlier, I was a newbie to this kind of porting. He spent considerable time mentoring me on both basic Linux and System z specifics to keep me moving along. As important, Neale was on the Docker band wagon. He’d begun building docker containers with specific functionality. I was able to take several of his containers and imbed them into the containers I was building to simplify my deployment.
The Linux Community also has Github repositories of System z ready open source code. I bookmarked those pages and visited them often. I’m pointing links in a Bibliography in Part 4.
The real dilemma came when the vendor switched from Centos to Alpine as the base Linux kernel. Alpine was so new in late 2016, early 2017. While both are Linux derivatives, the syntax of packaging applications is different. As such, Docker builds for Centos are different from Alpine. Because I was doing a proof of concept, it really didn’t matter whether I used Centos or Alpine. However, the longer my porting took, the faster the vendor was converting their code to Alpine, so now, I would have to make “throw away” changes to support Centos.
Worse than that, there was only one person even trying Alpine on the mainframe and that was “some college kid” as a research project. How could I build an enterprise application on a system that one unpaid person was supporting? That person was Tuan Hoang and I am indebted to him. He was a Marist College student. I began contacting him late in 2016. While he had the kernel ported, there were very few packages for Alpine ported to S390X. He was quickly up to the task. I gave him a list of high priority packages. Each night, I’d get an update of what he completed. Each day, I’d build some more containers off his evening’s work. It got to the point that only third-party open source packages were not done by him. This really got my development effort going. But the best news of all was at the end of my project. Tuan had worked so hard to get his “prototype” of Alpine for System z going that the Alpine community accepted S390X as a primary target platform. All Alpine packages would be available on S390X, simultaneously to their deployment on other hardware architectures. It was painful, but it was wonderful at the same time.
What I found throughout this porting effort is there is a wonderful community of people dedicated to the support and value of System z. They were very accommodating and helped reduce my efforts greatly.
As I’ve explained in Part 1 Basics and Part 2 Good, I did a proof of concept port of an Enterprise Application from Amazon Web Services on x86 to Linux on System z in 2017. The good news was I got to the point I needed to, the bad news was it was more than difficult to get there.
Open Source is open source…available to anyone. The story goes that Linux is Linux. Close, but not quite. Unfortunately, architectural chip bits (Big Endian vs Little Endian) is one of many differences and there is code that needs to change to handle these differences. There are also supported platforms, “tolerated platforms” and unsupported platforms. This is the problem with Linux on System z. The marketing hype is that all of Linux is supported on z. The reality is somewhat different. Not necessarily insurmountable, but you better know what you are getting into.
When Linux on z is a supported platform, then the packages for System z are supported in binary format, such as an RPM file for Centos/RedHat or an APK file for Alpine. This is the best case and makes development of S390X on par with other platforms like x86 and ARM.
In this case, the code may work on S390X, but it’s a source code build. You can find instructions on Github for S390X as to how to modify the code to get it to work on the platform. But if you want to use that code, it could take a long time to
Let me use an example. Couchbase is the non-SQL database preferred by the vendor I worked with. Someone within IBM is maintaining a script on Github to help others leverage a particular release of Couchbase. Since Couchbase is constantly coming up with new versions, those edits need to be constantly updated. I would have preferred a binary version of the code, but IBM doesn’t do binaries…They only do source. And in order to make Couchbase work, there are pre-requisite source modifications necessary to Go, Python, cmake, Erlang, flatbuffers, ICU, jemalloc, and v8 javascript. Manually doing all that is necessary takes a few hours. I was fortunate to take all of these changes and build a docker script that was several hundred lines long to automate the build of Couchbase by doing all this work. When I ran this container build, it took over an hour to complete. I had to do this many times before I got the automation script to work properly. And that automation is only good until the next release comes out. In comparison, with an x86 rpm, this takes a couple of minutes and the Docker script is about 15 lines long. In the end, I got what I needed, but the level of effort to get there was tremendous. I also mentioned container memory size in Part 1. This Couchbase container on z was over 1 GB memory. This put a tremendous strain on Docker and we found a few bugs as a result. The size was a combination of Couchbase and all the prerequisite code to build Couchbase. So I had to modify the Docker build to delete all the prerequisite code which included source, binaries and documentation. This got the container down to a more reasonable execution size.
BTW, when I complained to IBM leadership about the lack of support for Couchbase, they suggested I use a different, easier product that was available on z. Since I was porting and not a true developer, this was not a possibility for me. I had begun negotiations with Couchbase toward this goal, but stopped working on it when the prototype ended.
There were two cases where neither the open source community nor the Linux on z community had guidance on how to get a particular open source program on the mainframe. In those two cases, I was able to get through the code, successfully and get a binary for System z. The good news was it was pretty simple to do. I was quite fortunate. If it hadn’t been easy, this could have ended the project earlier than I had hoped.
I’ve seen some hype that once you get it in Docker, it’s portable to any Docker. I’ve heard a few mainframe customers believe any Docker container can run on System z. I’ve also seen articles in IBM sponsored magazines that purport this to be true. This is a combination of marketing hype and misunderstanding. It all depends on the container architecture/binary and source code. Typically, a container binary for a particular architecture, such as x86, should run in a Docker container on any x86 platform, even if it’s a different operating system running Docker. For example, Docker running on x86 version of RedHat 7.3 could be running containers with RedHat, SUSE, Alpine, Ubuntu, etc, as long as they were built for x86. Similarly, I ran Docker on a RedHat 7.3 image for Linux on System z, and had containers with Centos and Alpine running with binaries for S390X.
The only containers with source code that were portable were built exclusively with interpretive languages, such as Java or Python. Those could be portable across hardware architectures. Many of the test cases used by this vendor fit into that category. However, as soon as one of those interpretative languages makes a call to open source code middleware (e.g. Couchbase), then the container is no longer portable across architectures because the middleware is not supported across architectures.
When I started this project, Docker on z was pretty new. Once in a while, it would have issues. Only a couple of times did it require Marist College to restart my z/VM guest. The other times, it would automatically recycle itself and get running again. I believe it’s improved since we began the port effort until now, but it’s been a few months since I tried it. I’ve heard from others, though, that the experience is better. During our Big Bang builds, we would peg each of our System z processors at 100% busy for a few hours. The fact that it would stay up and continue processing is a testament to the reliability of those large code tests.
The net of all this bad is the initial effort to support the mainframe is longer than it would be on x86. However, if you have the patience to get to Part 4: The Future and Value, you’ll find that you should be rewarded for the effort.
In Part 1 The Basics, Part 2 The Good and Part 3 The Bad, I’ve explained I did a proof of concept port of an Enterprise Application from Amazon Web Services on x86 to Linux on System z in 2017. The good news was I got to the point I needed to, the bad news was it was more than difficult to get there. But why did I go there in the first place?
The vendor for the Enterprise application was targeting the Financial Services industry for their initial deployments. This is the primary customer for IBM System z. Their beta customer is running z/OS transaction processing via CICS, but wants to authenticate customers using this vendor’s product running on Amazon Web Services. In order for CICS to call the AWS Cloud, it has to launch Websphere on z/OS to call the vendor’s service on AWS. The vendor’s application has to do it’s task of authenticating users and get all the way back to CICS in less than 18 seconds so the transaction doesn’t time out. It’s a really powerful use of the vendor’s application and valuable to both the consumer and financial institution to avoid potential fraud or cybersecurity scams.
I was told this vendor wrote all their code in Java, so I immediately began a plan to get this running within z/OS, since Java runs so well there, especially on the z14 systems. I also knew that in the time allotted to run on AWS for those 18 seconds, only three biometric/analytic tests could be completed on behalf of the consumer. I hypothesized that if the vendor app ran within z/OS perhaps up to ten analytic tests could be completed using the outstanding analytics and Java performance. However, once I learned of the number of open source middleware programs required and the complexity of porting them to z/OS, I went to Linux on System z as the target port.
Using RDMA as the memory based communication between z/OS and Linux LPARs, I know it will take a bit more time than running inside z/OS, but much less time than going to a public cloud, so I hypothesized that eight analytics tests could be done instead of the three on AWS. And regardless of z/OS or Linux on z implementation, the vendor agreed that the software price would be the same as AWS. The net is, z would have additional analytic value, and given it’s hardware and software integrity and reliability, it would offer better security and business resilience than any public cloud provider.
So that’s what I set out to prove. Sadly, I got so close and the vendor changed their mind on their business strategy. They received a significant new round of venture capital investment, signed up several new financial firms to try their code and they decided to stick to their current cloud plan and stay off the mainframe, for now.
I still believe that my hypotheses as to the performance and value were correct. But the activity ended just before I was able to prove that. However, the exercise did confirm the possibility of getting the product on the mainframe successfully.
But what else is possible? I said in Part 3 that Docker containers are not portable across architectures. However, they are portable within the same architecture. There are some prototypes underway for Docker to run within z/OS. Given the way Docker works on other platforms, it would infer than any Linux on z containers could run unmodified within z/OS. If Docker for z/OS were to run on a zIIP processor, there would be no software license hits for z/OS. If that all comes to pass, that could lead to significant transaction and analytic value within z/OS and greatly simplify the system management requirements for these types of hybrid workloads, while improving the overall security, resilience and performance and reducing the operational costs. I would hope that a public announcement of this capability is not too far in the future.
That, my IT friends is a win for everyone. Any of the bad associated with a slightly more complex development environment can quickly be eradicated with a greatly reduced operational expense that has greater operational benefits than any alternative architectures might try to demonstrate. This type of workload makes for a very compelling end to end benchmark comparison as well. So while I didn’t succeed in getting the enterprise application to market, that was because of a business decision rather than a technological impediment. And the business decision was tactical, based on their new financials.
I learned a lot and documented many of the short cuts I took and set up required to make this development effort possible. I’m happy to share the experience if you’d like to undertake your own development effort. While I thought the end of the project was a failure, it’s unintended consequence, with the efforts of the great Linux for z community identified in Part 2, is that this will be easier porting for everyone that follows.
LinuxONE and Linux on z Systems Open-source Team
Neale Ferguson’s pre-built Docker containers for z
What’s a bottleneck? From Dictionary.com, it’s “a narrow entrance, spot where traffic becomes congested”. In IT terms, it’s something causing slower operations or that inhibits a Service Level Agreement (SLA) from being met. The worst case scenario is a lot of IT shops are absolutely confident that they don’t have bottlenecks as they are meeting or exceeding their SLA’s. They couldn’t be more wrong!!!
There are a wide variety of traditional methods for identifying bottlenecks. On an IBM mainframe, a business might use IBM’s Omegamon, BMC’s Mainview or CA’s SYSVIEW. On a desktop, it could be as simple as Microsoft Task Manager or Apple’s Activity Monitor. On networks, there are a many tools. At home, you might wonder if your ISP or internal network is running well, so you’d try Ookla’s speedtest.net. In the cloud, there are monitors for Amazon Web Services, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Yet, none of these will find the modern IT system bottleneck. When you have an IT system bottleneck, there’s always someone to blame. But who is it? Is it the System Programmer’s fault? Is it the Application Developer’s fault? Is it the asphalt? Oops, wrong punchline. No, it’s the System Architecture’s fault. It’s a 1990’s mentality that looks at IT in operational silo’s and independently manages the systems. But hang in there for another moment. There is a cure.
The 1990’s methodology bases IT operations on server silos. The mainframe is independently managed from the Unix servers, which are independent of x86 servers, which are separate from cloud and mobile and desktop and network. Security is done for each domain. Business resilience is done for each domain. Budget’s are created and departments compete for more spend in their particular area. Some areas might claim they have a bottleneck and warrant more spending to resolve it. Next budget cycle, they’ll still have issues and want more.
Another type of silo-ed operation is looking at separate systems for Record, Insight and Engagement. Systems of Record are the master database and transactional systems that update those databases (e.g. credit/debit, stock sales, claims, inventory, payments, etc). Systems of Insight are the analytic systems (e.g fraud detection, sales opportunity, continuous flow delivery, tracking). Systems of Engagement are the human computer or Internet of Things (IoT) interfaces (e.g. mobile, IoT device, tablet, browser). Many businesses create silos to manage each of these areas independently because if you had ever tried to do this in the 1990’s, you’d hit a bottleneck or drive up IT costs too high. Funny how the systems of the 1990’s actually created the hidden bottleneck today! But it can be fixed.
Where can you buy the “fix” for this? Is it via a software product? No. Hardware product? No. Cloud? No. Consulting services? Maybe. But the reality is every business can solve this pretty easily within their own environment. I guarantee that your business can far exceed current SLA’s and establish new business goals. In the process, your business can save tremendously in IT expense, while improving security and business resilience. The solution is pretty simple.
Stop copying data between systems! In the new API economy, all of the systems have been modified to allow for direct access to applications and data from other systems. The change is either philosophical and/or organizational for most enterprises. It’s all about managing the IT systems together instead of separate silos. That starts at an architectural level, with hybrid development systems and extends to hybrid operational systems that address end to end security, business resilience and performance.
If you’ve moved data to another server to keep the Systems of Record separate from the Systems of Insight. Stop the move. Keep the data together. Systems like IBM’s mainframe are now capable of hosting both databases and analytics in a single system and improving analytic performance many times over separate Systems of Insight without impacting the SLA’s of the transactional systems. The applications that access the Systems of Insight can be easily modified to point to the Systems of Record instead via updated device drivers without changing any code logic. This changes things like batch analytics, which might be used for fraud detection into real time analytics that can be used for fraud prevention. And in the process, businesses will save with reduction in storage, network bandwidth and system utilization, costs and time associated with copying the data. Products such as Rocket’s Data Virtualization Studio can provide the device drivers and mappings necessary for applications to share data from a variety of Systems of Record, across platforms. And new apps can be developed to join the data from different sources, including partner organizations or from “the cloud” to solve business problems in new and creative ways. These applications wouldn’t be possible without sharing data. Apache Spark technology is one means for collaboration across data sources.
There is no reason to copy data to move it closer to or tailor it for a specific System of Engagement. The API economy allows for applications to directly access the data or transactions on other systems via the API economy. New pricing options are available that allow for increased transaction rates, due to direct access to mobile, at a lower cost than traditional access methods. zOS Connect is one of the tools for making the API connection between mobile and transactional systems.
Regardless of how you might transform your business, the unintended consequence of standing still on current IT silo-ed operations is there are bottlenecks and slow downs in business systems that depend on heavily copying data and batch windows to facilitate copying. Direct access to data and devices is the future. The future is now. Begin the migration to hybrid operations management. If you need help in deciding how to look at your architecture differently, don’t hesitate to ask me.
I recently saw a blog post by one of the Federal CIO’s. I can’t argue with their observations, though I think we may disagree on how to tackle the problem. That CIO is going to post their direction in future posts. I’m going to take a shot at my own direction in this post.
The following graph demonstrates that the US Government IT is falling behind Fortune 500 firms and way behind internet startups.
Federal CIO study graph
I remember having this debate with an IBM General Manager years ago when he was considering outsourcing some operating system components thinking that all programmers are created equal. There is a huge difference in maintaining a legacy of millions of lines of code vs. starting from scratch with something new. As important, starting over AND maintaining all the rules and regulations of the legacy, is also a very difficult proposition. It takes pre-existing knowledge for success.
This CIO faces a problem that is similar to many other businesses. It’s true for mainframes as it will be for Microsoft Windows and Linux systems in the future. There are millions of lines of “legacy code” in languages that are less popular today than they will be in the future. The inference is to move away from the legacy code toward a modern language where there are more skills available. As a factoid, there are more ARM chips in the market today than Intel chips. There are more applications being developed for iOS and Android than for Microsoft Windows and that’s way more than being developed for mainframes. So that might lead someone to believe that’s the programming model of this generation. And as I’ve said in an earlier post, if your IT career began in the 1990’s and you hated mainframes, you were right….at that time….
But like everything, time changes things. IBM and vendor partners have dramatically changed what the mainframe was into a more modern computing environment. IBM spends over $1B in R&D for each generation of the mainframe that comes out about every two years now. I’m going to park that, for a moment, to go to another topic, that is more relevant to the skills discussion.
Programming is about patterns. Patterns occur at a process level, in languages and in behaviors. There are three broader patterns at work here. Systems of Record, Engagement and Insight. I’ve written about that before, but Record deals with transaction processing, Engagement deals with the end user interface and Insight is about analytics. Most programming being done today is around systems of engagement – taking advantage of enhancements in smart phone, wearable tech (e.g. watches and fitness) and other devices that are the Internet of Things. GPS, accelerometer, touch, voice and biometrics are just a few of the advances that improve the human computer interface. The mainframe has avoided this programming area completely as a native interface. That makes complete sense. Ignored by many, though, is the fact that the mainframe has fully embraced leveraging those capabilities through interoperability and standard formats and protocols. They enable hybrid programming to reach out to those interfaces to simplify the deployment of systems of Record. In addition, they’ve integrated with Systems of Insight to enable real time analytics to be applied to traditional systems of Record to reduce risk.
This link will take you to a tremendous video about the z13 server and its ability to satisfy these new capabilities. Warning – it’s 30+ minutes long.
Another fear raised is that schools no longer teach “mainframe”. Perish the thought. While there are fewer “mainframe” schools than teach commodity system programming, there are a wealth of schools across the world that are part of IBM’s System z Academic Initiative. Checking their website, there are three in Maryland, close to the Federal government and very close to the agency head writing the blog. But you know, “you can’t trust the marketing” materials put out by a vendor. So I went to the Loyola College of Maryland, University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and Prince George County Community College web sites to see what they said about the IBM Academic Initiative. Honestly, the info I found was from 2011-13, other than Prince George which was up to date. So I reached out to the schools. UMES responded quickly.
“First and foremost, I would like to inform you that we are actively involved in the IBM Academic Initiative. Dr. Robert Johnson is the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science is the lead person in the initiative. Further, they are currently in the process in moving into our new $100 million Engineering and Aviation Science Building which will significantly enhance our capabilities to support the initiative.”
Here’s a brochure for their program.
Most importantly, success is not a two-way street between IBM and the schools. It’s four way, including businesses/agencies and the students. The best schools will work with businesses to provide internships with students PRIOR to graduation. There is generally a very high (close to 50%) success rate in those students choosing full-time employment at the business they did an internship. I strongly encourage any business or agency concerned about future skills deployment to reach out to these schools and work directly with them. Experience shows that you’ll be very pleased with the results. UMES gave me their cell numbers if you’d like to reach out to me for a direct introduction.
The collective wisdom of the Federal CIO’s seems to point to new technologies as the “future” of programming. The referenced blog points to Uber, Siri and Facebook as examples of such applications and suggests they may be irrelevant in five years. (See Myspace as an example). New technologies grow up in a vacuum. There is no maintenance legacy. It doesn’t mean the legacy can’t work with them, though. A prior blog entry looks at 22 emerging technologies and their relationship to the mainframe and how hybrid computing can solve new business problems.
Let’s consider one of the new, cool tech referenced: Uber. I happen to have a chauffeur’s license (a story for another time) and am very familiar and active with Livery legislation. The Uber mobile application is actually very simple and easy to recreate. What makes them successful is their business model and practices. They hire drivers as contractors, therefore no tax consequences for Uber. They avoid the bureaucracy of Livery laws.
There is a state law that enables the New York City Taxi and Livery Commission (T&LC) to regulate who and what can be operated within the boroughs. This is for the “safety and comfort of passengers”. However, it’s big money. Medallions, per cab, have cost up to $750,000 just to put a car on the street and the T&LC limits the number of medallions. Cars from outside the T&LC are not allowed to make more than one stop in the city. They cannot pick up a passenger at an airport if they dropped them off more than 24 hours ago. The T&LC have 250+ officers in unmarked vehicles that follow and intimidate non-T&LC livery vehicles in the city. I witnessed a stretch limo being impounded by the T&LC when an upstate Livery firm dropped off the passengers returning from a NYC funeral at a NYC restaurant before traveling north. The second stop was illegal. In any event, other states (CT and NJ) got upset with this bureaucracy. They lobbied and a Federal law resulted to allow reciprocal rights to other states to operate without joining the T&LC. But upstate Livery can’t participate. The NY Assembly and Senate have had to modify laws to create T&LC’s in neighboring jurisdictions to allow reciprocal rights in NYC locations. Rockland, Nassau and Westchester counties have T&LC’s now. This is the third year that Dutchess and Ulster have legislation to enable reciprocal rights up for a vote. The NY Assembly has passed their legislation, but the NY Senate hasn’t. Last year, they decided to wait on Dutchess and Ulster until they figured out how to allow Uber and Lyft to operate in NYC exempt from the T&LC bureaucracy. That legislation has now been created and will be voted on soon.
T&LC makes revenue on selling taxi medallions and collecting tax on fares. Uber & Lyft disrupt those economics. The livery vehicles pay $3000 per year for insurance. Uber/Lyft cut deals with insurance companies to lower that to $600/year to make them more competitive. The drivers must also have personal insurance on the cars when a fare isn’t present. Laws are now being enacted to allow “Transportation Network Companies” (TNC as they generically refer to Uber and Lyft) to get “fair access” to markets in NY without this bureaucracy. I’ve developed an app which will qualify the “local” livery company to operate as a TNC to reduce their costs and in turn, reduce the cost to consumers…will the government allow that? Will the Dutchess and Ulster laws pass? This is more about big money, venture capital and paid lobbyist getting to the legislative leaders, than the small livery companies trying to stay in business. We’ll see if the legislation and the bureaucracy will enable the small livery services to morph into a mini-Uber. The legislation enables the Commissioners of Insurance and Motor Vehicles to regulate the “TNC” businesses. The legislation doesn’t prescribe how that will be managed nor how much it will cost. By the way, did you notice that the legislation for Uber includes a lighted icon in the front and rear of the car to identify it? That’s as much for passenger safety as it is to make it easier for the T&LC police to pull over the cars if the legislation doesn’t pass. Not much likelihood of that, though, given the amount of money changing hands in Albany.
Long story short – Uber is more about business processes than it is about new applications.
Going back to the graph, there is much to learn from prior experiences of the Fortune 500 and government agencies introducing new technology.
Benefits processing: Hewitt Assoc and Fidelity continuously advance their capabilities. They provide integration with employer payroll systems. They have up to the minute accuracy of consumer records. They provide immediate access to Accruals and eligibility. They’ve adopted web and mobile technologies as Systems of Engagement, including biometric security authentication.
Claims processing: Travelers Insurance has historically reduced IT and people expense 10% annually while improving response times. Claims agents leverage mobile technology for accidents and disasters as input to “legacy” systems.
The FBI and VA leverage mainframe virtualization to avoid IT costs of millions of dollars over commodity systems, while improving security, resilience and service level agreements. They run the same code in a different container with a superior operations model and lower costs.
All of the above use Hybrid technology which includes the mainframe.
Marine Corps – hosted by an IT supplier that gouges them on mainframe costs – three times the amount if they hosted it themselves. The IT supplier takes floor space, energy and cooling costs for an entire data center and only bills to the mainframe users. The IT group claims: Commodity systems wouldn’t be affordable if they were “taxed” with those costs. That’s why understanding the Total Cost of Ownership is a critical success factor when considering mainframe vs. commodity system costs. Unfortunately, regulations are in place that mandate that the Marine Corps use that particular IT Supplier. Other groups have bucked that policy to save money.
US Postal Service was not competitive with package tracking vs UPS and FedEx. They realized they needed to add new applications and wanted modern programming to do it. It included new engagement systems at the delivery vehicles via mobile technology. ….that’s the good. The bad – they spent $100’s of millions on redundant “commodity” IT infrastructure and copied key data and applications from the mainframe in order to host the new applications, while leaving the mainframe running. Testing and benchmarking have demonstrated that adding the new applications to the existing mainframes would have avoided millions in costs and operations complexity, while simplifying the architecture and improving SLA’s. With package shipping volumes increasing annually, they’ve continued to upgrade the mainframe each year. They are just spending too much overall. While they collaborate between the systems by moving data, they could save more if they shared the data in real-time.
While a prescription for change is forth coming in the CIO’s future blogs, let’s hypothesize some changes for their benefit.
Rational tools – They move the mainframe application development to commodity systems. This moves 80% of the development off the mainframe to reduce IT costs. They provide tools to modernize and document the “legacy” applications and simplify their maintenance. They provide seamless test to the mainframe and other platforms of deployment choice. One large business has 1000 Java developers for commodity systems, 400 Cobol programmers for the mainframe and 50 developers familiar with Java and Cobol to enable hybrid programming and integration. All use the same Rational development front end. From a skills perspective, the mainframe development can now look and feel exactly the same as development on commodity systems. This eases the skills and knowledge requirements to start.
Cobol Copybooks – the means to define data structures – are now sharable with web services and those services can launch from Cobol. More on that in a moment.
The System z13 server runs dual core 5GHz processors. Benchmarks show that Java runs faster here than any other platform. The video referenced earlier provides specifics. With direct access to databases and files, business applications can have better performance than other architectures. With fault tolerance and an improved hardware and software security architecture, the result is a very price competitive hosting environment for new workloads.
Financial services businesses are doing real-time analytics in the middle of their System of Record transaction programs to assess risk and avoid fraud. Leveraging the Copybook capability, they can call out to leverage the 1000+ processors in the IBM Data Analytics Accelerator (IDAA – formerly Netezza) that have been tied into the mainframe to speed time to resolve.
Callsign – a biometric authentication and fraud prevention technology, can leverage a modern smart phone to identify the owner/user of the device before they actually answer a challenge – which could be a finger print, facial recognition or voice. Using the accelerometer in the phone, the GPS and pressure points on the touch pad, along with historic behavior patterns, Callsign can tell by the way a person is holding a phone if it’s the original user or someone else before offering them the authentication challenge. This type of technology can be used at kiosks in regional/branch offices to enroll users and make sure they are the real person requesting later service. No need for a card. A unique user id is sufficient to provide authentication. True, many low-income users/beneficiaries may not have smart phone capability. Alternative mechanisms can be deployed for challenge/response authentication. But, maybe providing a low-cost device to beneficiaries for this purpose, a more modern version of the “RSA token devices”, might reduce overall costs for low-income users. Watch this space. One of the Callsign customers, a large credit card processing bank, is calling out to Callsign from a “legacy” mainframe transaction program to authenticate that the real customer is at the point of sale or ATM device requesting service. Compare that to an experience I had recently. Visiting 500 miles from home, I went to a big box department store and paid with a valid credit card. Everything was good, but the transaction was denied. I then used a debit card, same bank, same credit card service, but used my pin code. The transaction was approved. As I walked out of the store, I got a call from the credit card provider asking me if I just attempted to use the card. They restored my card to service immediately. Use of the Callsign capability eliminates the human intervention, lowers my embarrassment and speeds transaction processing.
Going a step further, Callsign runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or a private cloud today. This is a distributed connection to the transaction systems calling out to it. There are about 15 “risk tests” that can be done, but typically just three can be done and the results fed back to make a risk decision in the time allowed for a transaction to complete. We’ve hypothesized that if Callsign was running on a mainframe, with a memory connection to the transaction programs, that 10 risk tests could be done on the mainframe and maintain the service level agreement of the “legacy” transaction programs. Stay tuned for future updates in this pace.
The NSA has proven that leveraging a Google like search capability can help stop attacks. Why not use web crawling software to look for fraud and overpayments? Leveraging online obituary information, an insurance company or benefits providers could determine if a person has died and no longer eligible for services. In addition, it can predict the services that may be available to the survivors of that person. This can speed up time to deploy payments to their survivors. These web crawlers can feed a data warehouse searching for fraud but also feed real-time systems to avoid fraud for new transactions.
Education: partnerships between vendors, businesses/agencies and schools is necessary to create the next generation of IT professionals (programmers and operations) as well as to update the skills of existing personnel.
Operations: Today, fiefdoms around individual architectures or administrative domains exist that create/foster conflict and drive up IT costs. Not everyone is going to get along. Organizational politics and budgets have as much to do with fiefdoms as anything. Leveraging the Rational developer example, where a small group of people have some hybrid responsibility, can lead to breakthroughs in processing schemes.
Legislation: Where necessary, this can be valuable to enable a leap toward something new that will provide value and reduce costs.
There is no right or perfect answer to any IT decision. As the saying goes and leading to an unintended consequence: “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” isn’t necessarily a good approach. Leveraging a hybrid computing, operational and development environment can make a large shift toward leveraging “modern” application models. Happy programming!
There have been so many breaches. In every case, the business or agency affected realizes that they must spend money to fix the breach. That’s when the vendor sales teams come out of the woodwork. Everyone has something to sell. New analytics, new detection mechanisms and new management offerings are just some of the products. However, in almost every case, a quick decision on a new product would be like putting lipstick on a pig. At the heart of a breach is a fundamental problem with people, process and technology associated with security. While a witch hunt for the base problem may be happening, it’s important to take a step back, take stock of what’s good and bad about what is already in place. Re-look at processes and find the gaps that need to be considered. But most important, what is the scope of the processes?
Too often, a business will have multiple domains that are independently managed. For example, there may be separate domains for management of desktops, web servers, application servers, data warehouses, transaction servers and database servers. My experience has shown that when a breach is found in one area, the other areas breathe a sigh of relief as it is not their problem. That’s a bad attitude. Business problems are end to end solutions that cross several of these domains. As such, a business should be looking to collaborate their security and harden processes across domains rather than manage them individually.
The IBM mainframe is an ideal hub for centralization of security focus. For the same reasons that IBM calls the mainframe the System z, z being for zero down time, it could have been System s for fail safe security. IBM has spent years in hardware and software R&D to harden the mainframe for business resilience and security and include that level of functionality in the basic hardware and software systems. The bulk of the built-in security services meet industry standards for interoperability and programming interfaces. As a result, these services can be executed on behalf of any other system or server that is interconnected with them. This includes usage as an authentication server, managing logs, providing real-time analytics to prevent loss and a central site for audit management. Unfortunately, no sales person is going to run to a business to brag about these capabilities. The unintended consequence by IBM and for its customers is that with all this capability “inside the box” they don’t have a commissioned sales force pushing these functions. IBM has a wide variety of software solutions that they are selling for distributed domains. They have software to manage the mainframe better. However, there is no end to end play that focuses on the mainframe as the central hub for enterprise security.
All is not lost, however. IBM and their Business Partners have a wealth of documentation and capabilities to demonstrate the strength of the mainframe for enterprise security. European customers can attend an excellent security conference in Montpellier, France from September 29 to October 2. The IBM Design Centers provide briefing centers and proof of concept capability tailored to an organization’s needs. There are IBM Redbooks describing the security functionality, including cryptography, analytics and Digital Certificate management for global authentication.
There are also a wealth of up and coming vendors that can contribute to end to end security. Two that I’ve been working with are Callsign and Cyberfy that can leverage a mobile device for multi-factor biometric authentication in a consistent way across platforms. Throw away your userids and passwords that could be key logged and stolen and move to something that is truly unique to an individual. With these tools, a common authentication is used and managed across a wide range of servers and applications. Common authentication is the center of cross domain security management. Without a consistent authentication mechanisms, it becomes extremely difficult to correlate security activities across domains.
I started this about breaches. A mainframe can provide and collect a wealth of forensic information across systems. As the host server for a tremendous amount of financial and personnel transaction processing, this information is used in real-time to prevent fraud because of the mainframe’s ability to run multiple transactions and database servers simultaneously, with integrity, while satisfying a service level agreement. This combination of functionality can work well with network attached applications and user devices.
These are the tenants that provide the foundation for hardening an environment. If a business or agency looks at what they have already and they find a mainframe, they’ll find a wealth of capabilities to lock down their end to end systems. The most important element is collaboration across organizations. Through collaboration, organizations can find weakness and inconsistency. Once these efforts are undertaken, then the gaps can be identified and the acquisition of new products can be done intelligently.
If anyone needs assistance getting started in locking down their systems, give me a call. Don’t wait until you’ve been breached, it will only cost more to solve the problem. As has been said, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
hosts a Lunch ‘n’ Learn Webinar presented by
April 15, 2015 12-1PM EDT
Call in: 888-245-8770 passcode 206580
Presentation Slides will be posted here prior to the call
For years, the IBM mainframe has been the benchmark for secure transaction and data base processing. It’s considered hacker resistant, via a hardware and software architecture that inhibits buffer overflows, which are the bane of Trojan Horses, viruses and worms.
The modern PC, smart phones and tablets are rife with malware and identity spoofing. As long as an end user is the systems programmer for these devices, there will continue to be problems. If a userid can be spoofed on the end user device, there isn’t much to prevent them from accessing back end servers of all types that these devices may be connected. Businesses spend enormous sums looking to detect problems and attempt to better manage these devices.
Raytheon Cyber products takes a different approach. They compartmentalize infrastructure to create a more secure computing environment. E.g., separating Internet traffic from internal business systems. They’ve simplified operations so that the end user behaviors and server access barely change. The result is an environment that prevents malware intrusions and data theft. Detection products are nice, but how much will a business spend on unplanned forensic efforts and brand loss marketing should a theft occur? Raytheon’s approach simplifies the hybrid deployment model and reduces the risk at back end servers, such as the mainframe, and can help to lower overall security deployment costs.
This session will introduce the “battle tested” Raytheon Cyber products to commercial customers. It will demonstrate how compartmentalization of networks, data and applications can simplify end-to-end operations while preventing attacks. It will show how their technology is complimentary to existing Hybrid infrastructure. They’ll also introduce some of the future deployment models they are considering to further prevent attacks on electronic business.
Jim Porell is a retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. His IBM roles included: Chief Architect of Mainframe Software (10 years), led Business Development for the mainframe (3 years), Security and Application Development marketing lead (3 years), Chief Business Architect for IBM Federal Sales (2 years). He’s presently a partner at Empennage, developing its marketing and investment possibilities. Jim is also on the Advisory Board of startups: Callsign and Malcovery. He’s a sales consultant to Vicom Infinity. In each of these roles, Jim is focused on the secure and resilient deployment of Hybrid Computing solutions across server architectures and end user devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, PC’s).
Jeremy A. Wilson, is a member of Raytheon’s CTO Council & the Director of Customer Advocacy. Mr. Wilson works closely with Raytheon’s Executive Leadership Team focused on solving information sharing challenges for their extensive portfolio of customers including the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, as well as Civilian and Commercial agencies. Mr. Wilson has over 15 years’ experience in Multi-Level Security and Cross-Domain Solutions. Prior to joining Raytheon in 2005, he served as the Chief Technology Advisor and Architect for both SAIC and General Dynamics. In these roles, Mr. Wilson held a vast number of responsibilities such as System Design, Technical Assessments, Security & Policy Auditing, Strategic Planning, Proposal Generation, & Certification & Accreditation. Mr. Wilson has spoken at number of technical events and sessions and is a member of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP), and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA).
Jim Porell and James Porell Consulting 