INSIDESSSOvercomingBig Data Challenges

©2015 UBM Tech, a division of United Business Media LLC. ALl Rights Reserved.

Introduction

Page 2

Reframing the MainframePage 3

Apps and OpsPage 7

Linux and Open Source on the MainframePage 11

De-Siloing Ops in a Transplatform WorldPage 15

ConclusionPage 19

1511

022

Reframed:

November 2015

A Mobile to Mainframe Approach to the Application Economy

SPONSORED BY

UBM Tech2 SSS

Businesses today operate in the application economy. Great applications are

essential for winning customers, operating efficiently, and staying competitive in markets

that seem to be in a state of constant disruption. And compelling functionality isn’t the

only thing that makes applications great. Applications also have to perform well, run 24/7,

scale cost-efficiently, and be highly secure.

At most large enterprises, great applications have to run across multiple platforms. A

smartphone app, for example, may invoke application logic and data that reside on virtual

Windows and Linux servers, network-attached storage, multiple XaaS clouds, and IBM z Systems.

So business success requires technical excellence across all platforms—from mobile to the mainframe.

This e-book provides a synopsis of four insightful discussions about how IT can make the most of its

mainframe investments in the context of this increasingly transplatform application delivery environment.

Based on the latest developments in Linux on z Systems, best practices for DevOps, and other significant trends

in enterprise IT, it offers practical, fact-based advice to IT leaders who want to give their organizations an

optimal competitive advantage in the application economy.

Introduction

UBM Tech3 SSS September 2015

ReframingMainframeThree Keys to Getting Maximum Value From z Systems Assets

IT faces many challenges in the application economy. Among these challenges are:

• Volume. Workloads are growing dramatically as businesses increas-

ingly serve customers via apps—and as customers use those apps

more intensively. Big data is also driving massive computing volume

at many companies. IT must be able to cost-efficiently scale capacity

to support these workloads as they continue to grow over time.

• Security. As companies do more business digitally—and as their

digital infrastructures grow—they create larger threat surfaces that

increase their exposure to internal and external cybersecurity threats.

IT must protect the business by rigorously mitigating these risks.

• Security/Privacy. As companies do more

business digitally—and as their digital infra-

structures grow—their exposure to internal

and external cybersecurity threats increases

exponentially. IT must rigorously protect the

business with policy-based mechanisms in

place for authentication, access control, and

data governance.

Obstacles to ValueThat said, IT often struggles to leverage the

mainframe’s unique advantages in the context

of the application economy. One common

problem is agility. Mainframe management

processes at most IT organizations were estab-

lished back when applications didn’t have to

be updated nearly as often as they do today.

Mainframe applications also tend to be long-

standing systems of record and core trans-

action processing systems that require “five

nines” availability. This high standard for avail-

ability tends to make mainframe teams highly

risk-averse, which often means being change-

averse as well.

Plus, because mainframe teams have spent

years defending their highly available, highly

secure mainframe environments from their

less stable and secure counterparts in the

UBM Tech4 SSS November 2015

k Click here for an eye-opening

60-second clip of Ovum Chief

Analyst Gary Barnett contrast-

ing the workload economics of

mainframes and distributed infra-

structure during the keynote panel

discussion of InformationWeek’s

recent virtual event, Reframed: A

Mobile-to-Mainframe Approach to

the Application Economy.

UBM Tech November 20155 SSS

Watch the Video: Reframing the Mainframe to Thrive in the Application EconomyCheck out this video panel featuring Ovum

Chief Analyst Gary Barnett, CA Senior VP

and Mainframe Business Unit executive

David Hodgson, and InformationWeek

Contributing Editor Lenny Liebmann to

learn how IT leaders are reframing their

mainframes for the application economy.

distributed world, the mainframe is often

segregated from the broader IT organization.

Now that mainframe applications and data

are more frequently required to serve as back-

end resources for customer-facing mobile and

Web applications, this segregation has be-

come seriously counterproductive.

Three Keys for IT LeadersIT leaders who want to overcome the limita-

tions preventing them from fully leveraging

the capabilities and economics of the main-

frame should consider taking the following

steps:

1 Leverage mobile-to-mainframe application logic synergies.

IT leaders can be much more creative and

aggressive about leveraging mainframe

code. Mainframe applications execute

transactions, manage customer records,

control ERP workflows, and perform other

core business processes. Much of this

application logic can be better leveraged to

add value to customer engagement via the

mobile and Web channels.

2 Expand access to mainframe data. IT can provide decision-makers with valu-

able actionable insight by applying the right

analytics to the right data. Unfortunately, IT

often struggles to incorporate mainframe-

resident data into its analytic environments—

even though as much as 80% of the relevant

data may reside in mainframe databases. IT

leaders need to address this data extraction

problem while maintaining appropriate secu-

rity and privacy controls.

3 Integrate mainframe management into enterprise operations.

If a customer-facing app depends on back-

end mainframe resources, those back-end

resources must be as visible to ops teams as

the distributed environment. Any infrastructure

UBM Tech November 20156 SSS

opacity will undermine their ability to ensure

availability and performance. Unified man-

agement of mainframe, distributed, Web, and

cloud platforms is therefore essential.

These steps are not easy ones, but they are

keys to success in the application economy.

Mainframe applications, mainframe data, the

mainframe platform, and—perhaps most im-

portantly—mainframe people can no longer

operate in isolation from the rest of IT. Every IT

leader should make ending that isolation a top

priority for 2016. p

UBM Tech7 SSS

Great digital experiences are critical for winning and retaining

customers in the application economy. Companies that deliver great

experiences keep their customers happy—and can even turn them into

social promoters of their brand. But it may only take one bad experience

to turn a customer off. And that turn-off can be permanent.

Great experiences require excellence on the part of both application

developers and operations teams. On the apps side, it’s important to

provide intuitive interfaces that deliver the functionality customers

want and need—and to leverage all appropriate data sources. On the

ops side, it’s important to ensure that

underlying compute, storage, and

network infrastructure has appropriate

capacity, redundancy, and load balanc-

ing at all points to support current and

Apps and Ops

November 2015

Collaborating for a Superior Customer Experience

UBM Tech8 SSS

projected demand.

To optimize app performance, however,

development and operations teams have to

work together. That’s because the way an app

is coded and architected affects how it con-

sumes capacity. So a bottleneck that appears

to be a lack of sufficient capacity may actually

be a symptom of inefficiently written code.

On the other hand, even efficiently written

code can overwhelm the ops environment if

it becomes wildly and unexpectedly popular.

The Special Case of the MainframeCollaboration between development and

operations is especially important when it

comes to the mainframe. Many customer-

facing apps depend on the mainframe as a

back end for data, application logic, and

transaction processing. So a great customer

experience on the front end requires

optimized engineering of these back-end

resources.

More specifically, companies that depend

on the mainframe for back-end app support

need to address:

• Premobile code. Twenty years ago, few

mainframe developers would have imagined

that sections of their code would be called

thousands of times per minute by custom-

ers with smartphones. Nor would they have

anticipated having to change that code

repeatedly to accommodate customer

desires. Development and operations

teams therefore need to exercise care in

how they utilize mainframe applications

and manage code modification.

• Utilization/cost dependencies. The main-

frame offers superb performance at scale. It

can also offer lower incremental cost than dis-

tributed infrastructure. One idiosyncrasy of the

mainframe, however, is that software license

costs are linked to cumulative peak workloads.

So developers and ops staffs need to work

together to ensure that unanticipated spikes

in demand don’t result in unacceptably high

expenses for the platform as a whole.

• The crown data jewels. One reason the

mainframe remains the favored platform for

core business applications is that it enables

IT to keep data secure and tightly governed.

Developers and ops staffs must collaborate

to avoid compromising that critical security

and governance—even as they leverage

November 2015

k Click here for a 30-second

perspective from CA’s Marie

Godfrey, Senior VP of Product

Management, on how the wrong

metrics and incentives undermine

collaboration between developers

and management teams, taken

from a DevOps panel discussion

presented as part of Information-

Week’s virtual event, Reframed: A

Mobile-to-Mainframe Approach

to the Application Economy.

UBM Tech9 SSS

mainframe-resident data to deliver higher-

value apps to customers.

Rethinking and RetoolingDevelopment-operations collaboration on

the mainframe requires both new tools and

new approaches to application delivery. On

one level, this collaboration is similar to the

broader DevOps initiatives IT organizations

are undertaking. Instead of just “throwing

code over the wall” to the operations team,

developers are being encouraged to bring

ops into the architectural discussion early in

November 2015

Watch the Video: Apps and Ops: Keys to a Superior Customer Experience This lively and informative video on

development, operations, and DevOps

features Shannon Dolan and Marie

Godfrey, CA Technologies SVPs for

Product Management, specializing in

ops and apps, respectively.

UBM Tech November 201510 SSS

the development cycle to build efficiency

into application design.

DevOps on the mainframe can be a bit

more demanding, though. For one thing,

mainstream developers and data analysts

may not be very familiar with mainframe

technology, so they may need special tools

that give them the visibility into program

logic, interprogram relationships, and main-

frame data sets.

For another, mainframe teams can be very

protective of their extremely stable and

well-managed environments. They can also

be skeptical about the ability of their non-

mainframe peers to sufficiently mitigate risk

as they gain access to the mainframe environ-

ment. IT leaders therefore have to consider

the cultural chasm between the mainframe

and the rest of IT, as well as the technical dif-

ferentiators.

This additional work is well worth the effort.

Companies that successfully leverage their

mainframe applications and data—as well as

the remarkable performance economics of the

IBM z System platform itself—can achieve sig-

nificant competitive advantage in the applica-

tion economy. Those that fail to unlock the full

potential value of the rich mainframe-resident

data and code logic, on the other hand, will al-

most certainly lag behind when it comes to the

all-important digital customer experience. p

With the right tools and processes, mainframe environments can fully and effectively support enterprise application agility initiatives.

UBM Tech11 SSS

A common misconception about the mainframe

is that it can only run “legacy” application workloads. This is far

from the truth. In fact, IBM has offered the Integrated Facility

for Linux (IFL) on z Systems since 2000.

What is perhaps even less well-understood in the enterprise

IT community is that as support for Linux on the mainframe

has evolved since 2000, the platform has become a viable—

and, in many cases, the optimal—host for open source soft-

ware in general.

Linux and Open Source on the MainframeEnabling Innovation, Driving Value

UBM Tech12 SSS

Enterprise EvolutionLinux and open source on the mainframe

are so compelling in part because Linux and

open source themselves have become so

compelling.

Many enterprise IT leaders were skeptical

about Linux when it first arrived. Over the

years, however, a significant turnaround has

taken place. As an open source OS, Linux gives

IT visibility and control that it never had with

proprietary offerings. The open source com-

munity has also done a superb job of moving

Linux forward to meet the needs of the secu-

rity- and management-conscious enterprise.

So Linux has rapidly gone from an experimen-

tal OS to the OS of choice for most new work-

loads—including high-intensity analytics and

back-end logic for mobile apps.

Similarly, open source software now more

generally occupies the center of tech innova-

tion. From Hadoop to SugarCRM, the open

source community has proved to be a well-

spring of software solutions squarely aimed at

the needs of the enterprise.

Given that so many of IT’s new workloads

are open source on Linux, the business case

for hosting those workloads on the mainframe

includes:

• Zero-footprint growth. Many enterprises

are facing the finite physical limitations of

their data centers as they keep adding capac-

ity. Linux on z enables them to add workloads

without needing additional rack space, floor

space, power, or cooling.

• Lower incremental costs. Linux on z

eliminates the operational costs associated

with the additional systems and network

infrastructure required for provisioning new

workloads in traditional x86 environments.

• Higher service levels. The performance-

at-scale and reliability of the mainframe

make it very attractive for workloads

requiring high availability and/or

support for intense utilization.

k Click here to hear a

30-second clip of Brown

Brothers Harriman VP of

Operating Systems Support

Ashley George explain his

company’s interest in OMP

during a panel discussion on

z Systems and open source

from InformationWeek’s recent

virtual event, Reframed: A

Mobile-to-Mainframe Approach

to the Application Economy.

November 2015

UBM Tech November 201513 SSS

For these reasons and others, Linux

on z is rapidly gaining traction in

enterprise IT—and is likely to continue evolv-

ing in ways that make it even more

attractive in terms of economics, manageabil-

ity, and performance.

Market MomentumSeveral recent market developments under-

score the growing interest in the mainframe

as a platform for new and existing Linux/open

source workloads:

• Open Mainframe Project. OMP is a col-

laborative technical community within

the Linux Foundation focused on the use

of Linux and open source software in the

mainframe environment. It includes enter-

prise practitioners, solution providers, and

academic institutions working together to

exchange ideas and provide appropriate

governance for Linux on z projects.

The mainframe offers a compelling environment for the entire ecosystem of enterprise-class open source software solutions.

UBM Tech November 201514 SSS

• IBM LinuxOne. IBM introduced a line

of mainframe-like servers designed

for Linux workloads and priced more

like high-end distributed hardware

than the company’s traditional z

Systems. LinuxOne Rockhopper in

particular may appeal to companies

that don’t have a mainframe today,

but are looking for mainframe-like

performance, scalability, security, and

economics.

• Third-party support. MongoDB,

Docker, and other leading open

source companies are joining the

Linux on z movement. This growing

open source ecosystem offers enter-

prise IT leaders greater choice and

confidence in the long-term viability

of Linux on z.

In other words, companies that al-

ready have a mainframe can leverage

their investment in ways that are more

relevant than ever to the application

economy—especially if they’re looking

for an alternative to the ever-escalating

complexity and opex “tax” associated

with expanding x86 infrastructures.

Watch the Video: Linux & Open Source: Driving New Innovation and Value on Your MainframeLearn about the latest innovations on the

mainframe from four of today’s leading

Linux on z practitioners:

• Ashley George, VP of Operating

Systems Support, Brown Brothers Harriman

• Michael Miller, VP of Global Alliances, SUSE

• Bryan Foley, Program Director, z Systems

Platform Strategy, IBM

• Andrew Chapman, VP of Product

Management, CA Technologies

UBM Tech November 201515 SSS

Companies keep deploying new technologies. That’s

why any company of less-than-brand-new vintage has multiple

platforms—which may include mainframe, RISC, Windows, and

Linux environments.

Separate management silos spring up over each of these

platforms. Mainframe teams had years to refine their management

tools and processes before distributed x86 computing came along.

Windows x86 teams then focused exclusively on their platform

before enterprises started adopting Linux.

De-Siloing Ops in a Transplatform

How IT Leaders Cope With ComplexityWorld

UBM Tech November 201516 SSS

The result of this history is that IT has gotten

very good at managing each of its technology

silos—but not so good at managing service

delivery across those silos. This siloed manage-

ment is problematic for several reasons:

• It doesn’t promote an optimized customer/user experience. Platform-

specific management silos tend to keep

people focused on the health of their

specific infrastructure domain, rather than

the end-to-end performance of applications

as they traverse multiple domains.

• It’s inefficient. When something goes

wrong in a siloed management environment,

a finger-pointing “blame storm” often ensues.

This territorial dynamic does not facilitate

rapid discovery and resolution of root causes.

• It isn’t proactive. Siloed operations teams

tend to spend much of their time respond-

ing to component-level alerts and telemetry.

Much of this effort may be worthwhile, but it

leaves little room for proactive optimization of

the end-user experience.

IT organizations that don’t address the silo

problem wind up spending more money on

operations as their app portfolios grow, with-

out necessarily achieving worthwhile improve-

ments in service quality.

Obstacles to De-siloingSilos exist because of historical realities. But

they persist because of obstacles to transplat-

form management. These obstacles include:

• Organizational politics. People are territo-

rial. If they are assigned territories and receive

incentives based on what occurs within them,

they will defend those territories at all costs.

• Platform-specific tooling. The historical

platform-specific focus of IT operations has

led to the adoption of highly platform-specific

tools. These tools, in turn, tend to perpetuate

the focus on the health of specific technology

components within the platform, rather than

end-to-end application behaviors.

• Platform-specific skills. Because of how

they have been hired and occupied, IT staffs

have developed highly platform-specific skill

sets. These skill sets do not always translate

easily into effective analysis and optimization

of the end-to-end application experience.

• Entrenched processes. Workflow

processes become explicitly engineered

into IT organizations through mechanisms

such as trouble-ticket escalation and

implicitly established through habit.

Getting people and systems to do things

a different way than they’ve done them for

years is always a challenge.

k Click here for a 60-second

description of how enterprise

ops teams are using Twitter

feeds to hone their focus on

customer experience, as shared

by CA Chief Architect Scott

Fagen during InformationWeek’s

recent virtual event, Reframed:

A Mobile-to-Mainframe

Approach to the Application

Economy.

UBM Tech November 201517 SSS

• New silos. Even when IT manages to

integrate existing silos, it will find new ones

cropping up. These new silos can include

big data analytic environments and SaaS

solutions adopted by business units without

IT’s participation.

Despite the above challenges, many IT orga-

nizations are successfully de-siloing operations.

Among the best practices common to these

organizations are:

• Implement unified monitoring. To work

together, operations teams need a shared “sin-

gle version of the truth.” Existing tools don’t

have to be replaced in order to unify visibility

into conditions and metrics for all platform

domains. Instead, most successful de-siloers

implement a unifying layer of data correlation

and presentation over those existing tools.

• Focus on process. Attempts to directly de-

silo management often fail, because people

like their territories. A better approach is

to focus on process improvement through

adoption of best practices such as ITIL as

well as agile ops. This approach doesn’t

IT organizations can de-silo operations by implementing a unifying layer of data presentation and correlation over existing management tools.

UBM Tech November 201518 SSS

Watch the Video: De-Siloing End-to-End Ops in an Increasingly Trans-platform World Learn from three IT management veterans

with hands-on experience de-siloing

management operations:

• Mary Anne Matyaz, MVS Core

Technologies Project Manager, SHARE

• Joe Craven, VP, Mainline Information Systems

• Scott Fagen, Chief Architect, CA Technologies

threaten territory or hard-earned skill

sets. It does, however, lead to de-silo-

ing as a byproduct of processes that

focus on end-to-end outcomes.

• Open up communications. De-siloing can sometimes be facilitat-

ed by something as simple as a team

posting a note on a bulletin board

(of the physical or virtual variety) that

shares information with or requests

information from other teams. By

promoting these simple cross-domain

exchanges, IT leaders can incremen-

tally change culture while also solving

the small, tactical problems that often

mask larger ones.

• Introduce new metrics. New metrics,

such as end-to-end application re-

sponse times, are critical to any de-si-

loing effort. Some IT leaders have even

attempted to get their ops team more

focused on customer experience by

giving them visibility into Twitter feeds,

app ratings, and other social content.

• Automate the norm. When ops

teams devote all their time and effort

to just “keeping the lights on,” they

can’t look past their own platform do-

mains. Analytics and automation ease

these daily operational burdens, free-

ing staff to redirect their energies to

proactive big-picture service delivery

objectives.

These best practices pay off in a more

collaborative IT organization that is

better able to maintain service levels,

even as the number of services in-

creases and budgets remain relatively

flat. In the application economy, that

transplatform excellence can spell the

difference between the success and

failure of the business.

UBM Tech November 201519 SSS

The Bottom LineTo successfully compete in the application economy,

companies have to make better use of their IBM z Systems

resources. But that requires more than just writing some fresh

COBOL code and upping their MSU budget. It also requires:

· Leveraging mainframe applications, data, and processing

power in the content of the entire multi-platform enterprise

IT environment

· Taking advantage of the new high-value opportunities

afforded by Linux and open source on z

· Unifying operations across platforms to ensure application

service levels across complex end-to-end delivery chains

· Coordinating ops and apps for an optimized customer

experience

IT organizations that achieve these goals will significantly

improve their companies’ ability to compete in increasingly

digital markets. Those that don’t will continue struggling to

maintain the viability of their legacy systems—and won’t see

nearly the same return on their investments.