Joe McKendrick: Eye on the Enterprise

James McGovern, a renowned and highly outspoken enterprise architect, says it all in a recent blog post headline: “The Mainframe is Not Evil, But COBOL Is.”

So what’s the beef against COBOL? Any language that’s been around for more than four decades has to have some redeeming qualities, right? Esperanto’s been around for just a bit longer, and there’s a language that promises world peace.

COBOL never offered world peace, but it did offer one of the first portable, standard languages that could be run across different vendors’ systems. Sort of a pre-Java Java, if you will.

James says, however, that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with Java. In fact, there’s no logical reason why IT shops are keeping COBOL going, he observes:

“Large enterprises love their mainframes but wrongly assume that they still need to keep COBOL on life support. Haven’t they realized that they can continue maintaining their enterprise applications by extending their functionality by leveraging Java? Java has a special co-processor that makes it run lightning fast on the mainframe and enterprises who aren’t using this technology are just dumb…”

If anything, COBOL is limiting the potential of mainframe, James says. For example, the commands are archaic: “Everything is a MOVE: Over 90% of a typical COBOL program will consist of MOVE, IF and GOTO. Not a very rich way of describing functionality. While COBOL is English-like, it didn’t incorporate the richness of the English language.”

Plus, James adds, the data layer supported by COBOL is too tightly coupled. “The program division contains direct reference to the physical name and size of database fields. This information is repeated in many programs, making changes very time consuming. In the Java world, if you wanted to expand the first name field from ten characters to twelve, this isn’t any work but very tedious in COBOL.”

It was estimated about 10 years ago that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated five billion lines of new code annually. There’s no reason to think that this number was shrunk, so its going to be some time before we finally put COBOL out of its misery.

The technorati has been abuzz lately about the promises of “cloud computing,” in which any and all functions within the stack — from storage to processing to messaging — are handled by third-party services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The impact on large systems and mainframe shops has been unclear, though it’s a sure bet the cloud services themselves will and need to be run out of large, high-availability data centers.

However, in a recent interview with CNET’s Dan Farber, IBM VP Steve Mills said he doesn’t see cloud computing shaping IBM’s mainframe customer base anytime soon. “Our corporate buyers are running mission critical apps, and they are not going to pick up their businesses and take them to some amorphous and ill-defined data centers,” Mills said. “The cloud as some amorphous concept that meets all needs and requirements is science fiction.”

IBM has a long history of competing against itself, and this is certainly in evidence here. IBM is a leading proponent of cloud computing, and is even building new capabilities to make cloud computing a reality, under an effort called “Blue Cloud.” Dan aptly describes IBM “as an arms supplier to the cloud vendors.”

But Mills feels that enterprise computing will demand on-site capabilities for a long time to come. However, he sees plenty of opportunity for Big Iron in this space as things progress. As he put it:

“We are constantly tracking where things are moving to with the IT automation providers. Our challenge is to make sure we sell to them,” Mill said. “You take some Isaac Asimov a thousand years into the future where all businesses source services from service providers, but it’s not likely to happen in my lifetime, my children’s lifetimes or their children’s lifetimes. There won’t likely be only two companies left in business services. There is enough diversity for different business models to exist, and the service bureau model will get bigger and we can sell into it.”

IBM recently released figures estimating that worldwide digital archive capacity is expected to increase at a nearly 60 percent compound annual growth rate by 2012, which means the total amount of data will have increased by 800 percent during that time.

Organizations are facing a sharp increase in the amount of digital content that must be managed with new compliance and discovery requirements. Worldwide file, database and email archive capacity will each skyrocket at an a compound annual growth rate of up to 73 percent — altogether totaling nearly two trillion full filing cabinets of information.

To put it bluntly, that’s a lot of bits and bytes to be managed. We all know that storage requirements — for video, audio files, images, and transactional data — are exploding. Layer on top of that the various compliance mandates that dictate that organizations hold on to certain types of data for extended periods of time, and you get the idea.

A couple of years back, I was chatting with the IT director for one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, who remarked that as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley, when it comes to e-mails — or anything else — the information stays. “Right now, we save everything — no matter how far back,” he said. And this is an organization that handles almost a million and a half e-mails a day. I asked him how they’re going to be able to store and manage all those files. Currently, everything was backed up on disk, and his department was investigating ways to move older files to tape.

Society and the legal system are turning enterprises into pack rats — havoing to spend time and money on the ludicrous exercise of saving and cataloging every scrap of correspondence and data that ever crossed their domains. As a result of this, and some very legitimate data requirements, multi-terabyte databases have become commonplace. Many databases are now cracking the 100-TB market, compared to a few that finally hit the one-terabyte mark a decade ago. Our research with the Independent Oracle Users Group found that multi-terabyte databases are fairly common these days.

I had the chance to speak with Craig Butler, IBM’s storage products marketing manager, on the occassion of the 50th annoversary of disk-based storage. Basically, Butler explained, storage devices have been able to keep up with exploding data demands because of a sort of “Moore’s Law of storage.” Over the past 50 years, capacity has grown by at least 40 percent a year, and even accelerated to 100 percent a year over the last decade. All this came with no change in price, and this is likely to keep pace into the near future.

However, nothing has come along that really can take the place of disk or tape, Butler said, and there is nothing emerging on the horizon.In fact, Butler predicts that we’ll still be relying on disk drives a decade from now — except that they’ll be smaller and more ubiquitous.

There are two challenges that we face with storage as time goes by, Butler said. First, there’s a need to be able to better manage and access the huge proliferation of data piling up in enterprises. “We need new search and retrieval techniques to find thee right data,” he said. “We have amassed all this capacity, but human beings don’t have time to search through it all.” Unstructured information is real challenge — take video files, for example. When the police need to review security cameras for suspects, soemone has to spend time — hours and days worth — watching analog video.

The other challenge is being able to access storage media decades from the time the data or image is captured. “A lot of valuable data could get stranded in an application that no longer exists, or in a file format that no longer exists, or a hard disk storage of some type that no longer works with new systems,” Butler said. IBM has been working on a research initiative that has been looking at storing data and artifacts with descriptive metadata, he said.

In terms of hardware, IBM has been exploring approaches such as molecular-size switches that could toggle molecules to different states — a sort of dense way to store ones and zeros.

Ultimately, Butler pointed out, its not disk technology that will restrain storage — it’s the organization and applications around it. “The energy is shifting from how we store our hard disk drives to the applications, security concerns, how we use all this data, and how we search through all this data,” he said. “Then there’s the privacy and ethical considerations of keeping all this data, because a lot of it is going to be about you and me. Who owns it? How do we keep it safe? We’ve got a lot of legal, ethical, and privacy concerns to sort through.”

RedMonk Analyst James Governor, who has had one ear to the IBM space and another to the burgeoning SOA/Enterprise 2.0 space for some time now, recently reflected on the changing role of CICS, once the standard middleware for mainframes. (Around before middleware was even called middleware.)

James wonders whether IBM’s pitch to abstract CICS functions into an SOA-based service layer can alleviate the need for hard-core mainframe programming and administration skills. Under the law of “leaky abstractions,” he says, things go wrong, and there will always be a need to dig underneath the virtual layer and learn to code what’s underneath.

Thus, if the mainframe is to be a player in SOA, companies will need a solid core of mainframe skills — not just SOA skills.

Still, maybe CICS’s time has come again. “Originally it was a customer information control system. I think its time to make CICS a front and center information management platform again, rather than just providing transaction management services. That’s a potential new frame for the frame. And yes - IBM’s moves to offer REST interfaces to CICS is a good move in that direction, as is all the WS-* service enablement.”

“This is the era of extreme integration… We’re not too far away from seeing a million-server data center.” This prediction by Kirk Skaugen, vice president and co-general manager at Intel Corporation, was part of an experts’ panel at the recent Windows 2008 launch, hosted by Al Gillen, vice president at IDC. (Archived video available here — requires Microsoft SilverLight download.)

While the vast majority of enterprises, of course, will not be faced with managing a million servers anytime soon, it’s fair to say that server proliferation and sprawl is now a pervasive problem, compounded by enormous growth in data and storage requirements.

Add to this the impetus to better align with the business, by being more flexible and adaptable to fast-changing processes. Given the prominence of the panel at the Windows 2008 event, this signals that data center efficiency is clearly an emerging positioning strategy for Microsoft - and perhaps a defensive one as well. Other leading vendors, including IBM and Sun, have been promoting this concept for several years, and have gained a lot of traction by blaming Windows-based servers for a lot of the server sprawl and waste that now dots enterprise landscapes.

Skaugen made the direct shot over the bows of the big server companies by pointing out that while distributed systems and storage put their share of strain on data center environments, large centralized systems are not above blame, either. “Intel and AMD today have 94 percent of the units of servers, but six percent of what is still RISC and mainframe computing make up almost 50 percent of the IT spend on hardware spend,” he said.

Regardless of platform environment, panelists agreed that the emphasis of data center value is rapidly evolving from “watts and slots” to achieving higher efficiency and better business delivery. The bottom line is that data center infrastructures need to deliver more for the business, while reducing their own footprints. “If you look at the emergence of these huge data centers, the new metric is going to be performance per watt per cubic foot - how much computational ability can you put into a volume space,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD’s Server and Workstation Division.

James Mouton, vice president of the platform division within the HP Industry Standard Server business unit, suggested that executives and managers view data center metrics over at least a three-year time horizon. “You’ve got to look at that cost at least over a three-year period, including the power and cooling prices,” he said. “The manageability of the infrastructure overall is key. Unless you can see what’s going on, and map that to the application service level, you’re missing the forward-looking thinking. You have to make sure you’re looking at that very holistically, including business outcomes. It may or may not be a server uptime question — more likely, it’s a question of, ‘are your apps doing what they’re expected to do? Are your IT costs going down, as well as your overall three-year horizon of overall costs?‘”

Panelists also agreed that virtualization was clearly the best strategy for managing the complexity of server sprawl. Allen noted that the ability to pack greater processing power into smaller, more efficient spaces is a natural opportunity for virtualizing resources. “Virtualization flows right into that, offering simplicity in terms of managing all the complexity,” he said.

As enterprises demand more and more computing power, the challenge is more efficiently managing large-scale resources, and virtualization is one key element of such an approach. The challenges not only include improving the efficiency of data centers, but also reigning in energy consumption while correcting the underutilization of servers. As Skaugen put it, “The challenge that everyone’s facing today is that servers are only used 10 to 15 percent of their utilization in a standard data center, which is appalling.”

Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions for Dell, added an additional element that should be considered alongside virtualization - intelligent network storage. “Intelligent storage is the next piece of the puzzle,” he said. “The only thing growing faster than server proliferation is data proliferation. As we go digital, we have to get intelligent about how we manage and grow storage. You also get more benefit out of a virtual environment when in fact the workloads are on a shared resource.”

Enterprises need to view their data center costs and benefits more holistically in terms of the business, panelists agreed. “In the old days, the question was on the entry price of the gear, and sometimes, enterprises would miss the whole, ‘once I deploy it, how do I deploy it, how do I maintain it what type of staff do I need, what type of training do they need to have?‘” said James Mouton, vice president of the platform division within the HP Industry Standard Server business unit.

Ultimately, the data center needs to view itself as a business, and not as a technology shop - a view echoed by another panelist, Ajei Gopal, senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Systems Management business unit at CA. Gopal said there’s an evolution underway, from “IT as a cost center to IT as a driver of the business.” Data centers need to think of themselves more as service centers, he added. As part of this initiative, Gopal advices data center executives and managers to embrace best practices such as ITIL [Information Technology Infrastructure Library].

Ultimately, through strategies such as adopting best practices and virtualization, many companies may be able to forego the need to dramatically expand or build new data centers to alleviate the crush of data and applications. “We have the ability to find the hidden data centers we have in our data centers,” said Becker.

Microsoft, when it’s not tweaking operating systems, releasing security patches, or dissing open source, has another project it’s bringing to the fore: it’s first data center in a box. (Uh, sorry, I meant “containerized datacenter facility.”)

The idea is that these data centers, literally housed in portable shipping containers, can be trucked and parked at a corporate site, and quickly be up and running.

As relayed by Mary Jo Foley in her leatest Microsoft Watch blog post, Microsoft, on April 1st (no fooling!) announced publicly its plans to build a completely containerized production data center. The facility will be in Microsoft’s Northlake, Illinois facility.

Microsoft’s James Hamiltion provided some additional details about the facility in a blog post: The facility “is a two-floor design where the first floor is a containerized design housing 150 to 220 40’ containers each 1,000 to 1,000 servers. Chicago is large facility with the low end of the ranges Mike (Manos who leads the Microsoft Global Foundations Data Center team) quoted yielding 150k serves and the high end running to 440k servers. If you assume 200W/server, the critical load would run between 30MW and 88MW for the half of the data center that is containerized. If you assume a PUE of 1.5, we can estimate the containerized portion of the data center at between 45MW and 132MW total load. It’s a substantial facility.”

Hamilton has been Microsoft’s thought leader on the data center in a box proposition. I posted some details about his vision last year. As Hamilton put it, a standard 20×8×8-foot ship­ping container is “ideal” for this purpose, since not only is it is rugged and built to withstand ocean voyages, but also “relatively inexpensive and environmentally robust.” Upon delivery to a site, a data center container could simply be attached to the network, chilled water, and powered up. Each container can be fully equipped with networking gear, compute nodes, and persistent storage.”

Other vendors getting into the data center in a box garme include IBM, Dell, Sun and Verari.

HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The crux of the announcement is that capacity will be organized into a more abstract service layer, whether it comes from within the enterprise itself, or from HP’s latest on-demand offerings.

This is a vision, actually, that has been talked about for years by the large infrastructure vendors. I remember 10 years ago when Sun’s irrepressible Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” Around the same time, IBM began talking about building server farms that will deliver capacity on demand to customers from remote locations.

HP’s “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS — now there’s a mouthful) is particularly interesting, since its a data center offered through the cloud from HP. HP AIaaS offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applocations such as Exchange and SAP. HP did not mention others, though it did leave the door open to “other critical business applications.”

HP also is offering a range of virtualization capabilities which it calls HP Data Center Virtualization services, along with virtualization software, which supports all kinds of virtualization across servers, storage, networks and applications.

The move to cloud-based data centers continues, and thanks to high bandwidth networks, is technically feasible. Today’s economics is also helping to fuel this decade-old dream: the costs of building and maintaining data centers that can keep growing with demands for more data and digitalization of processes are going through the roof. Energy is one cost drain, but simply being able to find, train, and retain staff talent required to keep things going is a huge budget item. Tapping into data centers in the cloud offers a more incrementally priced alternative.

We just wrapped a survey of members of the Oracle Applications Users Group — which includes IT directors, CIOs, IT operations managers, and developers — on the extent to which they’re able to employ automated processes to manage multi-application workloads. In other words, are there processes in place in handle the management and movement of data across Oracle, PeopleSoft, and anything else that helps keep the enterprise running?

The survey of 344 companies, sponsored by UC4, found there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. More than 75 percent of organizations surveyed are having difficulties managing and monitoring workload.

Over two thirds of survey respondents reported delays in business processing that could be directly attributed to the inefficiencies and errors that are introduced when manual intervention is required to drive processes that span multiple applications. Automation is helping address some IT process management issues, but adoption is slow. Three out of four operations still either rely on manual scripting, or simply don’t know what approaches they should take.

The need to automate IT processes is pressing. Not only are data center infrastructures becoming more complex; the challenge of managing workload that spans multiple business applications, such as Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft and SAP, adds to this complexity. The survey shows that organizations recognize the overall value and benefit that can be derived from end-to-end process management and visibility. Unfortunately, budget constraints combined with some companies’ inability to adopt standardized IT procedures is holding back more widespread deployment of IT automation solutions.

Most organizations turn to IT process automation to reduce the amount of staff time consumed by routine or manual tasks. However, in many cases, there is little room in corporate budgets for extensive business process management (BPM) solutions that provide automated modeling, management, and monitoring capabilities. One third of those surveyed are considering strategies based on Oracle Fusion, BPEL and Application Integration Architecture (AIA). However, at this stage most are undecided or unclear about the viability of these technologies as workload automation platforms.

Copies of the full survey are available here (registration required) at UC4’s Web site.

Just when you think the operating system space is about as saturated as it could get — and all the action has moved to the middleware and applications layers of the stack — there’s a new OS added to the mix.

Unlike most OSes, however, the new OS, called Cosmos, doesn’t run on the bare metal of machines. Rather, it’s a virtualized OS that runs within the .NET container, intended to support .NET-based languages (particularly C#) that are also resident on the .NET container. Cosmos stands for “C# Open Source Managed Operating System.”

The OS is also open source, issued under the BSD license.

Why develop Cosmos? Actually, Microsoft also has a .NET-based OS called Singularity that also runs within this environment. The reason stated in the Cosmos FAQ section is that:

“Primarily because it’s fun. But beyond that, how else can you boot .NET on a floppy or small USB stick? Who else will try to put .NET on the Wii, OLPC, and iPhone? We are also developing a TCP/IP stack. Imagine instead of deploying half a dozen virtualized OS’s, deploying many dozens of dedicated OS’s. One that only does DNS, a few that only do HTTP, etc. One instance, one function.”

Welcome to the party, Cosmos. Mary Jo Foley, who first uncovered this announcement, also spoke with Chad “Kudzu” Hower, a former Microsoft employee, who admitted the OS has a “super geeky” flavor to it, and even has garned independent interest from Microsoft staffers.

It’s no secret that Cisco Systems sees data center management in it’s future, beyond simply being a hub-router-switch vendor. Cisco’s strategy for the past few years has to promote the idea of moving intelligence off the server and out onto the network.

For example, Cisco has been promoting its Service Oriented Network Architecture (that’s SONA, not SOA), intended to abstract network functions — such as switching, security and storage — to a more manageable and uniform service layer.

Now, the vendor has unveiled what analysts see as a bold move to take control of the data center once and for all. Cisco announced a family of data center-class switching platforms , the Cisco Nexus Series, designed, the vendor says, for “next-generation mission-critical data centers.”

At the heart of the announcement is the Cisco Nexus 7000 super-switch, which combines Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities across one unified network fabric. This monster supports 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in its chassis, with room for 512 10-Gbps Ethernet, and the capability of upgrading to 40 and 100 Gbps.

As one analyst explained: “Most data centers have a separate network for high-performance clusters and a network for storage. Cisco is saying you don’t need all these different network silos. You can have one network to support everything.”

Maybe Sun was right all those years ago — the network is the computer.