"Where a lot of people are today is back to looking for the best total cost of ownership for any particular workload," Marshall says. With regard to z/OS, IBM's flagship mainframe operating system for zSeries, the primary customer focus is on maintaining application availability, he says.
To make the performance analysis make sense to the technician whose core skills may have been honed in the small-systems world, Compuware has developed iStrobe, a browser-based implementation that not only renders performance data numerically and graphically but also provides explanations and advice in English. By contrast, Candle's approach for Omegamon XE is to compress all the vital analytical data graphically into a single window, with visual cues that make their point simply and immediately.
The danger in having access to this depth and degree of data, Cutter Consortium's Ulrich says, is in misinterpreting its meaning to the organization and applying the wrong remedies. Ulrich says he's shocked to learn how many large companies focus their attention disproportionately on such factors as storage-utilization levels, saving half a million here and a quarter-million there, when the bigger picture is telling them that entire applications, databases, and even human power are being duplicated three or four times over worldwide. Some telecommunications companies, Ulrich says, "have the same people doing the same jobs, spread out all over the country. If you could consolidate those people into a single function, you're talking about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of savings."
Being able to completely analyze the performance of applications as they're being developed, on the same site where they'll eventually be deployed, not only expedites development but can conceivably cut substantial time from debugging and, possibly, disaster recovery. What's more, utilizing storage-management and application-performance-management software together to present a bigger picture of what the various departments of a business are doing, when they're doing it, and what they're accomplishing can be key to a companywide consolidation project that encompasses not only IT, but every aspect of the organization.
What Ulrich would like to see is for his clients to develop small teams of representatives from many IT units, encompassing older technologies such as Cobol development and newer technologies such as Java. These teams would disseminate the data their management tools give them and coalesce to produce a reasonable, incremental, achievable plan for consolidation. Ulrich calls it a "joint solution that would incorporate the legacy side, the new development side, and the new architecture side."
The task of adequately explaining the true purpose of the Web-services model for applications got off to a rocky start in 2000, where, for a while, the marketing consensus seemed to be that Web services would make it easier for users to place quicker, lower bids on eBay. Wipe that slate clean in your mind, if you will, for Web services has little or nothing to do with Web media resources. The true purpose of Web services is to enable any type of program to advertise its functionality and certain elements of its data content, for potential use by other programs, using XML as its transport conduit (see story, "Three Tiers Minus One"). This way, a simple Web page, including buttons, text boxes, and other tools arranged to suit the job at hand, can all be directly socketed into a functional application--a process that, at least conceptually, resembles building a sophisticated control panel with Legos.
When Web services work as intended, a server-based application assumes the job of communicating with the user and providing that user with a front end--replacing the green screen. This same application acts as a surrogate for the user in exchanges with the mainframe's transaction system, which in a majority of cases is CICS. The server-based application often adds functionality and is at any rate easier to use than the traditional mainframe green screens.
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