Longevity for Legacy NonStop Tapes

- from ETI-NET

Many NonStop tape drives have become unsupported by HP this year.  And few S-Series system tape drive models can be moved to NonStop Integrity systems.  Fewer still to NonStop Blade systems.  New tape drive technologies are expensive and don’t allow access to the data on your inventory of legacy tape media. 

ETI-NET has solved these problems with the BackBox™ Legacy Tape Server.  Now you can cable any media-compatible open system tape drive to the Legacy Tape Server and access legacy tape media from NonStop systems via it. Or you can have the Legacy Tape Server reconstitute this media onto your choice of storage, from which you can later retrieve it without changes to your NonStop catalogs.

The Legacy Tape Server is a great way to ensure continued access to vital archived data, and an excellent tool to migrate those archives onto modern storage subsystems.

Come see us at Community Connect Europe 2008 in Stand 41 for a demonstration of legacy tape support.

For more information call 1-650-888-8949, email us at information@etinet.com, or visit www.etinet.com

NonStop - A Running Commentary - November, ‘08

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author
and shouldn’t be viewed as reflecting any views
of his current or past employer

I have been re-reading earlier articles written for this publication as I prepared an upcoming blog posting for Real Time View: www.itug-connection.blogspot.com Back in the September ’08 issue, I looked at the slow uptake across the ACI community of the offer to move from the NonStop platform to IBM’s System z, and I asked the question “how long will IBM stay excited about figures like that?” And in the July ’08 issue, I looked at how open the platform was becoming and pointed to the potential productizing of a deep port of the SASH stack as a sign of the commitment by HP NonStop to open computing.

In other words, is the HP NonStop platform’s open story really beginning to develop traction with the user community and is it doing so at a time when IBM is starting to reveal cracks within its own mainframe community ranks? Could IBM be looking at many more desertions from within its rank of mainframe users at the very time it’s trying to appeal to new communities, like NonStop? In email exchanges with Jim Johnson of the Standish Group, we continue to see IBM System z attacking the traditional “availability” story of NonStop, and position some cluster-configurations of this product family as being “almost as good as a NonStop”, yet with all of IBM’s marketing muscle, it still doesn’t seem to be generating the migrations away from NonStop IBM had expected.

Martin Fink’s blog on the HP web site, “Musings on Mission Critical Computing”, is quickly becoming a must-read site for me these days. Check it out at: http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/musings-on-mcc/default.aspx Martin lambasts a number of official IBM statements, and delivers a slightly different perspective on IBM’s marketing efforts. Two such postings, Mainframe Claims (October, 13^th, ’08) and Convergence (July 30^th, ’08) were ones I found particularly informative with Martin stating “See, a few month ago, IBM decided to combine their I-Series (AS/400) with their P-Series systems … Just wanted to make sure the facts were a tad more visible to you than IBM wanted you to see.” He also wrote “In looking at IBM’s website I have noticed a number of claims about our product and their offerings that frankly aren’t true … My advice is don't take what they are saying for granted. Kick the tires and look under the hood to make sure the claims are actually true.”

It was comments like this that led me to dig into the numbers, found in a recent newsletter supported by the IBM SHARE user group, and post the blog entry “Reserve some ‘Whoa!”” (October 26^th, ’08). In that posting I noted how “I was particularly intrigued by the story filed under the heading ‘Mainframes Brightest Spot in IBM Server Line with 25 Percent Sales Jump’ that reported ‘revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 25 percent compared with the year-ago period’…  and what intrigue(s) me here was that, comparing System z sales to a year-ago, glosses over the fact that twelve months ago the figures for System z were very low. All the smart CIOs, fully aware that the new z10 would be announced early in 2008 … had held back the purchase of additional mainframe MIPS, depressing sales figures in the process.

But IBM continues to put as good a spin as possible on its dwindling mainframe deployments. It continues to talk up a great story about consolidating servers, distributed throughout a company, onto a single mainframe and often points to a number of successful implementations. The OS of choice is often the more “fashionable” mainframe version of Linux, and not the traditional zOS (aka MVS) many of us remember. But for most companies, mainframe mips are too expensive for Linux deployment, and the CIO’s aren’t all that amused as taking this ride does very little to reduce their staffing levels!

Again, it was Martin who most recently pulled apart this “faulty assumption”, when he wrote “(IBM’s claim that) mainframe reduces IT staff requirements over ‘distributed’ environments. I honestly can't believe they are serious here. Any time IBM uses ‘distributed’, their basis for comparison is servers that are 5 years old, grossly under-utilized (roughly 5%), non-virtualized and running one application per server.  This is the only way IBM can show TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) saving versus the mainframe.”

Last week, HP issued a News Release that pulled all these comments together in an extremely profound manner. In the October 29^th, ’08 release “Businesses Achieve Cost Savings of up to 70 Percent by Migrating to HP Integrity Servers” it opens with “HP today announced that 40 European customers have successfully migrated in the past year from legacy mainframe systems to HP Integrity servers, achieving data center cost savings of up to 70 percent.” The release then goes on to add “HP expects to help migrate an additional 125 European companies in the next 12 months.” Finally, it includes a quote from Ruud Vrolijk, HP’s Vice President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems - EMEA that says “HP also promotes better investment protection through its open, modular HP Integrity server solutions that are much more economical and flexible in adapting to changes in business.”

If you combine these numbers with what I know is occurring in the other GEO’s, it’s becoming fairly obvious that IBM has lost more than a hundred mainframe customers – possibly more. I am sure IBM will downplay these migrations as being associated with customers with much older systems or as a result of  recent M&A activity but either way, the pool of IBM mainframe customers is definitely in decline. The proprietary nature of the mainframe is finally sowing the seeds of its downfall. The enormous cost of mainframe software – in particular, the pricing of infrastructure software – continues to be a major stumbling block in almost every move-to-the-mainframe discussion.

Not every IBM mainframe customer is moving to the Integrity NonStop server line and perhaps there’s very limited engagement with NonStop. But in the battle over whether NonStop applications should be moved to System z, this migration story remains very significant - there’s little credibility left for any CIO moving off of NonStop to the main frame only to plead for additional funds to then migrate to more open platforms! But with a shrinking pool, how can IBM possibly keep up? How can IBM lay claim to being an industry-leader in any category whatsoever?

The truth is that the IBM marketing machine will continue to crank out messages for some time, but customer testimonials and references will become a lot harder to find – and we may just see the same names rehashed time and time again. Perhaps, as Martin advises, for this ride it really has come time to “kick the tires!” And by all means, “look under the hood to make sure the claims are actually true.” After all, platform desertions have a tendency to spiral and no CIO will find it amusing jumping on this roller-coaster as it heads straight down!

Richard Buckle

HP – ITUG:            Board of Directors (2000 – 2006)    Chairman (2004 & 2005)

IBM – SHARE:      Board of Directors (2007 – 2008)

Real Time View blog:           www.itug-connection.blogspot.com