The sixth annual VMworld user conference is underway this week in the "city by the bay," and this year's event was accompanied by the usual flurry of product announcements. My inbox is stuffed with vendor messages about new product and service offerings. But if I did a keyword search using "virtualization," I'd surface only about half of them. The keyword this year is "cloud."
It's not surprising that cloud computing would take center stage at this year's event. Competition in the virtualization space has been racing up the stack since the commoditization of the hypervisor.
"My chief concern with the whole cloud conversation is that people plunge into it headlong thinking about infrastructure," says Paul Muller, VP of HP's Software and Solutions organization. "We tend to get a little wrapped up in the how, when all we need to care about is the what. Whether it be virtualized or served up by mice on a treadmill, it doesn't matter, as long as I get my services." (Muller is one of those guys you actually want on a soap box.)
HP is making one of the splashier cloud announcements today (which I'll cover here later). But it won't be alone. The list of product releases at this year's show with "cloud" in the name is long. As the show's sponsor and still the market leader, VMware will take the spotlight, of course. Here are a few other vendors to look for that might not get the press they deserve:
- Analysts at Gartner may be predicting that VMWorld’s share of the cloud management market will decline from 100 percent, which it theoretically commanded until recently, to 65 percent by 2012 -- but this is still their show.
- HyTrust, a Mountain View, CA-based provider of access control and policy enforcement vendor for virtualized infrastructure, unveiled an out-of-the-box integration between the HyTrust Appliance and VMware's vCloud Director. Dubbed HyTrust Cloud Control, it's designed to bring strong authentication, role-based access control, security and visibility to VMware-based clouds.
- Egnyte, a provider of cloud file server solutions, announced its Enterprise Local Cloud (ELC) solution on VMware. The ELC is designed to be deployed as a virtual appliance on any VMware Virtual Machine (VM). It's a merging of virtualization and cloud computing, the company says, that allows organizations to deploy a hybrid cloud storage solution on existing infrastructure, including big iron equipment, low-cost commodity servers or a heterogeneous mixture of the two.
- Nimbula is a Menlo Park, CA-based provider of "cloud operating system technology" that was developed by the company's founders in Cape Town, South Africa. The company plans to launch Nimbula Director, which it describes as "a new class of cloud infrastructure and services system that uniquely combines the flexibility, scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today’s most advanced data centers." Think of it as Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall.
- BlueLock, a provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services, is announcing a partnership with VMware at the show, and the release of a beta version of a new enterprise-class cloud service. The BlueLock plug-in is designed to enable VMware customers to view and manage private cloud environments and new public new enterprise-class cloud service resources in a single interface. Even more surprising: They're not based in Silicon Valley! (You'll find them in Indianapolis, IN.)
- Not every vendor is at the show to announce partnerships with VMware. Abiquo, for example, is focusing on virtual-to-virtual conversion, and citing studies in its PR about VMware losing cloud market share. The Redwood City, CA-based company is a provider of a hyper-visor agnostic, open-source platform for setting up public and private clouds and managing resource allocation. Not only does the company support all major hypervisors, but it supports conversion of virtual machines from one hypervisor to another in any combination.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 31, 20100 comments
Hewlett Packard is making an aggressive move into the cloud this week with a new all-in-one, turn-key solution for deploying private clouds. Unveiled today at the annual VMworld user conference in San Francisco, HP's CloudStart is designed to get your behind-the-firewall cloud up and running in 30 day.
That's a bold claim, but it works, Paul Muller, VP of HP's Software and Solutions organization, told me last week, because it's built on HP's Converged Infrastructure, a combination of hardware, software and services joined under a common management platform. HP unveiled this set of associated services last year to address what it called "IT sprawl."
Also, CloudStart is delivered via HP's Cloud Consulting Services and combines HP's BladeSystem Matrix with the Cloud Services Automation stack and StorageWorks for data services.
Why the big push into private clouds?
"We hear a lot about the momentum of the off-premises cloud, but there's also an equally aggressive trend toward leveling the playing field in the private cloud," Muller said. "Private clouds give companies a chance to experiment with cloud computing and get used to the idea without having to trust third-party providers. The bottom line is they get greater control when the rollout is within the confines of their firewall."
Underpinning this turn-key, private-cloud infrastructure, Muller said, is something HP calls Cloud Maps, which he described as "engineered, tested and proven" application configurations.
"Infrastructure without an application is just a very expensive way to heat your data center," he said. "Our customers want more than just a raw infrastructure capability, more than just virtual servers being served up on demand. They need those infrastructure services to be tuned for best practices associated with a handful of common, off-the-shelf applications that they want to deploy onto them. We built the Cloud Maps to help ensure that you are deploying and automating the management of applications at a best-practices level."
Cloud Maps are imported directly into client cloud environments, where they build a catalog of cloud services for the business, the company says. HP is offering Cloud Maps for VMware, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.
HP has partnered with VMware and Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh on a project that employed the CloudStart package to create a private cloud, which the school plans to use as a test bed for its ongoing cloud research. According to the press release, the university is replacing multiple dedicated clusters with a single cloud environment, which it will use to perform simulations, data analyses and for data storage and data-intensive applications.
If you're at VMworld, and you're interested in HP's cloud strategy, check out its Private Cloud Readiness Bootcamp event, which the company calls "a crash course in all phases of deploying, managing and governing a cloud environment. It's scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 2, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Westin Hotel.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 30, 20100 comments
News that Oracle might be dumping OpenSolaris sparked a lively response from the blogosphere this week. The OpenSolaris community is PO'd, to be sure, but for the most part, the bloggers were sober and serious on this topic -- for the most part.
The news broke when Athens, GA-based software engineer and OpenSolaris contributor Steve Stallion published an internal Oracle memo on his Iconoclastic Tendencies blog. The memo lays out Oracle's plans for the open source OS, which include ending open source developers' daily access to builds of Solaris binaries after version 2010.05.
The memo reads, in part: "All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express."
Stallion's comment on this plan is downright poignant: "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line," he writes. "This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."
Not surprisingly, his post drew numerous comments with many points of view on this issue. I have not been reading Mr. Stallion's blog, but it's on my list now.
Most of the blogging on this news grew out of the memo Stallion published.(The internal Oracle memo was also posted on the OpenSolaris Forum.) The best of these, in my view, is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' post on his Cyber Cynic blog: "Oracle Dumps OpenSolaris." I'm a fan of this blog for its insights and unapologetic crankiness. In his recent post Vaughan-Nichols responds directly to Stallion's post: "…[W]elcome to the Larry Ellison school of open-source thought," he writes. "As I'd been trying to tell OpenSolaris developers all along, the god-king CEO of Oracle doesn't give a damn about any open source that doesn't directly benefit Oracle. The moment Oracle acquired Sun, OpenSolaris' fate was sealed."
Great post. Tons of links. Comments piling up.
It's also worthwhile to take a step back and revisit some of the expectations earlier this year about the fate of OpenSolaris. Dana Blankenhorn, who blogs for ZDNet on Linux and Open Source, wrote back in March in a post entitled "Oracle taking back OpenSolaris" that "there's no long such a thing as Open Solaris, and I think anyone who bought Sun’s promises on building an open alternative to Linux just got punked."
Of course, more than a few people in the OpenSolaris community saw all this coming. (You're not paranoid if Big O really is planning to kill your beloved open source project.) About 350 of them got together to start a new project, dubbed Illumos, which launched officially on August 3. The project aims to create a fully open version of OpenSolaris independent of Oracle.
Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta, a sponsor of the Illumos project, declared in an August 13 post that his company was ready for Oracle's decision. "We've been planning for this contingency for a long time," he wrote. "We have the team to continue to support customers and partners and to continue our development."
Also check out open-source-maven-at-large Simon Phipps' post on the ComputerWorld UK blog; Phipps sees the Illumos Project as neither a fork of OpenSolaris nor another OpenSolaris distro. "It is in fact a project to create a fully open-source-licensed version of the Solaris operating system and networking consolidation -- the closest Solaris comes to a 'kernel project,'" he wrote. "It's a downstream open source project, happy to contribute upstream but resolutely independent. As such it is a thoroughly good thing and a breath of fresh air."
Phipps is a keen observer of open source trends; I recommend his Wild Webmink blog.
And finally, it's a bit tangential, but you might want to check out Adam Leventhal's announcement in his blog that he is leaving Oracle. Leventhal is a longtime member of the Solaris Kernel Group and will continue to blog at http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 20101 comments
No one was really surprised today when Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be acquiring application security solutions provider Fortify Software. Rumors have been bouncing around the Valley for months.
"This was a real contender for the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley throughout the summer," says Fortify's chief scientist (and co-founder) Dr. Brian Chess.
Details of the deal were not disclosed in HP's announcement, and Chess wouldn't talk about them, either. But he did have some things to say about the meaning of the acquisition.
"Since the company was founded, we've been saying that security is going to become part of building software," Chess says. "And now the big guys are saying it, too. In fact, we're coming into HP as part of the group that does application lifecycle management. With this acquisition, I really feel that we've had our vision validated."
HP is getting more than Fortify's vaunted static application security analysis technology (analyses app code). The founders and management team are sticking around, Chess says, so HP is adding considerable app security expertise with this deal. Fortify CEO John M. Jack will be running the business from its current San Mateo offices for the time being as a stand-alone entity.
"Long term, we think we're going to find that we have a lot in common with HP," Chess says. In fact, Chess himself worked at HP about a decade ago. "Of course it's a much larger company than the one I left, but I think I know these guys to a certain degree. My memory of the company is that it's made up of a bunch of straight shooters who really value technology."
Fortify was founded in 2003. Its initial funding was provided by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Earlier this month the San Jose Mercury News published a nice story about the company's early days setting up shop in the Silicon Valley venture firm's basement.
The Fortify is seen as complementing HP's 2007 acquisition of web-app security firm SPI Dynamics. And HP isn't the only big player adding application security expertise through acquisition. Last summer, IBM acquired Ounce Labs, a Waltham, Mass.-based maker of enterprise source-code security testing software. Big Blue's acquisition of Watchfire in in 2007 brought governance, risk management, and security and compliance capabilities to the software development lifecycle.
Fortify focuses on software security at the application layer, which is a longtime target of app security guru Gary McGraw. When he's not writing books such books as the now nearly classic Software Security: Building Security In and Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems (with Greg Hoglundl), McGraw serves on Fortify's technical advisory board. He's also the CTO of security consulting firm Cigital, which joined with Fortify last year to create a set of best practices for developing and growing an enterprise-wide software security program, dubbed Building Security In Maturity Model.
"We expected this, and it's nice to see it happen," McGraw.
Cigital actually created the core technology on which Fortify's static analysis products are based, McGraw reminded me, and licensed it to Kleiner Perkins in 2003. "We developed this really early static analysis thing that was consultantware/researchware, and they turned it into a professional software product," he said.
McGraw sees the acquisition as a good thing, and echoes Chess's view of it as validating the build-security-in-the-app strategy.
"The big guys finally care about software security, and they've got the marketing muscle to cause lots of other people to care about it, too," he says. "And that's good for everybody."
McGraw offers an interesting overview of the current software security landscape in an InformIT article, "Software [In]security: Software Security Crosses the Threshold." Worth checking out.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 17, 20101 comments
I stopped by the Googleplex on Friday to check out the MoveOn.org-sponsored protest of the proposed Google-Verizon network neutrality framework. About a hundred people showed up, by my very rough count, with "Save the Internet" and "Don't Be Evil" signs. (I'm betting that more than a few people at Google are getting sick of the company's slogan about now.) MoveOn delivered a petition signed by more than 300,000 people opposed to the framework, which the group characterized as a bid to "give giant corporations control of the Internet." MoveOn published some nice pix of the event on its website.Very civil demonstration.
It's not just the liberal-leaning MoveOn that opposes the Google-Verizon plan. The framework for net neutrality outlined by the two companies has come under widespread criticism. Earlier today, four House Democrats weighed in, charging that the plan is too "industry-centered." Reps. Edward Markey, Anna Eshoo, Mike Doyle, and Jay Inslee wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski calling for "a resolution of the current open proceedings at the commission to ensure the maintenance of an open Internet."
The joint proposal is available on Google's Public Policy blog, so I won't go into specifics here. And the blogosphere, of course, is humming with commentary. Instead, let's talk about why enterprise software developers, in particular, should care about making sure users can access the Internet free of service-provider-imposed restrictions. As usual, I asked around and found some industry watchers who've given this question some thought.
"At first glance, the proposal seems admirable," said Ovum senior analyst Tony Baer. "Preserve net neutrality, except in the wireless space where bandwidth is dear. The problem is that the exceptions, which for now are defined loosely as innovative and public service uses, are not exactly ironclad guarantees that blatantly commercial uses from well-heeled originators will not literally dominate the airwaves."
Baer, who blogs via the OnStrategies Perspectives Web site, is rather pessimistic about the future of net neutrality, especially in the mobile space. He pointed to the "chokehold" the carries maintain on the types of devices supported by their networks.
"As long as carriers remain the power brokers, net neutrality will remain an unrealized dream in North America," Baer said.
Al Hilwa, Seattle-based Program Director in the Applications Development Software group of IDC, sees the Google-Verizon proposal as a promotion of the status quo: a relatively open and lightly-controlled wired Internet, and a very restricted and carrier-controlled wireless Internet.
"You can argue both sides in terms of the state of the current wireless network and the level of resources it needs to be evolved to carry the types of payloads we are hoping to one day run on it," Hilwa told me, "but one thing is clear: developers will have to understand that their wired and wireless worlds will look very different for a long time to come. While applications targeting broadly available platforms can run anywhere on the wired networks as long as they adhere to the right standards, they can only run on the wireless network courtesy of a chain of custodians, such as platform vendors, device makers, carriers and anyone who sits in between to collect a penny. This means that the era of write-once-run-everywhere will give way to write many times and run where you are permitted."
A list of Hilwa's IDC papers is available here.
Austin, Texas-based Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk, warned that developers shouldn't be lulled into complacency on this issue by its seeming consumer-focus.
"At the moment, most of the worry is on the consumer end, but enterprises are relying on consumer-oriented services more and more," Coté said. "Public cloud computing is served over the Internet, after all. If enterprise developers are starting to use more services, and even infrastructure over the Internet, then net neutrality certainly has the potential to affect them. The same would hold true for those doing more mobile-based development, where developers are already dependent on carriers. If enterprise developers were relying on an 'open' network, vs. one where you had to pay for more for better service, then they'd need to start considering the cost and reliability."
On the other hand, providing enterprises with the option of paying for better service might actually be attractive for some of their applications.
"That said, if the outbound marketing at enterprises is relying on unfettered access to their customers, then there is call here to pay attention to net neutrality discussions," he added. "Just like media companies are worried that telcos and other carriers would 'tax' them for use or do more dastardly things, if outbound marketing and comms are trying to do things over the public Internet, they'll need to make sure that they can reach their end-users without paying (or having their end users pay) some kind of fee for better performance and access."
If you haven't, you should check out Coté's blog, "People Over Process."
Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions worries that the little guys might be missing the importance of this debate.
"Large enterprises are no strangers to net neutrality issues," Gardner said. "Large companies for decades have been paying WAN, private network and Internet fees based on provider formulas that takes the size and types of traffic into account. In this regard they have never had 'net neutrality.'"
But this may be something that small to medium businesses have not yet thought through. SMBs may have benefited from flatter consumer-oriented Internet connections and fee structures without realizing it. New network usage structures could affect how they reach out to their customers via the Internet, as well as how they deliver services to their employees via the Internet.
"So it certainly behooves companies to follow closely how these 'net neutrality' issues play out," Gardner said, "and to consider how the networks are disintermediating them and their customers. You can be sure that the network providers are not looking to reduce the total fees, and that affects the entire ecosystem of online providers and users."
Gardner's "BriefingsDirect" blog is a must read.
Now I'd like to hear what you think. Why should enterprise software developers care about net neutrality? What should their position be? Should they get involved? How?
Posted by John K. Waters on August 16, 20102 comments
As you've probably heard by now, yesterday Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google saying that the Internet search giant infringed on seven patents associated with the Java Platform in developing its Android mobile operating system (Oracle acquired the rights to Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in January). The analysts I talked with this morning say the the simple filing of the lawsuit could risk the future of Java as a development platform -- and not just in the mobile arena.
Jeffrey S. Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said he worries that Oracle's lawsuit will not only dampen Android's market momentum, but slow overall adoption of Java in mobile environments and elsewhere.
"The big question is, is this just the opening salvo in a protracted war?" Hammond said. "That's what it looks like to me, and in the long term, such a war would harm the Java community. Especially in the mobile space: If I'm a developer evaluating and evolving my technology strategy, and I can look at Qt or even Silverlight and know that the specifications and IP issues are resolved, the risk of using those solutions is lower than using Java. Why would I invest in Java in a mobile context?"
"We know that Java isn't going to be on the iPhone in the future," Hammond added, "and now it's future on a very popular competing mobile device is in question. I'd expect Oracle to try to extract a sizeable license fee from the device manufacturers, too."
Java developers around the world watched nervously as Oracle took on the mantle of Java steward from Sun. Recently, their fears about the fate of the language and platform seemed to be abating: In July, ADT reported on the results of a survey published by open-source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft, which found that Oracle was viewed by the majority of respondents as a better steward of Java and MySQL than Sun.
But Oracle's charge against Google is almost guaranteed to shift opinion in the opposite direction, said Hammond.
"Does this not just confirm every developer's worst fear about Oracle?" he said. "Oracle may come away from this with a chunk of change from Google, and it may all go away relatively quietly, but I think the long term PR damage of this move is going to be significant. Developers hate this kind of corporate brinkmanship."
Forrester Research analyst John Rymer agrees: "I think this lawsuit casts the die on Java’s future," he said. "It will become a slow-evolving legacy technology. Oracle’s lawsuit links deep innovation in Java with license fees, and that will kill deep innovation in Java by anyone outside Oracle or startups hoping to sell out to Oracle. Software innovation just doesn’t do well in the kind of environment Oracle just created."
Which, he added, is not to say that Oracle doesn't have a right to protect its IP.
"I think Oracle is introducing discipline to Java as a business," he said. "As we know, Oracle is about generating growth, and if it offends the Java developer community in pursuing that goal, so be it."
Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 201015 comments
One of the things I love about my beat is the relative rarity of personal scandals. I cringe whenever I see a politician's personal peccadillos paraded before the public, and I'd hate it if I ever had to lead the procession. But Silicon Valley is not without its dramas, and this week we had a whopper. I'm referring, of course, to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark V. Hurd's resignation.
In case you spent the last week coding in a cave, here's what happened: Hurd gave up the big chair after an internal investigation into a sexual harassment claim against him by a former contractor found that he had filed false expense reports. According to an HP press release, "The investigation determined there was no violation of HP’s sexual harassment policy, but did find violations of HP’s Standards of Business Conduct."
This is an important story, but I'm already feeling the need to wipe down my keyboard with about a dozen KeyKleens. Instead, I'll just let the blogosphere, which was throbbing with this story all week, do my dirty work.
Maybe start with CNet senior editor and blogger Sam Diaz's August 6 post, where Diaz lays out the market impact of the Hurd departure. He's one of the few who noted that Marc Adreessen (co-author of Mosaic, founder of Netscape and Loudcloud, and HP board member) would be "at the center of HP’s future" as a "key player in HP’s CEO search."
Venture Beat blogger Dean Takahashi, whom I normally think of as a gaming and gadget guy, gets into the background of Jodie Fisher, the marketing consultant who made the sexual harassment charge.
Industry analyst Rob Enderle poses the question, "Mark Hurd Falls; Could Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs Be Next?" The ever-insightful Enderle explores the similarity among these top execs, including their vulnerabilities.
Chuck House, who now runs Stanford University’s Industry Affiliate research program on media and technology, was an HP engineer for 29 years. He rips Hurd a new one in his August 10 post, "Holy Mackerel." House calls the departing exec "profane, a bully, autocratic, threatening, demeaning, vindictive and rude," among other things. Be sure to check out the comments from readers on this one.
Motley Fool blogger Rick Aristotle Munarriz not only has the coolest postmodern name ever, he's among the relative few to believe that Hurd's departure from HP won't be a career killer.
For a bit of historical context, check out this pre-any-idea-there'd-ever-be-an-ouster post (March 2010) on the OnStrategies Perspectives blog.
Finally, Lee Pender, executive editor of our sister pub, Redmond magazine, had me chuckling with his post, "A Modest Proposal: Hurd Is Out, Here's Why I Should Be HP's Next CEO." If I were on HP's board, he'd get my vote.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20100 comments
When I heard that Novel was set to unveil version 2.0 of its Mono Tools for Visual Studio, I was looking forward to chatting about the release with the manic Miguel de Icaza, original leader of the open-source Mono project, vice of Novell's Developer Platform group and super-fun interviewee. But Miguel was welcoming his first daughter into the world (¡felicitaciones!), so Mono product manager Joseph Hill pitched in for the briefing.
Hill is a former independent .NET developer/consultant and early Mono enthusiast, so he has an in-the-trenches perspective on the value of Mono. "As a .NET guy jumping into the middle of a Linux company, I've been able to say, here's what I think a Visual Studio developers are going to need to see to get interested in this." (BTW: It's Joseph not Joe, a preference with which I, as another guy saddled with a name made famous by someone else, sympathize.)
Mono, of course, is an open source implementation of the .NET Framework based on C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Mono Tools for Visual Studio is a commercial add-in for the VS integrated development environment (IDE) designed to allow developers to write .NET apps for non-Windows platforms, including Linux, BSD and Solaris.
When Novell launched version 1.0 last November, the company focused on .NET developers targeting Linux, Hill said. "We created this module that would allow .NET developers to use familiar Visual Studio environments to design, code and maintain multi-platform applications," he said. "But what we were mainly interested in with 1.0 was getting them to Linux."
The 2.0 release expands the scope of the add-in to support VS developers targeting Mac OS X. It turns out, Hill says, that the developers Novell hears from who are interested in adding one more platform want that platform to be the Mac OS.
"We got a lot of flak for not creating a version that allows .NET developers to build and deploy for the Mac," Hill said. "As a Linux company, we're not exactly driven to enrich Apple's ecosystem, but as a company that likes to please developers, we really had to respond to the demand. Mac OS X really behaves more like Linux, so there's a pretty good chance that, if you make a .NET application Mono-compatible and it works on a Mac, it's probably just going to work on Linux as well."
This version of Mono Tools for Visual Studio also supports a relatively new debugging framework for Mono called the soft debugger. Unlike Mono's hard debugger, which takes control from the outside and acts as an all-knowing and controlling program, the soft debugger works cooperatively with Mono. Where the hard debugger can debug both managed and unmanaged applications, the soft debugger can debug only pure managed apps.
"The hard debugger is very powerful," Hill explained, "but the approach we took made it very Linux specific. It's one of the reasons that 1.0 didn't have support for the Mac. In fact, porting the debugger to Mac proved to be a very difficult process. Our engineers came up with a different approach that allows us to get the debugger running easily on any platform that Mono runs on. The soft debugger isn't as powerful as the hard debugger -- it can't stop the world and allow you to inspect everything -- but it debugs more kinds of applications and is generally more reliable."
This version of Mono Tools for Visual Studio also provides additional support for Windows. "This turns out to be a pretty big deal for guys who are developing something they want to be cross platform," Hill said. "It allows them to quickly test, debug and isolate issues on Windows; you couldn't do that in 1.0."
Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 is available now.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 9, 20100 comments
IBM grabbed headlines last week when it unveiled its new System zEnterprise 196 mainframe. Something of a hybrid, the new mainframe combines the POWER7 and System x servers into one box, and the servers share resources through a common, virtualized platform.
Cool as this new hunk of iron is (and it's way cool: 60 percent faster than the z10, which it replaces, holds 3 Terabytes of RAM, and processes at 50 BIPS), what caught my attention was the upgrade to Rational Developer for System z IDE. Better known as RDz, this multi-platform environment for building, testing, and deploying zEnterprise applications comes with a new System z Unit Test feature. Developers using RDz can run the zOS on their laptops, write code for the mainframe, and now test that code.
"For our mainframe customers whose development teams were working with 30-year-old ISPF tools that ship with the mainframe, Rational Developer for System z brought them a laptop-driven development environment that set them free," Scott Searle, IBM Rational's not-usually-so-poetic marketing program director, told me. "Instead of working late into the night when the mainframes had some downtime, they could work with code anywhere, anytime on their laptops."
This version of RDz also comes with a new set of compilers designed to help customers update applications designed to work on older systems so that they can take advantage of the zEnterprise architecture.
RDz is aimed at COBOL and PL/I programmers, and I couldn't help wondering just how many codederos out there were learning and working with those languages today. Searle informed me that the current population of COBOL developers is about two million strong, and he says IBM expects it to grow -- with a little help. Thanks to an IBM initiative, COBOL is being taught in 400 colleges and universities around the world, he said, mainly in India, China and Eastern Europe.
"The big success story is India," Searle said. "We don't know the exact numbers in India, but we feel that it's in the neighborhood of 50,000 COBOL developers, and they're young and excited to be working on the mainframe."
But Searle suggested looking at the state of COBOL development today in another way: "We have customers who have been able to build up their COBOL developer populations with the help of a modern IDE," he said. "If you were a young college kid used to a modern IDE and you had to go in and learn ISPF, with all of its memorized prompts and commands, you'd hate it; it's not just boring, it's overwhelming. But Java developers learn modern IDE interfaces, and our customers find that they can work with COBOL just as well in that kind of environment."
These IBM customers also found that it's much harder to teach masters of the venerable, 50-plus-year-old COBOL to work with Java, Searle added.
And I shall resist here the childish impulse to say anything about old dogs and new tricks.
For more on the latest release of the Rational Developer for System z IDE, check out IBM's alphaWorks Web site, the COBOL Cafe online community and The Mainframe Blog.
Posted by John K. Waters on July 27, 20109 comments