IBM Engineering Workflow Management is the tool of choice for the IBM zHW team

Imagine a digital engineering workplace where thousands of people are building a single system. This system is used by two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, 8 of the top 10 insurers, 7 of the top 10 global retailers and 8 out of the top 10 telcos as a highly secured platform for running their most mission-critical workloads. The development effort involves coordinating manufacturing, chip design, hardware, firmware, testing and defect tracking, while also meeting stringent regulatory requirements across a variety of industries and governmental standards.

This is the challenge that teams working on IBM Z® (the family name for IBM’s z/Architecture mainframe computers) face with every new product release.

Looking to the future

The IBM Z developers embarked on an extensive year-long evaluation of the development tools available in the marketplace that would help them manage their daunting engineering workflow. To carry out this evaluation, stakeholders created a matrix chart showing which solutions included the required integration capabilities for the tools used by the team.

The team selected components of the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution, namely IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM), a fully integrated software development solution designed for complex product management and engineering, as well as for large, distributed development organizations that produce mission-critical systems subject to regulatory compliance. But this choice was not a foregone conclusion.

“By being completely objective and allowing the criteria and data to do the talking, we were led to EWM,” said Dominic Odescalchi, project executive manager of IBM zHW program management. “EWM was the consensus tool that we collectively agreed upon to provide the best solution.”

The advantage of IBM ELM tools

The zHW platform development team will leverage EWM as the central hub of engineering data, taking advantage of the customization capabilities within the broader ELM solution. This way, every team can adapt the processes that fit them best while remaining coordinated across one view of the development data and progress. Managing this data is critically important given the highly regulated workloads that are run on these systems across a variety of industries, governmental agencies and countries.

Given the holistic design of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management, the team has also adopted the IBM Engineering Test Management tool to manage the comprehensive verification and validation of the hardware, again leveraging the one view and traceability across development data.

“With EWM’s integrated tool stack, key data will be readily available through connection to various team repositories,” said Odescalchi. “This will enable us to kick the doors wide open to automating and aggregating data. It’s going to free up countless hours to focus on performing higher value activities.”

Source: ibm.com

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DevOps for IBM Z Firmware – with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift is perhaps best known for providing a platform for developing and deploying cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

But when the IBM Z Firmware development team in Germany were looking to modernize their DevOps process, they found the ideal environment in Red Hat OpenShift running on IBM Z.

Scalability and Security

IBM Z systems sit at the heart of many of the world’s biggest companies and most critical workloads. Optimized for performance, security and reliability, IBM Z is designed to handle billions of transactions without missing a heartbeat.

The IBM Z firmware layer sits between the physical hardware and the operating system, and executes many of the low-level operations of the IBM Z system. Creating and maintaining this layer is the responsibility of the IBM Z Firmware development organization, which includes hundreds of developers.

The challenges the team faced were similar to those faced by many large development organizations – flexibility, security, and availability, especially combined with the need to scale. How could existing Jenkins setups be easily extended to add new workers? How could the existing login server be updated to support new security requirements? And how could runtime environments be designed with high availability in mind?

“The DevOps process is based around a large code pipeline, moving from source code management to binary repositories to automated testing, all managed by Jenkins scripts and workers”, commented Ralf Schaufler, IBM Z Firmware Integration Architect. “Supporting this are tools for bug tracking, access control, and backup.”

Technical Solution

The team looked at various options and decided to go with Red Hat OpenShift as this provided a secure enterprise DevOps capability, as well as a CI/CD pipeline. Although most of the IBM Z Firmware artifacts run on the IBM Z architecture (s390x), some run on x86 – and so OpenShift’s support for heterogeneous environments could offer additional benefits in the future.

The next question the team faced was whether to run OpenShift in the cloud or on-premises on Z. They determined that the cloud would be a more expensive option, especially as they have a fairly static environment of hundreds of users. In addition, running OpenShift on-prem on IBM Z enabled them to co-locate the development environment next to the test environments. This dramatically reduced the time taken to transfer IBM Z firmware images between development, simulation, and new hardware – and increased security by locating all these environments in the same protected zone with local access only.

“The first use case we implemented was to migrate their multi-user development server to ‘interactive containers’ running on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z”, said Edmund Breit, Senior IT Specialist, IBM Z Firmware Delivery & Suppprt. “This enabled us to use the access control features of OpenShift and meet the IBM security requirements for developers.”

The next use case they deployed was to use Jenkins for the Continuous Integration and Development (CID) pipeline within Red Hat OpenShift, supporting greater scalability and enabling updates to be packaged and then included in the next driver update. This simplified the pipeline automation, and can also potentially enable future multi-arch support for both s390x and x86 firmware production in the future.

“We’re now looking at further use cases, including supporting virtual machines as well as containers, wider options for persistent storage, and additional CID services”, added Edmund.

“The migration of the DevOps process to OpenShift on Z has proved very successful and delivered a more secure and scalable approach,” continued Ralf. “This has also been helped by the Red Hat OpenShift for Z development team being close by in the IBM Boeblingen lab.”

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Z and the Open Neural Network Exchange

Nearly everyone recognizes the profound opportunity to bring new insights and better decisions to business workloads using AI and analytics. Enabling AI on IBM Z and LinuxONE is a key focus for IBM,  allowing clients to have a reliable, secured, and high performing environment for delivering critical business insights using Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications.

However, with this opportunity there are also challenges, especially those around deploying AI in a production environment. The use of AI in critical business workloads is a growing space, and as with other new technologies, the path to production can be challenging. Key challenges include the need to deploy data science assets without sacrificing production qualities of service (i.e., meet response time goals) in a consistent, repeatable manner.

That is where the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) comes in. ONNX is an open-source format used to represent machine learning models and is one of the key ecosystem technologies enabling a “Build and Train Anywhere, Deploy on IBM Z” strategy. ONNX helps establish a streamlined path to take a project from inception to production. Models represented in a standard ONNX format can then be implemented by an ONNX backend (i.e., runtime or model compiler), such as on IBM Z.

This journey to production starts with the data scientist, who may use a preferred set of tools to understand a business problem and analyze data. When that data scientist creates and trains a model, they build assets that ultimately need to be deployed in production. Often, however, the deployment platform and production requirements aren’t considered heavily in these early stages. This is where utilizing ONNX in a deployment strategy really shines. Many of the most popular libraries and frameworks, including PyTorch and TensorFlow, support the ability to export or convert a trained model to an ONNX format.

Once a model has an ONNX representation, it can be deployed to run on any platform with an ONNX runtime. This provides several key benefits: the model is now portable, with no runtime dependencies on the libraries or framework it was trained on. For example, an ONNX model that was originally created and trained in TensorFlow can be served without the TensorFlow runtime. Additionally, ONNX allows vendors to create high performing model backends that can optimize and accelerate the model for a specific architecture.

For IBM Z and the mission critical workloads it typically hosts, this combination of portability and optimization makes IBM Z an optimal environment for deploying models. One key example of the use of ONNX is in Watson Machine Learning for z/OS (WMLz), which incorporates an ONNX model compiler technology based on the ONNX-MLIR project. The ONNX model compiler feature of WMLz is focused on deep learning models and produces an executable optimized to run on IBM Z. WMLz allows the user to easily deploy this compiled ONNX model for model serving.

As IBM Z continues to innovate in enterprise AI, ONNX is a key part of IBM’s AI strategy. It allows IBM to build a deployment strategy optimized for the IBM Z architecture, while staying closely aligned with the broader ecosystem.

In August, you may have read that IBM previewed Telum, the next generation IBM Z processor. IBM is now examining opportunities to exploit the on-chip AI accelerator with the ONNX model compiler.

ONNX is part of the Linux Foundation and has widespread support from numerous key vendors that recognize the value it delivers. IBM is an early adopter of ONNX and contributes upstream to the ONNX project.

Be on the lookout for additional updates on how you can leverage ONNX as part of your IBM Z AI story!

Source: ibm.com

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The next step in homomorphic encryption for Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE

101 billion. That’s the number of data records compromised in 2020. This made 2020 a record-breaking year for data breaches – the cost per breach also hitting a record high with an average of $4.24 million per incident.

Modern cryptography has enabled sensitive data to be encrypted at rest and in transit – table stakes for the encryption world. The more challenging area to address is encrypting data while it is in use or being processed in memory. Whether it’s a third party, like a cloud service provider, or your own employee that is processing the data, data in this state can be particularly vulnerable because it must be decrypted to be processed. This missing link of end-to-end encryption can create a window of vulnerability for hackers to exploit and steal data.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an emerging security technology that allows computations to be performed directly on encrypted data without decrypting it, marking a new paradigm shift for data security. FHE can help support a zero trust strategy by keeping your data, the models that process the data (typically hosted in a cloud or third-party environment) and the results generated encrypted; only the data owner has access to the private key and has the privilege to decrypt. This advanced security approach can help protect your data against external attacks, insider threats stealing intellectual property intentionally or inadvertently and can help provide long-term data protection against quantum attacks.

What’s new?

Last year, we introduced FHE to Linux on Z with our FHE Toolkit. Today, we are announcing the availability of the next evolution of the FHE Toolkit called IBM HElayers, a software development kit (SDK) for the practical and efficient execution of encrypted workloads using fully homomorphic encrypted data. HElayers is designed to enable application developers and data scientists to seamlessly apply advanced privacy preserving techniques without requiring specialized skills in cryptography – all while working in newly integrated Python and C++ environments. The images for the Python and C++ kits are provided under a community edition license for non-commercial use. Customers who want to access advanced features and plan for commercial-grade deployment using HElayers can engage through the Premium Edition Program by contacting the IBM FHE team at FHEstart@us.ibm.com.

HElayers is engineered to support a wide selection of analytics such as linear regression, logistic regression, and neural networks so that application developers and data scientists can use the power of FHE. It is delivered as an open platform that is capable of using the latest FHE schemes and libraries and ships with a multitude of tutorials and sample applications that highlight the basics of FHE and how to use this technology in a practical way. Sample applications include credit card fraud detection, encrypted database search, text classification, and various examples from the healthcare industry.

Try it for yourself

It seems daily that we see news about data breaches and inadvertent disclosures of information. In a real sense, data privacy has gone from something discussed in a company boardroom to something that is now discussed at the dinner table with family and friends. Today, our goal is to make HElayers accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Try HElayers for yourself including tutorials, sample applications and documentation for Linux on Z by downloading the images from Docker Hub using the following links:

◉ Python kit with Jupyter Notebook IDE
◉ C++ kit with Visual Studio Code IDE

Take a look at our in-depth walkthrough video on how to download and get started with HElayers.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Telum Processor: the next-gen microprocessor for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE

In today’s digital economy, data offers tremendous opportunities for harvesting value. Yet extracting insight from real time enterprise transactions can present an elusive goal. Running deep learning models on high volume transactional data is difficult to attain with off-platform based inference solutions, as latency, variability and security concerns can make them impractical in response-time sensitive applications. IBM is addressing this challenge through recent innovations in system and microprocessor design.

Today IBM announced the IBM Telum Processor at HotChips; Telum will be the central processor chip for the next generation IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. Organizations who want help in preventing fraud in real-time, or other use cases, will welcome these new IBM Z innovations designed to deliver in-transaction inference in real time and at scale.

The 7 nm microprocessor is engineered to meet the demands our clients face for gaining AI-based insights from their data without compromising response time for high volume transactional workloads. To help meet these needs, IBM Telum is designed with a new dedicated on-chip accelerator for AI inference, to enable real time AI embedded directly in transactional workloads, alongside improvements for performance, security, and availability:

◉ The microprocessor contains 8 processor cores, clocked at over 5GHz, with each core supported by a redesigned 32MB private level-2 cache. The level-2 caches interact to form a 256MB virtual Level-3 and 2GB Level-4 cache. Along with improvements to the processor core itself, the 1.5x growth of cache per core over the z15 generation is designed to enable a significant increase in both per-thread performance and total capacity IBM can deliver in the next generation IBM Z system. Telum’s performance improvements are vital for rapid response times in complex transaction systems, especially when augmented with real time AI inference.

◉ Telum also features significant innovation in security, with transparent encryption of main memory. Telum’s Secure Execution improvements are designed to provide increased performance and usability for Hyper Protected Virtual Servers and trusted execution environments, making Telum an optimal choice for processing sensitive data in Hybrid Cloud architectures.

◉ The predecessor IBM z15 chip was designed to enable industry-leading seven nines availability for IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. Telum is engineered to further improve upon availability with key innovations including a redesigned 8-channel memory interface capable of tolerating complete channel or DIMM failures and designed to transparently recover data without impact to response time.

IBM Z processors have a history of embedding purpose-built accelerators, designed to improve performance of common tasks like cryptography, compression, and sorting. Telum adds a new integrated AI accelerator with more than 6 TFLOPs compute capacity per chip. Every core has access to this accelerator and can dynamically leverage the entire compute capacity to minimize inference latency. Due to the centralized accelerator architecture with direct connection to the cache infrastructure, Telum is designed to enable extremely low latency inference for response-time sensitive workloads. With planned system support for up to 200 TFLOPs, the AI acceleration is also designed to scale up to the requirements of the most demanding workloads.

Keeping data on IBM Z offers many latency and data protection advantages. The IBM Telum processor is designed to help clients maximize these benefits, providing low and consistent latency for embedding AI into response time sensitive transactions. This can enable customers to leverage the results of AI inference to better control the outcome of transactions before they complete. For example, leveraging AI for risk mitigation in Clearing & Settlement applications to predict which trades or transactions have high risk exposures and to propose solutions for a more efficient settlement process. A more expedited remediation of questionable transactions can help clients prevent costly consequences and negative business impact.

For instance, one international bank uses AI on IBM Z as part of their credit card authorization process instead of using an off-platform inference solution. As a result, the bank can detect fraud during its credit card transaction authorization processing. For the future, this client is looking to attain sub-millisecond response times, exploiting complex deep learning AI models, while maintaining the critical scale and throughput needed to score up to 100,000 transactions per second, nearly a 10X increase over what they can achieve today. The client wants consistent and reliable inference response times, with low millisecond latency to examine every transaction for fraud. Telum is designed to help meet such challenging requirements, specifically of running combined transactional and AI workloads at scale.

In today’s IT landscape, it’s not just about the data you have, but how you can leverage it for maximum insight. For this reason, knowing how to utilize AI and having the infrastructure ready made to support it has become the new standard in computing. The first step in becoming future ready starts with Telum.

Source: ibm.com

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Flexible, agile, and secure: modernizing applications with IBM Z

Priorities have changed over the last two years for IT executives. From business as usual to a rapid shift toward digital transformation, the impact of the pandemic cannot be overstated. With this shift to digital in mind, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) surveyed 200 IT executives and discussed changing marketplaces and the role of IT in transformation in “Application Modernization on the Mainframe.”

Read More: C2090-312: IBM DB2 11 DBA for z/OS

Much of this change is attributed to the rise of cloud-based applications. But where does this leave mission-critical mainframe applications? A knee-jerk reaction may be to say the only way forward is to rearchitect IT environments exclusively on the cloud. However, 71 percent of IT executives surveyed say that mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy. These workloads power essential business processes; with 93 percent of companies using the mainframe for financial management and 73 percent for customer transaction systems.

Digital transformation will require workloads to run where they make the most sense, necessitating a hybrid cloud approach. In three years, close to 70 percent of leading organizations expect their operations will include unique configurations of data and computing environments, including on-premise data center, mainframe, private cloud, public cloud, and edge computing.

By embracing a hybrid cloud approach, IT leaders benefit from the stability and security of the mainframe and extract maximum value from cloud investments. To ensure that applications are connected across platforms, it’s important to modernize mainframe applications. Modernizing mission-critical mainframe applications can help transform development culture, enabling adoption of DevOps and other agile practices that promote flexibility and innovation.

Enterprises in the financial services industry, like BNP Paribas, are re-thinking the way that they approach product development by modernizing their mainframe development environment. BNP Paribas deployed an integrated development environment backed by open-source tools. Driving both cost savings and quality development, the modern environment enables more efficient development and testing, which also helps attract new developers. It boosts developer engagement and code quality by offering greater autonomy and tool standardization.

BNP Paribas is just one of many enterprises taking advantage of modern mainframe tools and technology that deliver lower total cost of ownership and increased agility. The IBM Z ecosystem offers innovative solutions that drive enterprise transformation across the globe. The release of IBM z/OS V2.5, the next generation operating system on IBM Z, introduces high performance AI capabilities and new capabilities that support rapid product development on the platform.

Recognizing the need for continual innovation, 86 percent of IT executives say that their organizations need to accelerate digital transformation to stay ahead of changing customer expectations. By modernizing mainframe applications and integrating them with new applications in a hybrid cloud environment, enterprises can develop or maintain a competitive advantage and avoid costly re-architecture plans.

The first step of any modernization journey is to build an iterative plan. To learn more about application modernization on IBM Z, click here

Source: ibm.com

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Red Hat OpenShift’s great momentum on IBM Z and LinuxONE

Open-source innovation for cloud-native development

It’s been said that all great achievements require time. But sometimes, great things are achieved at a relatively fast pace—especially in technology. For example, it’s taken only six years for the Kubernetes project to become the de-facto standard for deploying containers. Kubernetes has matured rapidly in a short period of time thanks to the contributions of thousands of developers and hundreds of companies that remain committed to open-source software.

Kubernetes has advanced even further under the stewardship of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Red Hat’s commitment and contributions to the Kubernetes project over the past six years has contributed to the success of Red Hat OpenShift.

Red Hat OpenShift – Enterprise Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform to build, run, scale and manage containerized applications. Red Hat OpenShift automates the provisioning and management of cloud-native applications and augments Kubernetes capabilities with additional features and a rapidly growing ecosystem of open source-based services and operators.

Red Hat OpenShift has become the platform of choice for thousands of companies and IT organizations around the world for its capabilities, extensibility and constant innovation gained from open-source projects such as Tekton, Knative, CRI-O, Istio, and Grafana, to mention just a few.

Red Hat OpenShift is available for multiple processor architectures including IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE. With Red Hat OpenShift available for IBM Z and LinuxONE since February 2020, IBM has brought together hybrid cloud with the secure, scalable and reliable Z and LinuxONE platforms. And with the latest version—OpenShift 4.8—now available for all supported architectures including IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, Red Hat expands workload possibilities across the hybrid cloud.

Today, most of the major software building blocks needed for developing, deploying and integrating enterprise Red Hat OpenShift applications on IBM Z and LinuxONE are available—from IBM Cloud Paks, to Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, to IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center. 

Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z—market momentum

In parallel, a growing number of clients and service providers such as Blue Barricade are using Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE in order to accelerate digital transformation, co-locate cloud-native applications with system of record data and reduce costs. Listen in to Pascal Meyer from Fiducia & GAD IT AG talk about the value of running Red Hat OpenShift on IBM in this video clip from IBM Think 2021.

Industry-leading software vendors are also enabling their applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on IBM Z and LinuxONE to achieve security, reliability, portability and consistency across the hybrid cloud infrastructures. The ecosystem of applications running on OpenShift is rapidly evolving to help clients gain faster time to market. For example:

➥ Core banking applications like Temenos Transact, Technisys, and Infosys Finacle;

➥ Digital banking engagement applications such as Backbase;

➥ Relationship-based product, pricing and billing applications such as Zafin and SunTec Xelerate;

➥ Payments applications such as Vestigo and Fiorano

➥ And database management applications like Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres

If you’re attending the SHARE Virtual Summit this August, be sure to listen to the IBM keynote on Wednesday—“Infrastructure and Application Modernization on IBM Z with Red Hat OpenShift”—and to the Red Hat breakout session on Thursday— “Top reasons to run Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z.”

To summarize, with the latest Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 release and the large and growing ecosystem of software offerings driven by open-source innovation, IBM now has all the ingredients to allow the IBM Z and LinuxONE users to accelerate their modernization journey. They can do it with Kubernetes, Red Hat and IBM infrastructure, which has always provided the best performance, security, reliability and scalability.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Z Virtual Test Platform takes big stride forward with version 2.0

The growing need for digital transformation has driven organizations to aggressively transform themselves and adopt DevOps to enable accelerated application delivery, which is a key part of the transformation. While it’s great to see the adoption rate growing significantly for DevOps, testing remains a major bottleneck to a continuous software development lifecycle.

Read More: C2090-424: IBM InfoSphere DataStage v11.3

The recent survey results from Gitlab on DevSecOps confirm just that.

“Testing remains tough — for the third year in a row, a majority of survey-takers resoundingly pointed to testing as the area most likely to cause delays. The other bottlenecks include planning, code development, and code review, again reflecting what we’ve seen in our 2019 and 2020 surveys.”

In our continuous and sincere effort to address this issue, last year we announced the general availability of IBM Z® Virtual Test Platform V1.0, which fundamentally changed the game by providing testing capabilities that allow application integration, transaction and batch testing to be shifted earlier in the development cycle on a fully virtualized test platform.

For the first time, developers were able to test complete application integration before the code is even deployed to production while automating testing as part of their build process in a CI/CD pipeline. With this week’s V2.0 release, we have further strengthened the solution, incorporating key feedback from our clients by providing an html-based test results viewer and the ability to effectively version control your test case and results ensuring auditability and pipeline integration.

Further with ZVTP V2.0, we are taking a big stride forward in adding test automation and deep integration testing capabilities with IBM Distribution for Galasa. Based on the open-source project ‘Galasa’, the solution allows you to test applications at scale regardless of platform — including z/OS. Galasa enables deep integration testing across platforms and technologies within a DevOps pipeline. Galasa is designed to support repeatable, reliable, agile testing at scale across your enterprise.

IBM distribution for Galasa is not simply about providing the ability to write a test and run it in automation. It extends that to enable you to understand and manage your tests. This makes it easy to schedule the right tests to run at the right time and Galasa support is provided with VTP.

We will continue to strengthen our testing capabilities and you can look forward to some exciting and new capabilities coming up in our subsequent releases.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM CIO Office integrates IBM Z into the hybrid cloud

In a multi-technology landscape, it is increasingly difficult for companies to choose the path that eases management across the IT landscape. However, it’s a decision worth investing in, as making the right choice can enable a better user experience.

Many organizations today face challenges with their core IT infrastructure:

◉ Complexity and stability: An environment might have years of history and might be evaluated as too complex to maintain or update. Problems with system stability can impact operations and be considered a high risk for the business.

◉ Workforce challenges: Many data center teams are anticipating a skills shortage for some platforms within the next few years due to a retiring and declining workforce.

◉ Total cost of ownership: Some infrastructure solutions are evaluated as too expensive, and it’s not always easy to balance up-front costs with the lifecycle cost and benefits.

Trying to solve these challenges, IT organizations of all sizes have been investing heavily in a move to the cloud over the last few years. Many of them had been finding out that the usage of open and industry-standard APIs is very helpful.

Embracing a hybrid cloud approach that is based on open industry standards is better than opting for a platform-specific strategy. The IBM CIO Office determined the best approach for their needs and realized significant benefits, such as improving efficiency, agility and overall economics.

IBM Z is providing constant business value

“Our IBM Z® systems are still the high-performance, ultra-stable platform that our organization has relied on to support huge numbers of transactions for years and the assets running on these systems provide valuable content. That’s why it’s important for our organization that we include the IBM Z systems into our user portal,” says Eric Everson Mendes Marins, PCS_ZVM squad at IBM CIO Office. “We had been using a traditional IT operations model with individual management pillars for the infrastructure components. With that model it was hard and complex to manage the infrastructure assets across the multiple platforms. We had to develop scripts, and some administrator tasks had to be done manually. But what many people might not know is that IBM Z can be integrated seamlessly into an open hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.”

Creating a cloud provisioning portal for improved user experience

The CIO Office is helping its users to realize the potential of IBM Z, as well as the potential of IBM Power and x86 technology, demonstrating its power as part of an open hybrid cloud IT strategy.

“We aim to offer easy access and handling for our users—which means creating a portal for our cloud services that provide the access to our hybrid cloud IT environment,” explains Marins.

As part of the consolidation of the IT environment, the transition from the traditional IT operations model to a cloud operations model was implemented. For the integration of the multiple platforms into one cloud provisioning portal, the CIO Office wanted to use open standards and decided to use OpenStack APIs.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center provides an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer for IBM Z, enabling virtual machines to be provisioned and managed and the automation of services, and providing a platform for building higher-level cloud services.

Cloud Infrastructure Center helps to meet the demands of hybrid cloud strategy. It provides a ready-to-use solution for a consistent user experience with its integration capabilities to cloud management tools and with built-in OpenStack-compatible APIs to provision and orchestrate cloud workloads.

Its integration capability increased flexibility and improved efficiency at the CIO Office with a common skillset, simplifying the IBM z/VM-based virtual machine lifecycle management on IBM Z and providing unified cloud provisioning.

The entire setup of Cloud Infrastructure Center was done very quickly, in a few steps, and supports the CIO Office to reduce the costs and complexity in managing a hybrid cloud environment.

“IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center allows us to substantially improve our infrastructure management and reduce cost and complexity to manage from simple to complex environments,” says Marins.

The main values of integrating IBM Z into the hybrid cloud approach are increased business acceleration, higher developer productivity, increased infrastructure efficiency, improved risk and compliance management and long-term strategic flexibility.

Source: ibm.com

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Announcing Anaconda for Linux on IBM Z & LinuxONE

A clear trend is emerging in the era of hybrid cloud: winning enterprises will likely pull ahead by scaling the value of their data with AI.

For many IBM Z® & IBM LinuxONE customers, the enterprise platform often serves as the system of record for their mission-critical data and applications. Data scientists often look for open-source solutions, and we are committed to embracing and bringing open-source AI capabilities to Z and LinuxONE that can support real-time AI decision-making at scale.

Today, IBM and Anaconda, provider of the leading Python data science platform, are announcing the general availability of Anaconda for IBM Linux on Z & LinuxONE. Anaconda on Linux on Z & LinuxONE is the latest step toward bringing popular data science frameworks and libraries to these enterprise platforms, providing a consistent data science user experience across the hybrid cloud.

Data scientists who already know and love Anaconda can now expand their open-source data science experience to include IBM Z & LinuxONE, while continuing to work with their favorite tools and frameworks like conda, XGBoost and SciKit-Learn. This expands and enables choice in AI frameworks and tooling for end-to-end data science directly on the platform, including development, training, testing and production. Data scientists can benefit from the security capabilities, high availability and scalability of the IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms when implementing AI deployments targeting time-sensitive workloads or transactions when they are taking place. Anaconda runs natively on Linux on IBM Z, and through z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) on z/OS, the solution brings open-source data science tools close to key workloads, leveraging the data gravity of the Z and LinuxONE platforms.

According to new research commissioned by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, 90% of respondents said that being able to build and run AI projects wherever their data resides is important. Workloads running on IBM Z & LinuxONE often need to adhere to strict latency and SLA requirements to support transactions that are key to our modern life such as online purchases. With Anaconda for Linux on Z & LinuxONE, organizations can perform AI analysis in close proximity to their data, addressing latency to deliver insights where and when they are needed.

Customers can start using Anaconda Individual Edition and Anaconda Commercial Edition today by downloading the Individual Edition or Miniconda installer, and following the associated installation documentation:

Individual Edition

Miniconda

Source: ibm.com

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It is time for serverless computing on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE

If you have been around the software industry long enough, you have seen architectural changes and new computing paradigms from time to time. From monolithic to client-server architectures, and from web applications to containerized cloud-native applications, we see a constant evolution with more software available thanks to the proliferation of open source software.  

Serverless computing advances

Driven by open source technologies, serverless computing is a computing paradigm that has been around for a few years, and all public cloud vendors, including IBM Cloud, offer the service. Serverless computing typically refers to the approach of building and running applications hosted by a third party, but unlike with cloud computing, you do not manage the infrastructure. 

The hosting of serverless applications is only part of this new computing paradigm. The most important aspect is the model of breaking up applications into individual functions that can be individually invoked and scaled. This more finely grained development and deployment model allows for applications to have one or many functions that can be executed and scaled up or down on demand. 

Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Serverless

Today we are announcing that you can now build and deploy serverless computing on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless. This new offering is available as a no-charge add-on to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.  

One of the most complete open source projects for serverless computing is Knative, a platform that provides components to build and run serverless container-based applications on Kubernetes. Yes, you can create container-based applications broken into functions to run on stateless containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. 

Red Hat OpenShift Serverless is based on the Knative project and runs on an OpenShift cluster. Capabilities include Knative Serving, Knative Eventing, and Knative CLI. You can deploy serverless applications in practically any programming language and enable auto-scaling to scale up to meet demand or scale down to zero when not in use. You can invoke serverless functions using plain HTTP requests following CloudEvents specification. You can also trigger serverless containers from a growing number of event sources, and it comes with out-of-the-box project templates to jumpstart your code. 

As is customary, software developers from IBM and Red Hat contribute upstream to open-source projects including all Knative components, and they continue to enhance functionality and ensure everything works smoothly in the s390x architecture for IBM Z and LinuxONE. 

This is a significant new capability for all those Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE deployments in the largest and most important enterprises in the world. You now have the option to migrate applications or to build new applications based on individual functions while combining both containers and serverless functionality.   

Serverless computing is well-suited for parallel processing, event-driven, streams and message queues. Most applications with large volumes of transactions, including AI-related ones such as Monte Carlo simulations, database updates and event processing of data with small payloads (such as the IoT) are ideal for serverless computing. Moreover, unlike function-as-a-service offerings, with your Z or LinuxONE, you do not trade control and visibility of your infrastructure when you are doing “serverless.” 

To summarize, you now have the opportunity to develop applications based on functions with discrete units of code for event-based execution. This will bring development velocity and rapid benefits to the business. 

Try a new computing paradigm on IBM Z and LinuxONE and stay tuned for more OpenShift add-ons, support for more event types, and more great technology powered by open-source innovation available to you in integrated and easy-to-deploy supported packages.

Source: ibm.com

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Hybrid cloud strategy requires on premises consideration

Cloud computing continues to grab all the headlines, but on-premises IT infrastructure remains vitally important and will continue to be well into the future. Even as they move workload to the cloud, most organizations plan to increase investments in their on-premises computing infrastructure.

Although these assertions have long been my opinion, they are also backed up by research. IBM recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey IT decision-makers on their hybrid cloud strategy. You can read the insights obtained in the Forrester Consulting study: The Key to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategy for yourself by downloading it here.

A perhaps unexpected reality is being exposed as organizations trek toward the cloud. And that is that the lowest cost option is not always moving workload to the cloud. Indeed, incorporating existing infrastructure into a hybrid strategy can reduce overall IT costs because it minimizes the need for specialized skills and improves productivity.

Most executives are looking to improve speed and agility as they adopt and embrace agile development and DevOps management into their organization. Adopting a standard toolchain that works across your enterprise for both cloud and on-premises workloads is the smart strategy.

Such an approach can help to assure that your organization does not fall prey to the pitfalls outlined in the Forrester study, where lack of reinvestment can expose your firm to issues such as:

◉ Security vulnerabilities

◉ Higher costs

◉ Compatibility restrictions

◉ Diminished performance

In 2021 we are still reeling from dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and surely the Forrester study recognizes this fact, but your hybrid cloud strategy needs to be more far-reaching. Cloud adoption is not just a reaction to the work from home requirement imposed on the world by the pandemic. The cloud was growing well before 2019! And we need to be aware that post-pandemic will require a “new normal” that requires a solid hybrid cloud strategy in order to succeed.

So, don’t forget the “hybrid” part of your “cloud” strategy. And as I’ve said before, don’t let cloud exuberance stop other IT infrastructure investments! As organizations move to a hybrid enterprise cloud infrastructure, keeping up to date with technology refreshes is more important than ever before to assure cost-effective, efficient IT. This means continuing to invest in, and keep pace with, upgrades to your existing IT infrastructure. Reasons that on-premises computing will continue to thrive include:

◉ Data residency

◉ Data gravity

◉ Existing on premises capacity

◉ Security and compliance requirements

The Forrester study reports that a vast majority of respondents stated that delaying on-premises infrastructure upgrades in the past five years resulted in negative repercussions. That makes absolute sense to me, and it should to you, too! Especially if you rely on IBM Z for your mission-critical work. And if you’ve ever booked a flight, accessed your bank account using an ATM, or used a credit card to buy something, then you’ve relied on an IBM Z mainframe. The IBM Z platform runs the world’s economy and all of the workload is not going to be moved to the cloud any time soon.

So, don’t waste any time creating your hybrid cloud strategy . . . and discover additional insights along the way!

Source: ibm.com

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Empowering a new generation of IBM Z developers

Every day, billions of transactions occur online. Many of them are processed by a mainframe. The mainframe has proven to be an integral part of the world’s economy, enabling global financial, medical and retail institutions to drive their businesses forward. And the platform continues to evolve with open standards and support of modern developer languages, toolchains, and management practices.

Cultural and social changes are driving digital transformations, opening up opportunities for more roles in IT infrastructure. In a recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Deloitte, most companies view their mainframe as a strategic component to hybrid cloud environments and 91% of the business interviewed identified expanding mainframe footprints as a moderate/critical priority in the next 12 months.  These new roles and opportunities in IT Infrastructure are being filled by a new generation of computing talent.

Here at IBM we are committed to inspiring, educating and supporting new generations as they begin their computing careers. Recently, IBM wrapped up the 16th annual Master the Mainframe competition. Twelve winners emerged from high school and university students competing across the globe in a “coding obstacle course” with three levels of challenges. The coding challenges offered participants a chance to use and build skills in VS Code, Zowe, Python, JCL, REXX, and COBOL. And it was all completed on the mainframe—a platform new to many students but leveraging a suite of developer tools consistent with current computer science curriculums.

“The mainframe really has a huge impact on your life,” said Melissa Christie, a North America regional winner. “It’s a hidden entity that controls a large number of things in your day to day, from medical records to transactions. It’s really interesting that this thing that we have in our society does everything, but most people don’t even know about it.”

The mainframe continues to be a highly secure, resilient and reliable platform for mission-critical applications. Today, enterprises are optimizing these applications for hybrid, multicloud environments, while maintaining stability, security and agility. IBM Z allows developers to have control over the full life cycle of application development, no matter where the application is running. And new developers are taking notice. Pierre Jacquet, a 2020 Master the Mainframe Grand Prize winner, said one of the highlights of the contest was the ability to work with multiple coding languages.

“I mainly learned about the new development environment for the mainframe,” said Jacquet. “Discovering the development environment with Zowe was really cool and was a way to be more agile to facilitate development. I was quite impressed by the smoothness of the tools.”

For enterprises to continue successful digital transformations, there needs to be a talent pool familiar with the platform and who have been exposed to career roles within the Z environment. The entire Z community is teaming to bring these opportunities to students and the future workforce. M&T Bank recently shared their transformation story with CIO.com, focused on their collaboration with IBM and investment in the future workforce.

For employers looking to fill IT roles, IBM created Talent Match, an online platform that enables employers to find skilled workers. There are additional employer resources available on the IBM Z Employer Hub. While the student competition is over, the Master the Mainframe remains open to the public as a learning platform year-round for anyone interested in developing their skills to prepare for an enterprise computing career. Students can continue learning and networking at the IBM Z Global Student Hub and explore all of the IBM Z education initiatives.

Source: ibm.com

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Expanding our DevOps portfolio with GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks

In the era of hybrid cloud, our clients are facing constant pressure to adapt to and adopt new models for application development and IT consumption in order to unlock the speed and agility of hybrid cloud. With even tighter budgets and more pressure to transform given the impact of our new normal, there is no better time to reimagine the way mission-critical workloads run on IBM Z.

Many clients such as State Farm, RBC and BNP Paribas have benefited by adopting DevOps on IBM Z which allows them to unlock new potential for increased speed and agility, directly influencing their digital transformation initiatives. Clients are able to leverage their investments in and the strength of their existing IT infrastructure, clouds and applications in a seamless way with people, platforms and experience they already have on hand.

Over the past year, IBM Z has taken significant strides to bring new DevOps tools to the platform, with seamless hybrid application development including IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces and Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, as well as a series of new hybrid cloud container offerings for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Today IBM announced GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks, expanding our DevOps offerings across the business allowing clients to get a comprehensive solution with a DevOps toolchain for modernization.  This is another significant milestone for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE clients, bringing even more choice with cloud-native development on IBM Z.

This is a significant step forward for IBM Z clients and is designed to unlock their software innovations by reducing the cycle time between having an idea, seeing it in production and monitoring it to ensure optimal performance. It provides an innovative, open and hybrid solution for DevOps.

With GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks, developers will be able to compose their DevOps solution using GitLab, write in any language they want and deploy it in any hybrid cloud environment they choose. Developers will also be able to take advantage of GitOps and GitLab’s orchestration automation technology, which can be used in conjunction with GitLab pipelines.

Source: ibm.com

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Leveraging AI on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE for accelerated insights

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a profoundly transformative technology because of its broad applicability to many use cases. It already impacts our personal lives, and it is changing the way we work and do business. In this blog we’ll examine AI and its role for clients running IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE workloads. We will cover principles of the IBM Z AI strategy and developments underway around IBM Z’s role as a world-class inference platform. We are developing a blog series to describe key elements of AI on IBM Z and how clients can tap into these capabilities for their next-generation AI applications.

Our mission is to provide a comprehensive and consumable AI experience for operationalizing AI on Z, and this includes the goal of building inference capabilities directly into the platform. Following the IBM AI ladder inference is part of the Analyze/Infuse rungs. Inference refers to the point when a model is deployed for production and is used by the application to make business predictions.

IBM’s design goal is to enable low latency inference for time-sensitive work such as in-transaction inference and other real-time or near-real-time workloads. One example is fraud detection; for banks and financial markets, accurate detection of fraud can result in significant savings. IBM is architecting optimizations in software and hardware to meet these low latency goals and to enable clients to integrate AI tightly with IBM Z data and core business applications that reside on Z. These technologies are designed to enable clients to embed AI in their applications with minimal application changes.

Target use cases include time sensitive cases with high transaction volumes and complex models, typically requiring deep learning. In these transactional use cases, a main objective is to reduce latency for faster response time, delivering inference results back to the caller at a high volume and speed.

Train anywhere and deploy on Z

IBM recognizes that the AI training landscape is quite different from the inference one. Training is the playground of data scientists who are focused on improving model accuracy. Data scientists use platforms that may be ideal for training but are not necessarily efficient for deploying models. Our approach enables clients to build and train models on the platform of their choice (including on premises or Z in a hybrid cloud), leveraging any investments they have made. They can then deploy those models to an environment that has transactional and data affinity to the use case – such as transactional processing on Z. That is the heart of our “train anywhere, deploy on Z” strategy.

To enable this strategy, IBM is architecting solutions to enable model portability to Z without requiring additional development efforts for deployment. We are investing in ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) technology, a standard format for representing AI models allowing a data scientist to build and train a model in the framework of choice without worrying about the downstream inference implications. To enable deployment of ONNX models, we provide an ONNX model compiler that is optimized for IBM Z. In addition to this, we are optimizing key open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow (and TensorFlow Serving) for use on IBM Z.

To summarize, our mission is to enable clients to easily deploy AI workloads on IBM Z and LinuxONE in order to deliver faster business insights while driving more value to the business. We are enhancing IBM Z as a world-class inference platform. We aim to help clients accelerate deployment of AI on Z by investing in seamless model portability, in integration of AI into Z workloads, and in operationalizing AI with industry leading solutions such as IBM Cloud Pak for Data for more flexibility and choice in hybrid cloud deployments. We will explore several AI technologies in future blog posts around open source, ONNX, and TensorFlow, Cloud Pak for Data and more.

Source: ibm.com

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How to win at application modernization on IBM Z

If you want to create new user experiences, improve development processes and unlock business opportunities, modernizing your existing enterprise applications is an important next step in your IT strategy. Application modernization can ease your overall transition to a hybrid cloud environment by introducing the flexibility to develop and run applications in the environment you choose. (If you haven’t already done so, check out our field guide to application modernization, where we’ve outlined some of the most common modernization approaches.)

Whether you’re focusing more on traditional enterprise applications or cloud-native applications, you’ll want to make sure that you are fully leveraging hybrid cloud management capabilities and DevOps automation pipelines for app deployment, configuration and updates.

With a cloud-native approach to modernization, your developers can take advantage of a microservice-based architecture. They can leverage containers and a corresponding container orchestration platform (such as Kubernetes and Red Hat® OpenShift®) to develop once and run applications anywhere — including on premises in your data center or off premises in one or more public clouds.

The benefits of modernizing on an enterprise hybrid cloud platform

At every stage of modernization, you can minimize risk and complexity by working from a platform that lets you develop, run and manage apps and workloads in a consistent way across a hybrid cloud environment. This will help ensure that everything on the app is done in a reliable, repeatable and secure manner, and it will help you to remove barriers to productivity and integration.

To that end, consider working from IBM Z® or IBM LinuxONE as your primary platform for application modernization. On either of these platforms you can continue running your existing apps while connecting them with new cloud-native applications at your own rate and pace, reducing risk and expense. You will also be able to leverage the inherent performance, reliability and security of the platform as you modernize your technology stack. They also provide a foundation for modern container-based apps (for example: web and middleware, cloud and DevOps, modern programming languages and runtimes, databases, analytics and monitoring).

Flexible, efficient utilization. IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE provide three approaches to virtualization to manage spikes and support more workloads per server with: IBM Logical Partitions, IBM z/VM®, and KVM. The advanced capabilities of these hypervisors contribute to the foundation of the typically high utilization achieved by IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.

More performance from software with fewer servers. Enable 2.3x more containers per core on an IBM z15 LPAR compared to a bare metal1 x86 platform running an identical web server load, and co-locate cloud-native apps with z/OS and Linux virtual machine-based apps and enterprise data to exploit low-latency API connections to business-critical data. This translates into having to use fewer IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE cores to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms.

Co-location of cloud-native applications and mission-critical data. IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE house your enterprise’s mission-critical data. Running Red Hat OpenShift in logical partition adjacent to your z/OS® partitions provides low-latency secure communication to your enterprise data via IBM z/OS Cloud Broker. This provides superior performance due to fewer network hops. It also allows for highly secure communication between your new cloud-native apps and your enterprise data stores since network traffic never has to leave the physical server.

Proven security and resiliency. Utilize the most reliable mainstream server platform — with the only hypervisor among its major competitors — that is certified at the highest level of EAL5+.

Source: ibm.com

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Taiyo Life innovates with IBM Z Automatic Binary Optimizer

Taiyo Life Insurance, established in 1893 with over 120 years in the business, entrusts its IT services to T&D Information Systems. Unlike other major life insurance companies, Taiyo Life Insurance provides insurance for family members in each individual household through personalized consulting services. A sales representative visits the customer and designs an optimized insurance plan by identifying insufficient protections within the current insurance plan.

Enhancing customer experience

Taiyo Life Insurance updated their insurance contract supporting system in 2012 achieving completely paperless procedures. This enabled sales representatives to sign onto their mobile devices to complete applications of insurance contracts which, until then, had been done manually. Mobile devices were further enhanced in 2018 and are currently used as “Taiyo Life Concierges”. Taiyo Life Concierge enables sales representatives to respond to various requests from customers immediately through a variety of new features, delivering convenience for customers and an evolution of its services.

Read More: C2070-981: IBM FileNet Content Manager V5.2

To realize the benefits of this innovative system, the IT infrastructure and tools supporting the core of the business require top performance. For a long time, Taiyo Life Insurance has relied on IBM Z, featuring high availability and processing performance, as a foundation for its core business applications.

Taiyo Life Insurance recently upgraded our production environment to IBM z14. This time, to realize the new features of Taiyo Life Concierge, we needed to optimize about 3,000 actuarial calculation modules using the IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS(ABO).  These modules, which calculate insurance premiums, would then be able to take advantage of ABO performance and enhanced response time of Taiyo Life Concierge improvements on the IBM z14. The actuarial calculation modules were developed by T&D Information System using Enterprise COBOL V3R4. We decided to introduce ABO since the development period is limited and wanted to avoid the costs and complexities of re-compiling all the actuarial calculation modules using the latest COBOL compilers.

Unleashing the power of IBM Z with ABO

After initial testing, we applied IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS to the 3,000 actuarial calculation modules. As a result, we obtained about a 20 percent CPU time reduction on z14. This greatly improved the response time of Taiyo Life Concierge for our customers, and was better than our expectations.

By using ABO and IBM z14, we have improved the efficiency of resources used in the production environment, and enhanced delivery of services to our clients through improved response time.

We anticipate continued performance improvement for scalability through the evolution of the IBM Z architecture in conjunction with ABO.

Source: ibm.com

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