Mainframe revival continues: report from System z Technical Conference

I registered early this morning at IBM System z Technical conference 2009 in Brussels. As I already attended last year, I was very keen to discover how IBM progressed in its strategy for system z.

After general usage recommendations for the week, I get very enthusiastic at half past 9, when Mark Anzani - IBM System z platform Vice President - talked about progress of system z in 2008: 54 new system z customers in the world, of which 22 bought it for z/Linux -- meaning 1300 system z customers using z/Linux.

In 2008, 537 schools in the world are training 50000 students to system z technologies compared to 24 schools in 2003. The IBM strategy for system z started in 2003  and it is now clear that IBM has dthis plan strongly, unerringly, (with no doubts nor hesitations) in order to reinforce and rejuvenate mainframe market thanks to the "mainframe consolidation" concept. IBM will not leave the mainframe dying off; it's now sure. Strengthened by this idea while building my training agenda, I decided to focus on z/VM and z/Linux conferences and labs for this first day. 

The first conference I attended was on z/VM basics. I discovered how z/VM which is a concept launched with Mainframe in 1960's  would be now able to answer to the "dynamic strategy" for System z envisioned by IBM.  z/VM is the base technology to consolidate on system z, "dynamic" technologies under Linux.

At 1.30 after a quick lunch, I observed in the common hall a few changes from last year: some attendees coming from Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. A few IBMers from India. On the other hand, as last year, Jean-Michel Rodriguez from IBM Montpellier is here to present again the "Green data center" which became a reality with first production workload.

Tomorrow I will try to retrieve more informations and photos on this subject as well as the link to the demonstration in "Second life."

According to Mark Anzani this morning we are faced with physical limits with CPUs; that means that chip performance will not increase as it has for the past 20 years. Mark said we must now search for performance and then cost savings everywhere in software with better workload management, resource sharing,  as well as better cooling for energy savings. I suppose that many RSD system Z customers would be interested in knowing how with a particular disposition of hardware in the room you can save money.

To be continue after day 2...