ASG announces automated mainframe scripting cloud service #CIOAngle
While mainframes seldom get much press or public attention, they are, as Wikibon Principal Contributor Jeff Kelly wrote in his recent Professional Alert, still working away dependably at the heart of many enterprises, running core transactional applications. But companies depending on big iron to run their businesses are facing a staffing crisis. The old time mainframers are reaching retirement age, and very few younger peers are coming along with either skills or interest in working on what is largely regarded as a legacy hardware platform. Mainframes today are highly automated, but some tasks such as provisioning new users and new LPARS, still require human intervention. As staffs shrink, CIOs are worried that they may have to migrate off what is a highly dependable, economic platform for large vertical compute loads. And while IBM tries to promote System z as a platform for private clouds and other new applications, potential customers are often hesitant to expand their mainframe footprint out of staffing concerns.
Today software company ASG has announced a unique new Internet service, CloudFactory for the Mainframe (CloudFactory/MF), designed to alleviate this problem by allowing non-mainframe IT staff and even non-technical business employees to accomplish many of these routine mainframe tasks easily in minutes. Essentially CloudFactory/MF is a script library containing scripts developed by experts by ASG to do routine mainframe management tasks, combined with an execution engine (CloudRobot) with a user-friendly natural language front-end. The user selects the required action (e.g., “add new user”), enters the details (name, password, user security profile), and taps the execute button. CloudRobot activates the correct script and does the rest. The status of each action in progress is reported back to each user through CloudFactory from the mainframe. Technical intervention is only required in the event of a fault.
What is ASG?
ASG is a 25-year-old software company that, says Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager Tom Ahlemeyer, can claim 70 percent of global 500 organizations among its customers and roughly 12,000 employees distributed across 80 offices worldwide. It started as a mainframe software provider, and that still accounts for a large fraction of its income. Ironically, however, CloudFactory/MF came out of its cloud services area and was originally developed to help customers manage servers and distributed systems. One of its major use cases, for instance, is automating lifecycle management for the hundreds of Windows application servers that fill the floors of many large data centers.
Soon after deploying CloudFactory last year, however, a team of senior people led by ASG founder and CEO Arthur L. Allen, created a demo of CloudFactory/MF for a major European-based worldwide bank that has a large mainframe installation. When they demonstrated the ease with which a normal mainframe task could be accomplished, the customer’s IT team said they had never seen anything as well integrated and easy to use. They admitted that they had developed an internal tool to do something similar strictly for provisioning LPARS. Based on the excitement of this customer, Allen put a team together to start developing scripts and templates for CloudFactory/MF. Five months later, ASG is introducing it in North America. During the five-month development stage, ASG talked to other mainframe customers, independent analysts and IBM, none of which had encountered an application or cloud service remotely similar.
The heart of the product is the script library, and while it covers many common mainframe management tasks today, Ahlemeyer admits that it is not completely mature. ASG spent three years developing the scripts and templates for the distributed systems version, and “we didn’t want to wait three years to complete the scripts for CloudFactory/MF,” he said. ASG hopes to create an open community of mainframe experts among its customers to contribute their scripts and is talking with IBM’s System z group in hopes that it can partner with IBM to make scripts for new tasks, such as those associated with running private clouds on System z, available.
CloudFactory/MF is a no brainer for companies who depend on IBM mainframes for vital systems or who are looking at System z to run private or hybrid clouds. It does not eliminate the need for mainframe staff, but it will allow companies to capture the knowledge of their existing staff members and, as those individuals retire or otherwise move on, continue to operate their mainframes confidently while minimizing reliance on outside consultants to major tasks.
Graphics courtesy ASG
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