Are you ready to turn off your mainframes? If so, then these next two columns will tell you
how one company did so.
The notion of turning off your mainframe computers is somewhere between romantic and
impossible, depending upon whom you talk to you. Our estemeed editor-in-chief gave an
actual date (this month) when the last mainframe would be shut off -- that is the romance part
-- while I am convinced that there will always be room for mainframes in corporate America,
somewhere.
The company that I visited is Edison Electric Institute, (EEI) the trade association that
represents US investor-owned electric utilities. They are located in downtown Washington DC
and had -- until recently -- a single IBM mainframe computer running their business.
At the core of any trade association are lists: "We are constantly putting on conferences,
mailing things, and updating records of people in our member's companies," said Jon Arnold,
the IS director at EEI. EEI publishes over 200 different handbooks, conducts training
seminars, works closely with more than 4,800 member-company representatives on
committees covering every aspect of electricity generation, transmission and distribution.
EEI had originally purchased a 4331 about 12 years ago. "At the time, we were spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars with an outsourcing company -- only back then we called
them remote job entry sites," said Jeff Kirstein, one of Arnold's managers. "We had written
all sorts of applications in COBOL and everything was charged back to the end user."
EEI decided to buy their own mainframe and began to write what would end up being a core
of six different applications, most of them written in SAS: a list management routine that had
over 70,000 names on over a thousand different lists, a meeting registration package to keep
track of hotels, courses, and other details needed for the various conferences the trade
association put on each year, a financial tracking package, a package to keep track of the
several hundred publications and periodicals that EEI subscribed to, and a committee
membership tracking system.
SAS was flexible, to be sure. "But it was also a hog, and as a statistical package it was poor
at generating business reports, but once we got the hang of it, it worked fine for our
purposes," said Kirstein.
The mainframe-based applications "got the job done," said Jim Coughlin, a programmer
analyst at EEI. "We had setup our mainframe to make it easier for each user to maintain their
own lists -- every mainframe logon ID was tied to a particular virtual machine and memory
space. However, the mainframe systems were fairly crude: each time a user opened a list it
would take time to resort and there was minimal error trapping during data entry." One plus
for the mainframe was that "we didn't have to spend a lot of time running the machine," said
Arnold. Using IBM's VM operating system, Arnold had one system operator and an assistant
to do routine maintenance and backups.
But the annual fixed costs were high, and when EEI moved four years ago into a new
building in downtown DC they began to deploy LAN-based technologies. At the time of the
move they began thinking about turning off their mainframe. However, they had to manage
the transition slowly:
"First off, my predecessor signed a five-year lease with IBM shortly before I came on board,"
said Arnold. That lease, along with the montly software maintenance charges for the various
applications and system software, ran to about a quarter of a million dollars a year. Breaking
the lease early would have been costly, so EEI decided to start planning on turning the
mainframe off when the lease expired in February, 1995.
Secondly, they needed to find other tools besides SAS that would run their applications on the
PC. More on what they picked next week.
Third, they had to populate their desktops with PCs rather than terminals. They began to do
this when they moved into their new building, first buying IBM PS/2 model 50s. Now EEI
buys Dell Pentiums exclusively. All of the desktops are networked together with two NetWare
3.11 servers, and run a standard suite of office applications including Word Perfect
GroupWise and word processing, Lotus 1-2-3 and Windows.
Fourth, they had to retrain their end-users. This was perhaps the most difficult part of the
process, and is still on-going.
I've seen lots of training efforts, but my hat is off to EEI's IS crew: they have the right mix of
pluck, enthusiasm, and end-user motivations to make things work.
The IS staff raffles off a used model 50 for $50 at a series of informal seminars ("You have
to be present to win," said Arnold). And "we also kept a list of people who didn't get trained,
and they don't get access to the new applications on the LAN," said Jeanny Shu Lu, another
IS manager at EEI. Finally, the applications developers in IS held a series of weekly
brown-bag lunches with their end-users, and solicited suggestions for changes. These would
be implemented if there was a group consensus.
Next week, I'll describe when their mainframe bit the dust.
col 16
I turned off my first mainframe at 1:11 pm on March 2nd, 1995 in the shadow of the building
where the original Declaration of Independence is kept. Somewhat fitting, but somewhat sad.
I was at the offices of the Edison Electric Institute, (EEI) who happen to be located across the
street from the National Archives in downtown DC.
When I first spoke to Jon Arnold (the IS director at EEI) last year about doing this, I was
somewhat psyched: after all, I had been using mainframes for about 15 years and had never
been in the position of actually being able to flip the big red switch (a little bigger than the
ones on the back of your PCs, but not by much) off before. However, when the time came to
do the deed on March 2nd, my feelings had changed somewhat: more of a mixture of bathos
and regret.
IBM mainframes were perhaps responsible for my first job in trade computer publishing in
1986: back then I was deeply involved in DISOSS (now called OfficeVision and almost
forgotten), 3270 gateways, and could even tell the difference between IBM's Enhanced
Connectivity Facilities and Distributed Data Management. So much of that knowledge seems
largely irrelevant now.
The mainframe I was ending was a small one: an IBM 4381 model 13. It had, at the end of
its lifetime, a wopping 16 megabytes of memory and 7.5 gigabytes of disk storage -- DASD
to you old-line IBMers. Since this may be one of the last times you see this acronym, it
stands for Direct Access Storage Device. It was running VM, which stands for Virtual
Machine, as its operating system. And since it cost over a quarter of a million dollars
annually to run, it had reached the end of its cost-effective life. It was replaced by two
NetWare file servers, one of which had more RAM and disk than the 4381 had. The network
was token ring, reflecting the IBM heritage of EEI and the utility industry it represents. EEI
took existing SAS and COBOL applications running on VM and rewrote them in Magic and
Btrieve on the LAN.
Magic is an Israeli-based software development company (Magic Software Enterprises, Inc.
has offices in Irvine, Calif.) that provides tools to build screens and assemble database
applications that can run on a variety of back-end database servers. One of the reasons EEI
began using it was they had a contractor who began to build applications using it. "However,
they never finished the work and we had to take it over," said Jim Coughlin, the chief Magic
programmer at EEI. "It is a wonderful rapid application development language, and easy to
make changes."
The combination of the two products is very solid, according to EEI's developers and
end-users. "We've had no data corruption issues, no performance problems at all," said Jeff
Kirstein, an IS manager at EEI. "We had tried other products, such as writting X-Base
applications in Clipper, but that was a mess."
The Magic-based applications took less time to write than SAS. For example, rewriting their
meeting registration package took two months, about half the time the equivalent SAS
application required.
And the new LAN-based applications allowed EEI to improve service to their members, avoid
duplicate mailings, and increase the quality of their databases. "We forced more cooperation
among our end-users since now one person owns the name while another owns the address,"
said Kirstein. "We've added lots of user-requested capabilities to our list management
software, but we've also managed to keep it centralized," said Arnold.
Getting rid of a mainframe, even a small one like this 4381, isn't simple of course. It took
EEI several years to migrate towards this LAN-centric computing environment and to rewrite
their applications on PC platforms. And then they still had to pay several thousand dollars to
have someone cart the 4381 off their premises. (Their original lease, written five years ago,
stipulated that EEI would be responsible for shipping charges.)
So in the end, the machine had a negative salvage value to EEI. They managed to make a
few hundred bucks, though, on a pair of 3174/3274 controllers that someone wanted to
purchase. Ironic, though, that the communications hardware (which was even older technology
than the 4381 itself) would prove to be worth more and outlive the actual beast itself.
Turning it off was relatively easy: I typed in "SHUTDOWN" at the systems console
(forgetting for a moment where the "ENTER" key is on the 3270-style keyboard), waited a
few minutes, and then hit the off switch on several components, including a tape drive and
CPU unit. Ironically, the cabinet of this mainframe was red: perhaps EEI knew they were
going to replace the mainframe with a NetWare network long ago? The hardest part was
remembering the command to turn off forever their 3270 gateway, which was a piece of
software so old from Novell that it was no longer was supported or manufactured (why
upgrade something that you eventually will retire?).
What made the moment of shutdown a sad one was that I was standing admist people who
had seen the 4381 first come in the door at EEI, and who had spent a large portion of their
careers in the care and feeding of the machine. And like myself, they had lots of knowledge
about mainframes that won't do them much good these days.
But not everything was shut off: their computer room now had several Intel-based machines,
including a Tricord server running NetWare and various other PCs running email and
communications programs. Even with all these machines running, "It is going to be pretty
quiet in our computer room," said Kirstein.
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David Strom
Port Washington, NY 11050 USA
US TEL: 1 (516) 944-3407