Announcement of IMS 13 and some extra info

Yesterday IBM announced IMS 13 : 'IBM Information Management System (IMS) 13 Transaction and Database Servers delivers high performance and low total cost of ownership (ZP13-0485)' and various IMS Tools like e.g. IMS Enterprise Suite for z/OS , V3.1 : 'IBM IMS Tools enhanced to help better manage your IMS database environments (ZP13-0478)'.

The one thing that gets a lot of attention is the 100,000 transactions per second benchmarked for Fast Path processing. And if you want a short summary of all what's new, then take a look at the 'What's New' tab over here at the IBM IMS pages. Do take a look at the features tab too, because there's some interesting news on pricing as well :

IMS 13 helps lower the Total Cost of Ownership. With IMS, you can expect:

• Cost-effective zIIP solutions for some IMS workloads that lower CPU consumption by up to 15%
• Up to 62% CPU time savings for Java Applications
• Savings on network support
• Lower operating costs through exploitation of z/OS and System z
• Superior environmental efficiency in power, cooling, and space

As I already told you in my previous post, IMS claims to step up in the same way as DB2 did already. It should consume less resources/mips (out of the box) and still deliver a much better performance. By the way, I mentioned that DB2 was celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, but did you also know that IMS turned 45 (!) this year.

IMS 13 becomes available on October 25, 2013 and requires at least z/OS 1.13.

While I was browsing around I also came across some interesting IMS resources.
I mentioned the IMS Newsletter quite some time ago, but the latest issue came out yesterday and also focuses of course on the new IMS 13 release. You can find it over here. One article gives more detail on how IMS 13 efficiency is improved to reduce MIPS usage. You can subscribe to the newsletter at this page.
And if you're on twitter, you can also follow @IBM_IMS to get all the breaking news on IMS. And while you're at it, just start following Helene Lyon as well : @HeleneLyon.

Consultancy Puts IBM’s TCO Claims to the Test

As if to emphasize my final note of last year, Stephen Swoyer of Enterprise Systems Journal starts off the year with this article : "Consultancy Puts IBM’s TCO Claims to the Test", subtitled "Do Big Blue’s mainframe TCO assertions add up?". The article focuses on a study by Wayne Kernochan, an analyst with consultancy Illuminata Inc. It looks at the way IBM presents the TCO of the mainframe divided into hardware, software licensing, people (e.g., administration, implementation, and upgrading), and environmental (e.g., electricity and air conditioning) costs. It seems to be clear that system administration and environmental costs are clearly more advantageous for the mainframe. The hardware itself is still more expensive, but then again, much less than, say, 5 years ago. Software costs should be about the same on all platforms. The strongest criticism is that IBM clearly underestimates the people cost for "for application, infrastructure, and (especially) database management", meaning "the more database instances you consolidate on a single system, the more DBAs you’ll have to have on hand to effectually manage them". But Kernochan immediately adds : "The reverse of this argument is that these costs are universal".
His conclusion is that IBM TCO claims do have merit : "Add it all together and mainframe TCO can look quite attractive. Administrative costs are often lower—even much lower—and … hardware, software, and physical plant costs are not … the drag they once were."