VM & IBM MAINFRAME INFORMATION

CERN VM

CN Division CERN plans to phase out the CERN VM service at the end of 1996. The existing IBM ES9000-600 mainframe hardware lease runs out at the end of 1994 and the target is to move LEP batch production to the CORE (UNIX servers) by then. Then the mainframe with be downsized to reduce the mainframe expenditures by a factor of 2 to 3.

The remaining interactive load (mainly mail & editing) will be absorbed by workgroup servers supporting the desktop. These will be based on the existing Novell based NICE environment for PC and Macs and a similar environment being develop for UNIX.

They are setting up a task force to faciltate the VM migration and 1 FTE from CN has been assigned to it. They are currently defining the areas in VM that have to be moved and are monitoring VM to understand the current use. Email is recognized as a major component to be moved. For UNIX they are looking at Z-mail. They will be moving the Oracle servers on VM to UNIX. There appear to be no plans to support FORTRAN 90 from Oracle. CERN makes little use of the ProREXX interface so there are no plans to port it to UNIX. On the other hand Pierantoio Marquesini of L3 did not feel it would be hard to port ProREXX to Regina (see section on L3 plans for VM) on UNIX.

L3 Plans for VM

L3 has considerable political pressure to get rid of VM. They have about 40 simultaneous user who are mainly physicists. They feel it will be fairly easy to move these people as soon as they see the grass is greener (access to data is better) on the other side. Some educational effort will be required.

L3's main concern is the many service machines and EXECs which control their production system and provide the master database system. They estimate they have over 100K lines of VM REXX code. The code is stable and often untouched for several years. A largely automated port would be preferable to a buggy re-write. They are actively investigating moving this code to UNIX by using the public domain Regina 0.5H (REXX implementation on UNIX). To facilitate this, they have: developed an RXSOCKET interface; implemented about 60% of the HEP REXX functions for Regina; and are developing automatic conversions for EXECIO and GLOBALV calls. They have found it easy to develop external functions for Regina. They are investigating how to adress IOS3270 (block mode full-screen 3270 interactive access), SPOOL, CMS PIPES, & XEDIT functions, possibly utilizing curses for the full screen emulation. They estimate that it will take item 2-3 man years to move, on top of the additional FTEs providing normal support and development in their Unix environment. They aim to accomplish the move by mid 1995.

They do not expect end users on UNIX to use REXX (Regina), rather they expect them move & move to use UNIX tools commonly used in the Unix community outside HEP (such as Perl).

There is a SENDFILE emulator out there that can simulate spool files from a Rick Trott. L3 uses CURSES to emulate XEDIT macro usage.

DESY Mainframe Down Sizing

In 1994 DESY will downsize their IBM 9000 mainframe running MVS with the production work moving to UNIX in 1995 and 1996. They have invested heavily in SGI Challenge machines with a total of 84 processors. They expect the "serious" users to move to UNIX and the casual users to Macs/PCs, though there is a faction at DESY that feels the casual users should move to Xterminals of which they already have 600, rather than to PCs or Macs.