Marist College educates the next generation of mainframe administrators with IBM System z, IBM z/VM and IBM System Storage

Marist College is one of the leading comprehensive liberal arts institutions in the northeastern United States. Nestled in the Hudson River Valley, the college is home to approximately 5,300 students and 800 employees.

A neighbor of IBM’s Poughkeepsie facility, Marist has maintained a longstanding relationship with the IBM Corporation. Marist first installed an IBM System/370™ mainframe with virtualization in 1978. Since that time, Marist’s IT infrastructure has gone through many upgrades, but IBM mainframes and virtual machine (VM) technology have remained a constant presence on campus, supporting IT activities in development, production and the educational process. As a result, Marist has gained a reputation as a trailblazer in virtualization and mainframe technologies.

Marist installed their first IBM System z over six years ago—an IBM System z900 mainframe running IBM z/OS® and IBM z/VM. Pleased with the ongoing performance and benefits of System z, Marist recently decided to replace the z900 with a new IBM System z9® mainframe.

Virtualization on IBM System z mainframes
Not long ago, the popularity of personal computers and rack servers meant that most people didn’t immediately think of mainframes as a low power or low cost option. In addition, the business world has only recently acknowledged the value of virtualization. However, virtualization on the mainframe has actually never been more powerful or cost effective, and modern mainframe systems such as System z have proven to be extremely competitive.

With the initial installation of System z900, Marist consolidated their IT infrastructure while expanding its capabilities. Because space is tight on campus, Marist maintains a fairly small data center. System z fits the requirements of small data centers by making extremely efficient use of computing resources, power and money. Over the years, Marist has been able to continue adding more resources without negatively impacting the mainframe’s processing efficiency or needing to make significant new hardware investments. Marist currently runs several hundred virtual servers on their z9™, servicing the needs of the entire college.

Martha McConaghy, strategic planner and project manager at Marist College, explains, “The cost to run a mainframe has decreased over the years. You can fit more on a mainframe, particularly the z9, than you could before—and at less cost. If we used rack servers to provide all the services we now run on the z, the footprint would be four or five times larger. And the cost in terms of space, power and cabling would be much larger.”

Educating the next generation of System z administrators
This ongoing involvement in mainframes and z/VM demonstrates Marist’s commitment to adopting vital technologies and applying them to both teaching and learning. Marist participates in the IBM Academic Initiative, a cooperative agreement between IBM, local businesses and higher education. The initiative provides opportunities for students to access technology they wouldn’t normally be able to and in real world situations.

Marist is leveraging this program to educate the next generation of mainframe administrators. McConaghy elaborates, “Companies still need those mainframe skills and they found that people who had them were all reaching retirement age. A few years ago they realized they’ll still need people to carry those skills into the future.” Employers now recognize that students are coming out of Marist internships with real world experience administering mainframes and z/VM on System z.

With z/VM enabling a complete virtualization of System z, students can practice managing everything usually done by hardware, including the layout of the network. z/VM enables Marist to run many complete instances of IBM z/OS simultaneously, providing a fully functional copy of the operating system to each group of students learning z/OS skills. It can even run complete, virtual instances of z/VM that can be further segmented into additional virtual mainframes as required.

Virtual clients for any application
z/VM also gives Marist the ability to run over 600 Linux® virtual machines for general student use, all on a single System z server. The consolidated architecture provides a great deal of flexibility and control over systems administration. On each virtual system, administrators can define minimum performance guarantees and workload characteristics. z/VM also enables dynamic system recovery from failures or outages, and the ability to quickly set up new Linux server environments or test environments for application programmers.

“We couldn’t do it any other way but with System z and z/VM,” says A. Harry Williams, director of technology and systems at Marist College, “Just in terms of Linux on z/VM, I’ve got over 600 virtual servers. For me to actually buy and try to manage that number of servers would be both cost and time prohibitive. We recently automatically applied two sets of security patches to every server in under 48 hours. If I tried to do that manually, I would still be going through the first set of patches.”

Linux on System z
Linux environments on System z can take advantage of specialized technologies such as HiperSockets™ to improve performance. Linux virtual machines on System z are not emulations or stripped down versions, but fully functional installations of the operating system. Thanks to the fast and dynamic provisioning capabilities of System z and z/VM, Marist can test new applications they may not have previously tried and can easily revert to previous configurations.

A better option in virtualization with IBM z/VM
“z/VM is much easier to manage from a technology point of view,” says Williams. “It takes less staff and provides more useful tools. z/VM lets us monitor performance data to see how the virtual machines are running. I can actually see how resources are being utilized so I can tweak and tune them so they can get the support they need.” The result is extremely high resource utilization levels.

McConaghy adds, “On other platforms, the rule of thumb is to keep utilization at around 20 percent—go above that and performance starts to suffer. The norm on the z is to run between 80 and 90 percent utilization without any performance degradation. This means you can get as much as possible out of the environment.”

Marist’s System z9 includes the reliability of a disk farm structure for easier replication and the ability to use clustering more easily than other platforms. The virtual network increases security while reducing the need for a physical network and the administrative headaches that come with it. The z9 also supports Marist’s green initiative of advancing environmental sustainability with its small footprint and reduced electricity bill. All of this translates to a reduced total cost of ownership.

Marist intends to continue using IBM technology into the foreseeable future. They recently installed two IBM System Storage DS8100 disk storage systems to enhance the information infrastructure and are now in the process of developing a storage area network (SAN). McConaghy says Marist is pleased with the performance of the storage systems. “Any mainframe customer demands high availability and high reliability, so you do have the expectation that when you bring in IBM Storage like DS8100 that it’s going to work from day one and it’s not going to have any major problems. We have certainly found that to be true.”

The current trend is to continue growing the System z capabilities and adding additional applications as required. “We’re constantly looking at every application we implement and saying, ‘Is this a good fit for the z9?’ More often than not, the answer is yes,” states Williams, “System z has been wonderful. Fabulous. A crown jewel. I can’t say enough superlatives about what it’s done for us.”