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lancelotlinc · Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 7:27 am Post subject:

Happy Friday!

Thought I would stir up some fun (er, trouble) and begin a philosophical thread about managing production environments.

I get the whole concept of different thinking between WMB on z/OS and WMB on Distributed. These two environments are worlds apart in some respects and exactly the same in other respects.

For example, in distributed systems (ie. AIX, Linux et. al.), there are many many systems because the cost per system is lower (smaller foot-print, more feet, like a centipede). Whereas, in z/OS-land, the focus is on larger foot-print, fewer feet (like a frog).

Because of the many more system installations a distributed system administrator must manage in a distributed network, the time one person (or one team) can devote to each box is less per box. On the other hand, in z/OS-land, because there are fewer systems, the SysAdmins can slave over every detail on the few boxes and spend much more time per box.

Thus, z/OS system administrators tend not to see the value in self-managing add-ons, dare we say, log4j. Hence the comment in a recent thread, "why is there such a focus on log4j? it wasn't part of the OP's requirement." In my naivetae, I had made an (incorrect) assumption that the benefits and need to use such a utility was accepted and known by all. Apparently, this assumption is incorrect.

The value a utility like log4j brings (and I am just using it as an example, many other distributed systems utilities could easily be substituted here) is self-apparent to experienced distributed systems engineers. They recognize that if you simply write a file to disk, the file will eventually consume too much disk space and require human intervention to correct. On the flip side to that scenario is employing automatic self-managing log file system like log4j which automatically shifts files around, and cleans up after itself so the human doesn't have to do it.

Am I mistaken, or am I right, in that mainframe adminstrators have a different perspective on managing their system compared to distributed systems administrators.

Please don't get me wrong here, I am not being critical of any group. I am merely stating that the systems are managed differently and therefore the people who manage these systems have differing perspectives on how to best do that for their own environment.
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