37xx FEPs:
The Right to Life -- Post IBM

Three FEP Retention Options

by Anura [‘SNA’] Guruge

Editor At Large, IT In-Depth

Current 3745 Microcode level: H10030F (3Q2005)

The reports of the impending demise of 37xxs have been greatly exaggerated.  This being so very much the case, rather than feeling guilty in anyway about plagiarizing Samuel Clemen’s famous admonition, one feels that not to state as forthrightly as that would border on being disingenuous!

IBM, as we all know, stopped marketing 3745/3746s as of September 2002.  Since then IBM has advocated Enterprise Extender (EE) that permits SNA/APPN routing across IP and the mainframe Linux-based Communications Controller for Linux (CCL) emulation as the strategic options for 37xx replacement.  The CCL
in particular being targeted at the SNA customers that still rely heavily on the value-added networking functions provided by 37xx/NCP [e.g. SNI].

The big concern that 37xx customers had confronted, since 2002, was that a shortage of spare parts or personnel with true 37xx maintenance skills could leave them totally incapacitated, with no means of recovery, the next time one of their 37xxs crashed.  Even I subscribed to this “the next time your 37xx crashes could be its last” mentality since IBM has always been rather vague about its inventory of 37xx parts.

But today we have new data that significantly changes this picture and as such alters prior assumptions. Spares, high-end replacement frames [e.g. 31As, 61As, 900s] or proven 37xx maintenance expertise is not going to be a short- or even a mid-term issue.  It is now rather clear that 3745s will continue to be available for 99.999%, mission-critical, production use till at least 2016.  Yes, another decade as of now.

Mid-Atlantic Research & Services (MARS) Makes a 10 Year Commitment

MARS [www.3745.com], a company created in 1990 by Mike Ward, an ex-IBM ‘big iron’ specialist, deserves much of the credit for giving 37xx FEPs this new (and somewhat unexpected) lease of life – for at least the next 10 years.  For a start, MARS, which has devoted itself exclusively to 37xx sustenance since 1991, bought IBM’s entire inventory of 37xx parts in early 2005.

In 2003 IBM closed its Havant, U.K. plant – bringing to an end 37xx production.  At that juncture, all of the high-level 37xx stock, valued at tens of millions of U.S. dollars, was shipped to Raleigh, North Carolina – still the nominal home of IBM networking (and the birthplace of EE and CCL).  MARS, one of only two authorized 37xx IBM Business Partners as of 1995 (the other being the now defunct Centron), acquired the entire stock from Raleigh.  Using this inventory MARS is now able to deliver, on-demand, the latest of the 37xxs models, viz. 31As, 61As, 900s and possibly even 950s, with the latest Type 3 processors – at the highest microcode levels available from IBM [e.g. H10030F as of 2/2006].

Despite the considerable size of the mother lode of parts acquired from IBM, MARS continues to judiciously add more frames and spares to its inventory by regularly buying up high-end 37xxs that customers are  decommissioning.  Later this year, following a major 37xx consolidation project that they are working on for a very large financial institution, they intend to acquire another 60 frames just from that one customer!  MARS maintains a refub/reengineering center in Fredrick, Maryland to accept, recondition and reconfigure such equipment.  Suffice to say that MARS is extremely bullish, with just cause, about their ability to successfully meet any and all demands for 37xxs, 37xx parts and 37xx expertise till at least 2016 – which just happens to be the arbitrary end-point of their most recent business plans.

3 New Options for 37xx Customers

Thanks to MARS, SNA customers that need to continue using high-end, NCP-related functionality for their business-critical networking now have three new options in addition to EE and CCL.  These being:

When considering these three new options, one should also factor in:

Hence it should not come as a surprise at all to discover that Mike Ward and his partner Joe Joyce (ex-Centron) have already helped SNA customers, with great success, in terms of all three of the above stated 37xx retention options.  Thus these options are not pie-in-the-sky speculative suggestions.  Instead they are proving to be true, nitty-gritty, pragmatic alternatives for customers who over the years have learned of lost opportunity costs of network outages.

To this end, Mike likes to stress that MARS is not in the business of just selling 37xx hardware.  There are brokerage firms that do that.  Instead, MARS is committed to making the “FEP business” an ongoing success both to SNA customers as well as for MARS.  Mike and Joe want to make sure that their customers continue to get the best out of their 37xxs; i.e. that the 37xxs are truly productive vis-à-vis the customer needs.  MARS wants to understand what their customers are doing with their 37xxs and see how they can best optimize H/W and NCP configurations based on the latest available parts, microcode and NCPs.  The goal, always, is to maximize reliability, increase performance and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Netting It All Out

Mike, a pragmatist to a fault, does not harbor any illusions that SNA customers will never ever get rid of all their 37xxs.  Though the longevity of the 37xxs is now approaching that of the Model 029 card punches that one would still see lurking in the dark corners of machine rooms well into the late 80s, Mike, like IBM and WillData believe that in the long-term customers will eventually get around to using EE to handling all of their remaining SNA traffic – the keywords here being ‘long-term’ and ‘remaining’.  With his hands-on experience, he already knows that many customers have already embraced EE and DLSw to handle quite a bit of their SNA traffic.  But as he correctly points out: “they just did the easy stuff like SDLC.”

As IBM itself has confirmed with the CCL, there are still a lot of SNA customers that need bona fide NCP functionality for SNI, Boundary Functions, NRF, NPSI, NPM etc.  And one has to note that CCL, for all its strengths, does not support serial ports, NTO, XI or EP.  But as we know there are customers out there that still rely on all of these esoteric SNA features.  Hence why we still have upwards of 20,000 37xxs still in 24x7 production use.  Consequently Mike does not feel that the CCL is a realistic, cost effective alternative to 3745s.  With spares guaranteed to be available for the next 10 years, Mike does not see the cost justification of getting rid of still working 3745s in favor of CCL.  If you want to get into this in more detail, you should feel free to contact Mike.  He will be happy to discuss the pros and cons with you – with conviction.  He certainly did when I spoke to him about the CCL.

So the bottom line here is very simple and straightforward.  There is no shortage of necessary spare parts for 3745s.  Based on their inventory, which is regularly replenished with parts from decommissioned machines, MARS is extremely confident that they can safely and satisfactorily meet all the needs of existing 37xx customers for another 10 years.  Thus one should not in anyway feel pressurized to seek alternatives for their existing 37xxs.  Instead they now have the option of just continuing with the staus quo and just making a note on where and how to get hold of Mike or Joe – which you can do via www.3745.com.