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DedicationThis book is dedicated to the kids who inspired it: the Students of Accounting241, University of Waterloo, Spring 2002.

AcknowledgementsI wish to acknowledge, with thanks, the efforts of those who helped me findmistakes and other problems in the text. In particular John McKeown (OpenUniversity, UK) and Jim Taylor of Winnipeg, Canada worked through everychapter. Obviously they bear no responsibility for the remaining errors, but theyboth found hundreds of them - thanks guys!

NoticeBy necessity, given the nature of the thing as a book about information systemstechnology, this book names names, discusses prices, and gives my opinions onthe performance and value of various products. Obviously:

1 all brand names, product names, web site names, and related materials asused in this book are, or may be taken as, trade names, service marks,trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and,

2 while every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this bookneither the publisher nor the author assumes any legal responsibility forerrors or omissions, or for damages arising from the use or distribution ofthe ideas and/or information, contained herein.

CopyrightUnless otherwise noted in the text the copyright for all of the materials in thisbook is held by Paul Murphy. All rights are reserved.

WebsiteThe website for this book is on http://www.winface.com/

This is a draftThe current release is a next to final draft. Comments are requested by email tomurph@winface.com or via the discussion group on the website.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1.2 Structure of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2 Data Processing and the IBM Mainframe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.1 Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.2 The Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

2.3 Case Study: Hardware Selection for a Consolidation Workload .

79

3 Application Appliance Computing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

3.1 Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

3.2 The iSeries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

3.3 The Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

3.4 Case study: Systems Decisions at Cutter Mills . . . . . . . . . . . 125

4 The Microsoft PC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

4.1 Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

4.2 The Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

4.3 Case study: Happy Valley Tax Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

5 Unix and Open Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

5.1 About this grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

5.2 Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

5.3 Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

5.4 The Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

5.5 Case Study: Safetyjet International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

6 Generic Issues in Computing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

6.1 Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

6.2 Information Integrity Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

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6.3 Networking and Related Security Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

6.4 Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) . . . . . 313

6.5 Total Cost of Ownership Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

6.6 Major Business Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365

6.7 E-Commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381

••••••

• • • • • • Introduction

Overview

This book is designed for people who interact with, but do not want to become,professional information systems staff. It is a management guide to informationsystems for auditors, executives, and business owners who want to understandwhat the issues are and how to resolve them.

As a manager, business owner, or management advisor you will often findyourself forced to make decisions in situations where systems professionalseither hold conflicting opinions or seem to have considered only the alternativethey’re most comfortable with. Whether what’s at stake is Sarbanes-Oxleycompliance or a strategic business opportunity doesn’t matter: it’s their field andtheir professional vocabulary, but it’s your decision and you, not they, will wearthe result.

Preparing you for situations like these is the most fundamental thing this bookis about. Not just helping you past the jargon barrier so their vocabulary doesn’tleave you locked out; but getting right to the hard core of the issue: helping youunderstand the real relationship between their ideas about computing and thebusiness problem your organization is trying to solve.

Read this book carefully and you’ll understand that systems decisions aren’tusually about bits, bytes, or megahertz, but about people and the way their ideasand interactions affect your organization’s ability to do its job.

In the long run business success is determined by how technology is applied, bythe things people think they know about technology and how to use it, not by thetechnology itself.

Talk the talk, but understand the people: that’s the hidden lesson from ninetyyears of business data processing - understand it, and making smarter systemsdecisions will become part of your professional repetoire.

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To the non technical manager a computer tends to look a lot like a computer, butthat’s not true from the expert’s perspective. If Dick and Jane are two systemsexperts with differing views on a technical issue, those views will reflect whatDick and Jane think they know about computers and therefore the differences inthe forces which shaped their opinions.

Dick and Jane may genuinely both be experts, people who deal with computingon a professional basis and whom you’d expect to resolve minor differences byworking out the facts, but reality doesn’t work that way. Instead they will usuallytry to focus discussion on the differences, rather than the commonalities, in thetechnology choices they support.

In most cases these differences are minor in the context of the business, but justas the protagonists in racial or religious wars are usually willing to die toperpetuate differences that are invisible or unimportant to outsiders, so too willDick and Jane unknowingly sacrifice your business to the unalterable certitudesimposed by their backgrounds. In fact, expecting Dick to work with Jane’s ideas,or vice versa, will predictably have roughly the same effect as hiring a Catholicprincipal for a Protestant school in Belfast.

Things got this way through the problem driven co-evolution of hardware,software, and management methods. In business data processing, as in nature,only the fittest survive - but, again as in nature, fitness is determined by localcircumstance. A polar bear is superbly adapted to life in the Arctic, but wouldn’tlast a week in sub-Saharan Africa.

Speciation, the evolutionary response that adapts some bears to the desert andothers to the Arctic, is driven by the problems the organism has to solve tosurvive and prosper. Once that evolution succeeds, however, the changeprocesses stop; freezing both behavior and perception in place. You can put apolar bear in a southern California zoo and feed it chickens, but it will alwaysscan its wading pool for seals.

The same thing happens among groups of professionals confronting problemsor opportunities. They rapidly evolve characteristic methods for using the toolsavailable to solve the problems they see, and then recast their perception of theenvironment around them in terms of the problem set that drove the group’sinitial development and specialization.

Generally speaking hardware differences are used to label systems cultures, butthe real differentiation comes from management practices and habits of thought;not hardware. At the global level a computer really is just a computer, but themanagement reflexes that are automatic components of the one right way to runa mainframe data center generally constitute obvious insanity to the Unixsystems manager and may be utterly incomprehensible to the Microsoft guru.

If Dick is from one camp and Jane from another, their arguments will usuallyboth be right within the context of the information systems culture they belongto. Dick will genuinely see seals where Jane sees berries and anthills, notbecause they are antagonistic or incompetent, but because those perceptionsreflect their systems culture. In choosing between their positions you need tolook beyond their arguments to the cultural coloration through which they filtertheir perception of both the problem to be addressed and the solutionsappropriate to it.

Making systems decisions, choosing between Dick and Jane, is likely to be anevery day part of your role as an auditor, a manager, or a business owner. To doit well, you need first of all to be able to communicate effectively with both Dickand Jane. That means much more than learning some acronyms and speakingthe words of their language; it means understanding the evolutionary pressuresthat produced their ideas, their reflexes, and, above all, their verities - the thingsthey never think about but which their data processing culture treats as eternaland unquestionable truths.

That fundamentally is what this book is about: demystifying jargon whilehelping you understand how Dick and Jane got their opinions, what theircultural assumptions are, and how to understand and balance the values implicitin those assumptions when you have to choose between them.

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Structure of the book

An information systems architecture consists of:

1 Hardware;

2 Software;

3 Management methods or processes; and,

4 A business or organizational context.

These elements are inter-dependent; they co-evolve as people use change in oneas both a cause and a consequence of change in the other three.

At the broadest level there are four major systems architectures in current use:

1 The IBM mainframe architecture;

2 The application appliance or mini-computer architecture;

3 The Microsoft PC architecture; and,

4 The Unix or Open Source architecture.

Each of these architectures evolved in response to some combination of businessand technological change, and each has its own group of practitioners. Thesegroups are distinct in that all have unique ideologies, their own understandingof the one right way to manage computing; their own vocabularies, and theirown view of the rightful and necessary role of computing in businesses andother organizations.

Thus when you first meet an IT professional, Dick or Jane, the chances are verygood that he or she will be a member of one of these communities - and thereforethat the effort you put into understanding these communities will pay off veryquickly in your ability to work effectively with Dick or Jane.

Nobody orders Slime Head for dinner - but Orange Roughy is a restaurant favorite

Just as most systems or network engineers aren’t engineers, systems and/ornetwork architects aren’t usually architects.

“Systems Architecture” is just an attractive term that has wide acceptanceamong systems professionals and no intrinsic meaning beyond what its usetells you about the profession’s lack of maturity and self-confidence.

That’s why the first four chapters of this book are organized as tours of thesecommunities with:

1 An overview of the history behind today’s realities focusing on theproblems that shaped the technology and the management ideas that gowith it;

2 A tour of a working data center in which we look at costs, roles,qualifications, technologies, and management practices; and,

3 A case study exemplifying the culture at work..

Critical technical or other information

Inset boxes like this one are found throughout the text. Usually the informationprovided either modifies and expands on information in the core narrative ordefines terms used in the main text.

These boxes are not asides. The structure of the book is designed to makelearning a lot of technical terms easier by providing the context in which thetechnologies evolved - but terms and examples still need to be presented andthat’s what most of these boxes do. For example:

Systems and “The Systems Men”a

a. See: T. Haigh, Inventing Information Systems (Business History

Review; 75, spring 2001, pp 15-61).

The word “system” is often used to label computers or software but “asystem” is really a multi-step process or procedure executed in pursuit ofsome goal. Thus a printing system for a daily newspaper can includepeople, organization, and a sixty million dollar printing plant. Systemsdo not need to incorporate technology or be successful in achieving theirgoals - it is proceduralization: the defined, organized, repeatable, natureof the processes involved, that makes something a system.

“The systems men,” an association of data processing professionals thatstarted in the 1920s (formalized in 1947 as The Systems And ProceduresAssociation of America inc.) focussed on leveraging their way into theexecutive suite by deploying organization wide systems built aroundprocedures appropriate to the data processing equipment they controlled.

Introduction 7

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The topics discussed in Chapter Five are extremal, either so different that sideby side explanation is called for, or so similar across all of the majorarchitectures that separate explanation would be a waste of everyone’s time.

Included are sections discussing the major goals, technologies and related issuesassociated with:

1 Clustering

2 Information integrity

3 Networking and Security

4 Relational Database Management Systems

5 Total Cost of Ownership

6 Major Business Applications; and,

7 E-Commerce.

A note from the authorVarious reviewers have told me that this book is boring. It is, and I’m sorry aboutthat; unfortunately I don’t know how to fix the problem. All that IBM stuff inthe first chapter, for example, is of little interest to people whose focus is onmaking the current technology work. Bear in mind, however, that your role as amanager or an advisor to managers, isn’t likely to involve making technologywork. What it will involve is making decisions: does the company back Dick’sideas or Jane’s? bet on this technology or that one? promote Zina or Ivan?

For those decisions you need first to speak the language, that’s a requirement forcommunications, but, more importantly, you need to understand where they’recoming from - and that’s what all that boring computing history is about. Dick’sopinions, like Jane’s, evolved in response to external pressures and events;understand those and you’ll understand Dick’s professional persona wellenough to make your decisions. Fail to understand them, and you’re left to baseyour judgement on other people’s opinion, the cut of their clothes, their positionin the company, or other externalities that really have little or nothing to do withthe merits of their arguments.

So yes, some sections are long and boring; but please think of it as a kind ofMurphy’s mixture - it may taste bad, but it’s good for you.

Chapter 1

• • • • • • Data Processing and the IBM Mainframe

About thisgrouping

The IBM mainframe information systems architecture consists of:

1 IBM System 360 compatible and successor hardware;

2 JCL, DOS 360, IMS, CICS and successor software;

3 Data center management methods or processes; and,

4 A transactions oriented business or organizational context.

As of late 2003 there were about 18,000 mainframe data centers in operationworldwide. Some amount to billion dollar businesses but, on average, eachspends an estimated 43 million (USD) per year; the vast majority of it on staff,desktop support, and facility services. Taken together these data centers costtheir owners nearly eight hundred Billion dollars to operate.

Originally data processing centers focused on developing reports summarizingbusiness data well after that data was generated by normal business processes.Although reductions in that time lag have allowed many data center operationsto get closer and closer to real time business support, the general focus remainson a class of tasks that can fairly be described as automated clerking.

As part of that after-the-fact focus on clerical automation most data centers wereinitially created to reduce processing costs in Finance, and cost justified mainlyon the basis of either displaced clerical wages or increased accuracy in clericaltasks. As a result the Information Systems Director has traditionally reportedthrough the Finance department and focused on cost cutting.

Many companies now also have Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and ChiefTechnology Officers (CTOs) to, or through, whom the data center reports to asteering committee of some kind. In general, however, today’s mainframe datacenters remain separate from the rest of the of the business and are usually still

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To address the first kind of problem IBM strengthened the memory partitioningprocess, first in the JCL and later by imposing hardware barriers to breakavailable storage into small chunks that could then be allocated within JCL.

Since this approach extended the independence of multiple batch jobs runningon the same machine, it also offered a way to share the hardware among severalusers because each partition looked like a real computer to the programmer.

This approach to managing the conflicting demands multiple users put on amachine first became known as virtualization1 and eventually as partitioning. Inits virtualization guise it formed the foundation for IBM’s attempt to build amulti-user operating system on top of CP and PR/SP that became known as VM;in its partitioning guise it became the foundation for a critical mainframe “bestpractice” - hardware partitioning.

Hardware partitioning attacked the problem of the million dollar phone bill byenforcing memory partitioning at the hardware microcode level. Equallyimportantly, however, it met the data center manager’s need to isolate test anddevelopment work from production work without forcing him to buy anothermulti-million dollar machine.

Today VM2, a virtual machine environment usually layered on top of hardwarepartitioning, is IBM’s major interactive user environment for the mainframe. InVM, individual users are given software managed private partitions within ahardware partition or dedicated machine. Thus data center management canenforce process resource utilization priorities and control within the VM userconfiguration and each user gets access to a virtual mainframe with which he, orshe, can do just about anything that could be done with an actual privatemachine - including loading a “guest” operating system such as VM itself,Linux, or MVS.

1. Note that “virtualiation” continues to refer to division of a machine in some usages buthas also acquired the opposite meaning in other circumstances. Thus Sun’s N1 virtual-ization software allows users to treat a large number of independent computers as a sin-gle set of resources.

2. For a fascinating look at the history and the conflicts between the batch oriented majoritywithin IBM and the attempts to create an interactive environment that led to VM/CMSsee <a href=http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda/25paper.pdf>VM and the VM Commu-nity: Past, Present, and Future</A> by Melinda Varian.

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Data communications and user desktop maintenance and support are contractedto IBM Global Services.

Until late 1998 all offices used IBM 3278 terminals and RJE (remote job entry)on 3274 style controllers1 to connect to mainframe services for the two mostmission critical applications clusters: Customer Claims (query and processing)and Sales Management (order and quotation processing). At that time thecompany rolled out new IBM Netvista desktops to all offices and instituted aseven year agreement with IBM Global Services to provision, manage, andsupport the company’s 15,000 desktops along with just over 1,700 NT/Windows2000 servers located outside the data center.

The original Netvista PCs had SNA boards enabling the machines to emulate a3278 style terminal. In the current round of desktop upgrades these boards arenot being replaced because the latest generation mainframes now use TCP/IP(the internet standard networking protocol) and 327X emulation can thereforebe handled entirely in software. Most applications requiring RJE or a 3279terminal have, furthermore, had customized Windows 2000 clients developed toreplace the old character interfaces.

The Windows 2000 or NT servers located outside the data center handleMicrosoft Exchange, Lotus Notes (now IBM Domino), and departmental fileand print sharing.

The data center itself started with a System 370 in 1973, was most recentlyrebuilt to house four S/390 processors in 1997, and is currently transitioning toa pair of IBM zSeries 2064-216 mainframes in a two way sysplex (clustered)configuration.

The five year capital lease on the new IBM mainframe gear includes2:

1. The 327X terminal/controller combination introduced with the System 370 in 1972offered page mode, glass terminal, keyboard data entry and display. The controllers,really separate mini-computers, operated the terminals and managed things like restrict-ing screen entry on specified fields to specified formats (e.g. “must be an integer”).

Page mode terminals transmitted and received information one page at a time, not onecharacter or line at a time. Thus users typically filled out an on-screen form, and thensent the whole form -a bit like a page submit on a web form- for validation and process-ing.

2. IBM does not publish detailed pricing information for mainframes. The mainframe pric-ing information used here is from the tech-news.com website which tracks list pricingoffered US customers.

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concurrent user processes over a thirty day period without a hiccup - sure, thatwas run on a much larger machine (72 dual CPUs at 1200Mhz), but the principleapplies to any Unix, including Linux.

In your context here there’s no technology related reason not to combine severalapplications - like email, boot services, and file and print support, on each Linuxmachine.

If you planned things out carefully, you could probably use Linux to shutdownas many as two thirds of those 218 servers while cutting operating costs on theremainder - but you certainly can’t consolidate everything to a single z800; itdoesn’t have the horsepower or the network connections, and, most importantly,it operates in a way that’s backwards to what you want.

A more senior IT manager might have walked out of the meeting at this point;but the presence of the VP finance, to whom the IT director nominally reports,and a couple of senior user side managers probably intimidated IT’s “Manager:Consolidation Services.” So instead of responding with a bluff based on appealto authority, he responded to this further provocation with an appeal toignorance.

“It’s a server Dammit!,” he thundered, “you can’t compare a PC to a mainframe;even the smallest mainframe is hundreds of times more powerful.” He went onquite a bit, but the main burden was that I should be kicked out of the room neverto darken their collective doorways again - and, of course, a single zSeriesengine could easily replace hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of PC servers.

That was a challenge I didn’t want to ignore - and I had remembered to bringone of my favorite overheads on this along. “The z900” I said, “is the biggest ofthe big iron at five million bucks for a 16 CPU, 64 GB unit, so lets compare thatto a mid range Sun machine running Unix and then go from there to the babymainframe- or z800 versus the PC.

“Bear in mind,” I said, “that IBM hasn’t participated in a public benchmark forthe mainframe since 1998 - when a S/390 lost badly to a lightly loaded Sun10000 on a SAP benchmark”.1

1. See: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/10000/performance/mips/

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As part of the new agreement AS/400 peripherals purchased from IBM duringthe lease period are being returned for credit on the new gear, thereby reducingthe list price to a total of $4,213,896.72, pre-tax.

The new machine is a fully configured iSeries Model 890-0198 and includes:

1 32 x 1.3GHz Power4 processors;

2 192 GB of memory;

3 6.5TB of disk storage (10K RPM, 17.54GB disks, RAID 5 in 22enclosures);

4 Continuation of the company’s IBM licenses, including OS/400 V5R2,DB2, RPG, and dozens of other tools or utilities;

More Terminology

A LAN is a Local Area Network - meaning a network restricted to a singlework site whether that’s an office or a campus. By extension a WAN is a widearea network joining several LANsa.

“T1” is an North American telco designation for a single cable provisioned tocarry up to 24 concurrent telephone conversations but usually applied toequivalent rate data communications. Since a phone conversation has a digitalequivalent rate of 56Kbits per second and requires an 8KBS control channel, aT1 provides for transmission at the rate of 1.536Mbs (=24 x 64) or about 192Kcharacters per second.

North American data transmissions ratings go all the way up to OC/3 - about173M characters per second. The comparable European designations start atE1 =40 phone line equivalents or about 2.5Mbits/sec.

ISDN (integrated services, digital network) puts a digital signal in place of theanalog phone signal and comes in increments of 56Kbits/sec. but can use the8Kbs control link as well. Thus an ISDN link described as “2b+c” has two 56Kchannels and a shared 16K control channel to deliver 128Kbs in throughput.

ADSL/SDSL are upgraded versions of ISDN using simpler wiring but broaderspectrum spreading to achieve much higher throughput - usually in the rangeof 1MBS to 8MBS depending on the user’s needs and budget.

a. The internet is a not a WAN. As discussed in Chapter 5, the core internet tech-

nology, TCP/IP, does not differentiate LANS and WANS.

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You can, I tell them, drive a 2 inch nail with a sledgehammer if you want to - butit doesn’t work the other way. Try to apply a leadership based approach in an allWindows environment and you’ll find yourself doing the equivalent of trying todrive railway spikes with an 8 ounce hammer.

It’s a difficult concept and acceptance isn’t helped by the fact that most placesthey’ve seen Unix used have been disasters - usually precisely because ITmanagement tried to treat it as just another constrained resource to be closelymanaged.

That brings us to infrastructure deployment options and costs. For this, I tellthem that I’m going to compare the effect a Windows client-server approachwith normal hierarchical systems management would have on the company tothe effect of going with Unix, smart displays, and a leadership based approachto IT management.

Somewhere in Paul Strassman’s book: The Politics of information Management(New Information Economics Press, New Canaan, Conn., 1995) he makes athrowaway comment to the effect that IBM lost the competition with Microsoftin part because they believed that the client-server revolution would requiremassive servers and so ramped up mainframe production instead of focusing onPCs and developing OS/2.

IBM was right of course --and they would have known, having abandonedclient-server as unworkable during research on the Future Systems project of1967-72. The consequence is that, despite the Windows myth of personaldesktop device control, Cutter would have to implement very tight, centralized,control of desktop PCs to make a Windows architecture system work - thusleaving users with responsibility for, but no control over, desktop gear.

On the Unix side those desktop PCs get shown the door in favor of smartdisplays running server based applications - that means both architecturescentralize processing, but Unix does it on one machine with a simple TCP/IPnetwork while Windows managers need to co-ordinate rackmounts full of littleservers with fairly cantankerous desktop gear and complex network switchingschemes.

Smart displays offer both advanced graphics and stability -unlike PCs whichhave high failure rates and require frequent reboots and/or replacement, smartdisplays offer 300,000 hour mean time to failure rates, usually last five to eightyears, and don’t change no matter what happens to the applications or servers.

Chapter 2

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printer manager accessible by users on network attached personal computers.That, however, was enough to turn them into a billion dollar company by mid1990.

The response IBM and Microsoft co-developed was a networking technologyknown as NetBEUI (NetBios Enhanced User Interface) which extended thePC’s BIOS, stored in ROM and run at boot time, to make it “network aware” andso laid the foundations for a PC network architecture known as SMB/NetBIOSthat is still in use in most corporate Microsoft Windows installations today.1

File and print sharing through a server led to demand for more shared services -particularly shared databases and, from this, the PC version2 of client-server,started to evolve.

At about the same time, however, there was a growing rift between Microsoftand IBM. The success of GUIs on Atari, Macintosh, and Unix computers haddemonstrated their potential and, of course, both IBM and Microsoft wanted toown the inevitable PC version.

As a result Microsoft, which had developed a partial windowing environmentmodelled on a GEM application for the Tandy 2000 (the only 1983/4 Intelmachine with the power to run anything remotely like a GUI, in this case usinga 12Mhz 80186) but dead ended it, revived that project and issued a partiallygraphical interface for DOS 3.1 called Windows 2.13 in December of 1987 - justover three years after announcing it and four years after abandoning Windows1.0.

1. Windows 2000 is designed to work with TCP/P instead of Server Message Blocks (SMB)and NetBios but users tend to turn on SMB networking in order to perpetuate previouspractice. Windows/XP deals with this by routing SMB over TCP/IP instead of using theNetBIOS but some users continue to install the older technologies.

2. The original IBM PC, the model 5100, had been designed as a client computer to beattached to the relational database engine, or future system, in 1972. At that time IBMcancelled the program in favor of the 370 architecture. By the time that the intendedserver was released as the System 38 in 1978/9, IBM researchers had deprecated the cli-ent-server plan as unworkably complex and so the System 38 was released with ordinaryterminals instead of the client computers envisaged in the original system design.

3. Competitors included: VIsiON, from Visicorp in 1983, GEM (from DR) in mid 1984,TOPView, from iBM in early 1985, and DESQview from Quarterdeck Office Systemsin mid 1985.

Chapter 3

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Case study: Happy Valley Tax Authority1

Note: The “I” in this scenario is that of a hapless systems consultant who didn’t do hishomework before setting off to meet the client. These events take place in mid2000.

The Happy Valley Tax Authority, its staff and mandates, are fabrications but thesituation presented, and the remedies offered, reflect the author’s unhappyexperience with real-world clients facing similar problems. This tax authority isimaginary, but the conditions, decisions, and outcomes described are broadlybased on real events.

BackgroundThe Happy Valley Tax Authority was set up as a regional co- operative toadminister tax programs for local governments along an eighty mile stretch ofhighway. At the time of incorporation none of the players would agree to use thelargest municipality’s name for the joint effort and so the tax co-operative wasnamed for a local tourist attraction: the Happy Valley Ranch. Although nowrebuilt as a federally funded national heritage site, the ranch house had beenbuilt in the 1890s as a second generation cattle baron’s imitation of an Englishcountry manor, acquired a rather different cultural status during prohibition, andbeen razed to the ground in an uprising of the local moral majority in 1957.

In the twelve years since start-up, the tax authority has acquired duties that gobeyond simple property tax assessment and collection. One town has a hotelroom tax, another provides school tax credits for couples with two or morechildren, while a third has an industrial land development program with bothrebate and tax relief schemes to attract tenants. Today the authority collects 32different levies from about 45,000 taxpayers; administers eight rebate, directsupport, or tax relief programs, and collects tolls on one road bridge and twopark entrances.

About eight months ago a town councilman with strong connections to the firmI usually work with got his council to hire the firm to do an operational audit ofthe authority’s effectiveness and assess what value the town was getting for itscontinued support of the authority’s mandate.

1. An earlier version of this parable appeared on Linuxworld.com in January, 2002.

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Plan 9 was developed at Bell Labs (the research division ofLucent Technologies). In July 2000 the 3rd Edition was releasedas Open Source, and this is was quickly made available by VitaNuova in the form of a bootable CD. The 4th Edition wasreleased by Bell Labs in April 2002 and Vita Nuova is nowshipping 4th Edition Boxed Sets and CDs. The developers ofplan 9 include some of the original Unix designers includingRob Pike and Dennis Richie.

To the end user, Plan 9 bears a superficial resemblance to Unix,but the underlying operating system is very different. Inparticular, Plan 9 was designed as a network operating system,as opposed to Unix where networking support was added as anafterthought. Some of the standard Unix tools are available, butthey have generally been either enhanced or completelyrewritten.

Plan 9 has been ported to a number of architectures, includingIntel x86, Sparc, Alpha, Power PC, and Arm1.

Plan 9 reflects the future of Unix and Sun appears to be currently migratingSolaris, the technically most advanced commercial Unix variant, to full Plan 9equivalence by concurrently expanding its OS vision outwards through networkmanageable resource allocation and inward to multi-CPU SMP on a chip.

ControlsThe most important thing to note about the operation of a successful Unix datacenter is the relative invisibility of hierarchal control. Most people work inteams that form for specific projects and disband just as quickly. Managementfacilitates, it does not direct. Most new work is user initiated, annual budgets aremore or less fixed but re-allocations are done on the fly. Most of the CoBiT2

controls simply do not apply. Most of the process documentation expected bythe traditional auditor has no purpose and does not exist.

1. http://www.vitanuova.com/plan9/origin.html. The name, meaning extended life, is froma passage in Dante’s Inferno. The language of many jokes and puns in Plan 9 (a Unixtradition dating from McIlloy’s prior work with Ken Iverson on APL), looks like Italianbut is actually Fruilian.

2. See: http://www.isaca.org/ for details

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4 Operations desk change orders had near real-time effect on the informationprovided at departure desks, on buses, and on-board the aircraft; and,

5 The airline could generally expect good regulatory co- operation on minorflight plan change,

then operations should be able to maintain an overall schedule optimized interms of passenger needs while giving up a minimum in cycle time, fuel, orother operational penalties.

Overall optimization for passengers does not, of course, mean individualoptimization. The occasional passenger may find herself temporarily re-routedto Alaska or stranded in Saskatoon, but the system would continually adjustitself to produce the best possible result for the majority of passengers themajority of the time.

As it happens that’s also the best possible result for the airline becauseminimizing passenger waiting times and ground travel distances is usually thesame as keeping the fastest gear, i.e. the airplanes, busiest earning money.

The critical design question is therefore clear: can the scheduling problem beformulated in such a way as to be sufficiently inclusive to generate usable resultsand yet solve in near real-time? - particularly if we define the latter as “generallyless than one minute”?

Formulating the scheduling problem requires considerable expertise and animmense amount of data - both of which should be available. Since there is nocompelling reason to believe that the problem cannot be properly formulatedwe’ll assume that it can be and concentrate on options for solving it.

The actual problem size is difficult to predict, inclusion of passenger concernswill add less complexity than might be expected because many passengerconstraints are linearly dependent - meaning that a full linear program mighthave 100 million rows and 200 million columns but the subset of interest willusually be at least an order of magnitude smaller on each dimension.

There are some givens in solving this. For example, the use of the Informixdatabase with Tuxedo is a given in view of the reliability requirements for thetransactions environment and the consequent need to keep the two data centersfully synchronized. Since this requirement also amounts to a Solarisspecification for the primary transactions processing and database hosting jobs,the real architectural issue for the solver lies between:

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up to switch jobs (applications) rather than processor tasks and a machine failurewould therefore more commonly trigger an application restart than a simpleprocessor switch.

Transaction Processing MonitorsIn the “TPM”, or transaction processing monitor, all arriving service requestsare first captured by the TPM software and then passed to two or more servers -but only one response is passed back to the requestor. As a result the two or moreservers involved are kept current during normal operations and activity loggedon the running machine during a server outage can be replayed on recovery tobring the two systems back to a synchronized state.

Although this approach is now largely obsolete, both IBM’s CICS, whichacquired some TPM characteristics as early as 1970, and Tuxedo, now ownedby Bea Systems, exemplify this approach.

TPM’s are extremely reliable and very effective in environments where olderapplications and/or technologies need to be used and the data center either doesnot have control of the application source or does not have the skills and otherresources needed to update the technology.

The more modern rendition of the same basic ideas involves database activityreplication. In replication, users access an application that, in turn, accesses adatabase management system, or DBMS. The DBMS then replicates anytransactions that affect stored data on a second server. Since the servers needonly be connected via a standard TCP/IP network they can be in differentcountries, cities or states without affecting the second machine’s ability to pickup the load anytime the first fails.

Since the first DBMS manages synchronization, SQL interpretation, queryoptimization, and transaction serialization, the load on the second server is farsmaller than on the first. As a result people who have two or more large scaledatabase applications usually split them between two servers using crossoverreplication to ensure continuity. Consider, for example, two application suites,say an ERP and an HRIS running on servers A and B respectively. Thus serverA will have the primary ERP database and the HRIS replicant while server Bwill have the primary HRIS database and the ERP replicant. Should a primaryhost fail, the other server will then carry both loads using the surviving andreplicant databases until the database management systems resync when thefailed primary is brought back on line..

Chapter 5

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From a human perspective the IP addressing approach translates the human“winface.com” to the machine’s “216.94.64.226” and the rest of the protocol’s

operations are invisible.

From a machine perspective packets are routed to ethernet addresses usingdomain names and IP addresses only as direction finders. The actual linkageinformation needed to make this work is disseminated across the internet usingrouter software acting under protocols like RIP2 - Routing Information ProtocolV2- and within local networks using ARP - Address Resolution Protocol.

Subnets and netmasks

Technically an IP address carries two meanings: it defines a network and itidentifies hosts on that network. Thus a.b.c.0 identifies a network of up to 255hosts (devices) all of whose IP addresses begin with a.b.c.

Suppose you have two workgroups, either physically separate or just peoplewith different needs and agendas. Traffic is to flow from one of these groups tothe other via a router but, within each group, all traffic is to flow to all machines- which will then inspect packets to see if they’re addressed to themselves.

Getting this to work requires creation of a subnet - breaking a network classlike a.b.c.0 into two or more pieces.

Subnets are defined by reference to the underlying binary interpretation of thefour numbers in an IP address. “To mask” means to apply a logical “AND” tothe binary digits revealed when both the “subnet mask” and the base addressof the IP class are expressed in binary.

Thus the 240 in the subnet mask 255.255.255.240 translates as “11110000”and has the literal meaning that only the last four bits of the address classexpressed in binary define local hosts. Packets in which those bits are not setare therefore accepted by the router for transmission to other nets or subnetsand packets in which those bits are set only circulate locally.

In practice this often gets quite esoteric - the “right answers” on the latest(January, 2003) CISCO Admin exam are technically incorrecta but mostpeople don’t need to know the details, just that it can be done and what it does.

a. See: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Routers/Q_20430870.html

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In 1969 the more widely accepted solutions to the problem of co-ordinating datausage among applications and development teams were accreted around theimposition of tight process control, requirements for additional documentation,the use of “structured” programming, and extensive data and process flowdiagramming..

Using a format adapted from that developed for the analysis of industrialprocesses by time and motion experts in the nineteen twenties and thirties, thesediagramming methods generally linked data, user processes, and ultimatelyCOBOL paragraphs using highly stylized pictographs.

By the mid seventies one of these, a dialect known as “entity relationshipmodelling,” had become well established as the leading methodology. Ten yearslater the PC’s ability to do on-screen graphics allowed E-R diagramming to

Procedural and non-procedural languages

The COBOL code fragment

PROCEDURE DIVISION.

BEGIN.

SORT WorkFile ON ASCENDING KEY WSCORE

INPUT PROCEDURE IS GetScore

GIVING ScoresFile.

STOP RUN.

embeds a call to a procedure called GetScore which reads each record, movesover 17 spaces from the left of the record, and writes the next four charactersout as rows in WorkFile for later sorting and eventual output as ScoresFile.

In principle “procedural” languages like COBOL are imperative - specifyingboth what to do and how to do it. By extension “non-procedural” languageslike SQL are declarative and only specify what to do, not how to do it.

In practice most “non procedural” languages, including SQL, use proceduresand the real difference lies in the absence or presence of locally defined codelike the example above to read and structure the input data before use.

Be aware, however, that many data processing professionals regard thisdistinction as important and meaningful so it’s usually best to just smile andmove on when they use the terminology.

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The biggest difference was in security servers, where Linuxsystems cost $91,000 over five years and Windows systems cost$70,000, IDC said. Next came print jobs, where a Linux servercost $107,000 over five years and a Windows server cost$87,000. In file sharing, Linux cost $114,000 to Windows’$99,000. In Web site jobs, Linux was less expensive at $31,000to Windows’ $32,0001

Bear in mind that the Linux software is free - and that no one has yet found asignificant security bug in its file and print services, firewalls or email services.

ExampleFour

Total Cost of Application Ownership (the Tolly Group2)

This study by the Tolly Group compares the cost of application delivery usingtwo architectures:

1 Traditional client server with rackmounts in the data center and Windows2000 desktop PC clients; and,

2 Traditional client server with rackmounts in the data center and Windows2000 desktop PC clients running Citrix ICA clients.

Under the Citrix ICA deployment strategy the desktop client runs as a terminalto a Windows 2000 instance emulated on a server. Notice that this turns thedesktop PC into a terminal while requiring extra server resources by duplicatingthe PC’s computational and data storage functions on the server.

Citrix technology started out as means of showing Windows desktops on Unixsmart displays, but later became a means of using Windows desktop machinesranging in scale from tablets running Microsoft Windows CE (known as thinclients) to high end PCs running Windows 2003/XP (known as fat clients) toremotely access simulations of other Windows desktop machines running onWindows servers.

This odd arrangement can offer value in two kinds of situations:

1 If the desktop application is extremely unstable, then moving it into aserver co-located with the support organization can reduce support costsby reducing the time needed for service personnel to access and reboot themachine; and,

1. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-975938.html?tag=fd_top

2. http://www.precisiongroup.com/TCA1Whitepaper.pdf

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What made the difference, in terms of the software and the conflicts generated,was the inclusion of the financial systems in the optimization package. From anoptimization perspective this made sense because a lot of the data needed forinventory management and production cost optimization is naturally found inthe financial systems. Adding direct links to the GL, Payroll, and Purchasingapplications thus greatly simplified overall processing.

Within most companies, however, the sales, warehousing, and productionpeople see themselves as the people who make the money. As a result MRPIIsystems are usually relatively easy to implement because people who seethemselves contributing directly to the organization’s success are generallyhappy to work with others seen as contributing equally.

In contrast, most production people see Finance people as freeloaders who justmake, and try to enforce, rules while treating production people as layoff targets.

Thus getting production people to work with Finance on the implementation ofan ERP system can be very difficult because the production people aren’tusually willing to the cross the us-vs.-them cultural barrier that needs to bebridged between the producers and the bookkeepers.

Nevertheless ERP was the natural outgrowth of MRPII and nothing could stopthe logic of its adoption once the hardware and software conditions for its arrivalwere in place.

On the hardware and cost side what made the difference was Digital’s 1977introduction of the VAX 780; IBM’s later response with the revival of the futuresystems project as the System 38; and the 1980 introduction of the VAX 11/750.

The System 38 was not widely accepted, but the VAX was a major hit withacademics and spin-off software developers. With low cos,t 32bit memoryaddressing, and good floating point performance, the Vax allowed developers toinclude on-line optimization in schedule and related MRP processing.

Thus when the small and cheap, but remarkably powerful, Vax 750 becameavailable in late 1980, many developers were ready with advanced shop floorand warehouse management systems that could be linked together to formMRPII systems.

The consequent rapid growth in small system MRPII installations drove bigcompany data centers to try to re-assert control by moving to consolidated ERPsystems despite the technical and organizational complexities of doing so.

398

••••••

HTML pages presenting information about the product and an HTML orderform enabling the customer to provide shipping, quantity, and paymentinformation.

Is it paranoid to self-report as Windows/IIS while actually using Linux with Apache?

Consider this often corroborated story by John Lettice on theregister.co.uk (aWintel oriented news site) for May 5/03:

Opera Software has accused Microsoft of deliberately engineering the MSNhome page in order to make it look as if the Opera browser has a serious flawin it. And the Norwegian company has published the results of an investigationwhich it says proves this.

Opera’s techies downloaded the page using wget, in three different formats,identifying as Opera 7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01. The files sent to each browserare different, which is not necessarily suspicious, and the one sent to Opera7has less content and is bigger than the one sent to IE. But that is not necessarilysuspicious either.

Where it does get suspicious is when you look at the style sheets MSN sends tothe browsers. The culprit, says Opera, is a 30 pixel value set on the marginproperty in the Opera style sheet. This instructs Opera to move list elements 30pixels to the left of the parent, which means content moves off the side of itscontainer, which means it looks like Opera is broken.

Opera tried to test whether or not this was deliberate by changingidentification to the non-existent browser Oprah. This returns the IE stylesheet, which works perfectly well in Opera. In Opera’s view MSN is thereforelooking specifically for “Opera” in the User-Agent string and sending it abroken style sheet. That, of course, could still be a mistake, as it’s perfectlylogical to send IE as the default if the browser can’t be identified. But as therewas no need for MSN to design an Opera-specific style sheet in the first place,one wonders.

* The Reg, incidentally, is regularly baffled by being unable to find stuff onMicrosoft TechNet using Opera, because yet again we’ve forgotten that forsome bizarre reason, lots of results from there in IE can equal no results at allin Opera. We’ve no idea whether this is a plot or not, either. Or indeed whethersomebody might have fixed it by now.

Numerics100baseT 2882b+c 1123/160 1603270 emulation 157327X CRT 47327X emulation 604th generation 325702/705 series 1680287 1588086 1198088 119

AA Mathematical Theory of

Communication 276A Relational Model of Data for Large

Shared Data Banks 315abends 49Access free form reporting language 97access laye 296Acoustic Couplers 285Ad Hoc Query tools 97Address Resolution Protocol 68, 294ADQ 97ADT 318aiResearch 153Alberta 213Alternet 298Altos 163Amdahl 21, 70American Microsystems inc 153Anatomy of a buffer overflow attack 305Anderson 299anti-trust case against IBM 21anti-virus and related products 304AO 17Apache web server 291APL 29APLSV 212Apple IIe 155Apple Lisa 56Appletalk and Appleshare 163application appliance information systems

architecture 91application integration 318application level 296arithmetic co-processor 158ARP 68, 294AS/400 107ASCII 17Ashton-Tate 324Assembler 18assessing RAID arrays 263AT&T Bell-Labs 155Atanasoff 15Atari 154audit process 13automated clerking 9Automated Tape Library 77automatic data processing 15

BBachmann 49backplane interconnect 266Backus 20Barry 337baseband 288BASIC 20, 155BBN 284BCNF 327Bea Systems 268Bemer 20benchmarks 270Berkeley 212Berkeley Software Distribution 212best route 311bit - or binary digit 22blade server 147, 170block mode 99blue book 299Boolean logic 17boot server 149Boyce 323Boyce-Codd Normal Form 327Boyce-Codd normal form 106Brewin 175Bricklin 157Bryce 12

409

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410

••••••

BSD 199, 212BSD ports 290BSD sockets 290Buchholz 15buffer overflow attack 305bullwhip 378, 379Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project

17Burroughs 15bus mastering 120Business Basic 222Business Continuity Plan 77business intelligence and other predictive

functions 92

Ccable and adsl modems are not modems

284Cache 121cache memory 19CAD CAM 160CADC 153Canadian information Processing Society

308capacity plan 58Capacity planning 44card image 11Carrier Sense, Multiple Access/Collision

Detection 289cat-5 288Catalyst 319CDC 24CDE 200census 12centralized processing wqith decentralized

control 205Cerf, 284CERT -the Computer Emergency

Response Team 298Chamberlin 323character mode 99Chen 322Chief Information Officers 9Chief Technology Officers 9CICS 47

CIPS 308Citrix Systems 292Citrix Systems, 166Classless inter domain routing (CIDR 296clerical automation 9click and drool 303client-server 148client-server application access steps 149Clustering 261CMS 35, 211CoBiT 57CoBiT Framework 57COBOL 18CODASYL 20Codd 315co-evolution of hardware 4columns 322Common Business Oriented Language 20common data naming 319Common Development Environmen 200Compag DeskPro 160Component Load Balancing 270Computer Assisted Design 160Computer Assisted Manufacturing 160Computerworld 63Computing- Tabulating-Recording

Company (C-T-R) 12Conference on Data System Languages 20Conseco Finance Corp 173Consent Decree 21Control Program/ Monitor 154Conzetti et al 30Corbató 211core 22Core storage 22Cortada 316cost function drives speciation 201CP layer 33CP/M 154CP/M86 162CPF 319CPF, predecessor to OS/400 109Cray 24CREATIVE COMPUTING 159Cruft Laboratory 17

CSMA/CD 289CTSS 208Cutler 166

DDARPA 68Dartmouth college 20data center organiztaional practices 75data flow diagramming 55data processing 13data silos 54database normalization 322Datatron 15David 150DB2, 324DBMS 313DDL (Data Definition Language) 328DDP-516 mini-compute 284Decision Support system 97Decwriter 120 95degree of a relation 327Desktop services 147De-synchronization 378De-Synchronization Risk 378diagramming 50Digital Equipment 70Digital Equipment Corporation 152Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 95Digital Research Corp 154Dijkstra 319disaster plan 58display postscript 199distribution switch 118Ditto 174DM512 97DMA 73DML (data management (manipulation)

language) 321DML (Data Manipulation (management)

Language) 328DoD 5200.28-STD 300DoD Color Book OS security Ratings 299domain for that attribute 321domain name 68domain names 293

DPS gear 218DQL (Data Query Language 328DSS 97Dun & Bradstreet Financials 149Dunwell 15

EE1 112earliest Unix application 209EBCDIC 17ECC 276Eckert-Mauchly 20EDI gateway 222EIS 97EMACs 214engine 36enterprise resource planning 327entity-relationship 50entity-relationship model 322Equan 343ER diagram 55ERP 327ERP and supply chain applications 378error correction code 276ESCON 73Ethernet 68

Distributed Packet-Switching ForLocal Computer Networks 286

ethernet address 293evergreen policy 181Excel 165Executive Information System 97

Ffailover software 261fault-tolerant 262FICON 73firmware 33First Consulting Group 174Flight Simulator 162Flowmatic 20forms driven model 325Forrester 22FORTRAN 20Fraise 322

411

••••••

412

••••••

Frankston 157Free Software Foundation 213front end processors 95FSF, 213ft-SPARC 265Fujitsu primepower 267futz facto 338

GGates 155GCOS 35GEAC enterprise financial system 149GECOS 35Geller 153GEM 154Gibbs, 338GIS 48Gistics 339Gnome 200GNU 214Go To Statement Considered Harmful,

319goods available for sale quer 93Governance, Control, and Audit for

Information and Related Technology 57granularity 108Griffiths 176

Hhardware interconnects 261header block 289Help desk out-sourcing 150Help desk services 179Herman Hollerith 12hierarchal database 314Hierarchal databases 48high availability systems 262Hitachi 21, 70Holt 153Honeywell 15Honeywell (later Groupe Bull) 25Hopper 16Hot site agreements 77hot swap 262HP N-Class Unix servers 218

HP9810A 305HP-UX 9.04 218hypervisor 32

II.P. Sharp and Associates 284i80286, 119IBM 5100 152IBM Fibre channel 73IBM introduced the 603 and 604 15IBM Lan Manager 163IBM mainframe information systems

architecture 9IBM Program Products 48IBM Tabulator and Summary Punch 316ICA/winframe 292ICL 72IDC 341IDMS 49IDS 49IEEE 802.3 287IEF 56IMP - inter system message processor 284impairment risk 278IMS 48Information Control System (ICS) 48information engineering 56, 322Information Engineering Facility 56information integrity 275information systems architecture 6Information Systems Audit and Control

foundation (ISACF) 57Information Systems Director 9Informix 4GL 222Ingres 324integrated services, digital network 112interactive applications model 95Internal Coupling Facility Processor 72internally redundant hardware 261Internet Protocol 68-Internet Protocol Addressing 292Internet2 298Intertec Superbrain 153invention of the microprocessor 153IP 292

IPL 31IRIX 214ISDN 112iSeries mini-computer 110iSeries Model 890-0198 112ISO/OSI network stack 296Itanium 119Iverson 29, 212IX/370 211

JJacquard loom 12, 316JCL 30, 316

KKapor 157KDE 200Kemeny 20Keyed Sequential Access Method 46keyed sequential access method 313Kildall 154KPMG Nolan Norton 338KSAM 46, 313Kurtz 20

LLAN 112Leyden 307licensing 6.0 181lifekeeper 272Lights out 76line mode 99link layer 296Linux 199lirva 306LISAtools 56litigation threat 310load balancing 261Local Area Network 112Lockdowns 150Locks 108Lossy 280Lotus 1 2 3 157Lotus Domino 341Lotus Notes 60

MMacintosh 155MacOS X 200Macro 18MacXL. 161maintenance programming 45Management Information System) 97Managing your total IT cost of ownership,

340Mark Sense 12MC Service Guard 222MC6800 153MC68020 160MCBA 218McIlroy 208McKeown 400MCM 69McMillan 236memory partitioning 34Message oriented middleware 324MetaNeos project 236Metcalf 286microcode 33Microdata 218Microsoft Outlook Server 307Microsoft PC 152middleware 100mini-computer systems 91Minix 208MIPS 70MIPS Computer Systems 70mirror disk 263MIS 97modem 284MOM 324Moore’s law 344Morris 297Motorola 153MQSeries middleware 66Multics 35, 208Muuss 160MVS 33myth of responsibility in software 203

413

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414

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NNAS 171National Computer Security Center

(NCSC) 300NCD 166NCR 15, 163NDIS 295Nelson 97Netbeui 164netmasks 294Network Attached Storage 171network based machine operating system

215Network Databases 49Network Device Interface Specification

295Network Environment Windowing System

199Network File System 163network file system (NFS) 297Network Load Balancing 270Networking and security 283NeWS 199NeXtSte 200NFS 163nibble 305NIC. 295non lossy 280NOP 121Northrop Aircraft 15Novell cards 163NT 4.0, 166

OOC/3 112on-line query environment 47Open Software Foundation 213operating system 29Opteron 119Oracle DBA 329Oracle financials 327ORDBMS 106order reconciliation 101OS/2 165

OS/2 Warp 165OS/360-MFT 33OS/360-MVT 33OS/360-PCP 33OSF 213Ossanna 208

Ppacket 287packet switching 285paging 23partitiioning and virtualization with Unix

202partitioning 34PC/AT 157PC-DOS 162PCI 120PC-Magazine 162PDP-11 209PDP-11/70 291Pentium pro 119Peripheral Component Interconnect 120PICK 97PICK emulator for Unix 222Pike 215Pioneer I 276Plan 9 215Polivka 212Postgres 332PowerPC architectur 117PR/SP primary boot layer 33primary control document for Windows

175Principles of Operations Research 236Procedural and non-procedural 320process documentation 58productivity advantage 339PROFS 297Programmer/analyst Credentials 62proliferation 170public switching 285Public Utility Customer Information

Control System 47

RRACF 300rackmounts 147Radio Shack 155RAID 264RAM, or random access memory 23RAS 70Raymond 214RDBMS 106, 313RDBMS Internal functions and

components 330RDBMS licenses 331receiving 92Rectangular Hysteresis Loop 23registered trademarks 2relational database management system

106Relational Database Management Systems

313Relational Terminology - part 1

tables and columns 321relations 321release early, release often 213reliability of service 70Remington Rand 20Remote Access Control Facility 300remote job entry 60remote procedure calls 296replication 268report 97resume shown earlier contains technical

errors 65Rigid role separation 44RIP 68RIP2 294Ritchie 208RJE 60rogue points of access 175Role documentation 58Routing Information Protocol 294Routing information protocol 68Royce 50RPC 296RPG (Report Generator) 319

RPN - reverse polish notation 305RS-232c 283R-system 319RTX (real time Unix) 299Rutgers 213

SSafetyJet 231SAN 170SAP Canada Inc 176Satellite Software 157scheduler 31schema 321Schuff 150Schwartz 303script kiddies 303SDLC 43SDM70 50Self timed interconnect 73separation of functions 58separation of responsibilities 58SEQUEL 323serial port 283Serialization 108serialization in SQL execution 328server and staff proliferation 170Server Cluster 270servers 147Service Assist Processors 72service level agreement 57service marks 2Shannon 275Shared services 147shibboleth 97SLA 57Slime Head 6smart display 111SMB 150SMB/NetBIOS 164Smith et al 340SMP 71SNA 60sneaker net 162Soltis 107spanning tree 311

415

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416

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Speciation, 4SQL - structured query language 322SQL (structured query language) i 106SQL execution engine 332SQL stored procedures 168SQL triggers and stored procedures 332SQL-NET 169SQL-Slammer 302SSP 107St. Louis 150Stallman 213Star 8010 155STI 73Storage Area Network 170stove pipe diagrams 54straight through processing 31strategic process error 281striping 262Structured Programming 319Subnets and netmasks 294succession 217Sunray 207sunshine reports 179SunView 199swapping 24switch based LAN 311Sybase 169, 332Symmetric Multi-Processing 71Synchronization Risk in ERP/SCM

systems 378Sysplex 61, 267sysplex 60system 7System 36 107System 360 25System 360 vs. Unix 210System 38 107Systems Development Life Cycle

Methodology 43Systems Development Methodology 50systems integrity 275Systems Men 7

TT1 112

tables 322Taking Computers to Task 338Tandy 155Tandy 6000HD 159Taylor 212TCO 337TCP 292teletypes 47terminal access 283The Cathedral and the Bazaar 214the economics of systems security 299The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing

System 208the network is the compute 208the Tabulating Machine Co 12Thompson 208three tier 148time slice 31Token ring 163Token ring? TCP/IP 68Toronto 176Total Cost of Ownership 337TPC detailed disclosure documents 267tpc.org 270TPM 261trade names 2trademarks 2Traf-O-Dat 155transaction processing monitor 268transaction processing monitors 261transactions processing council 270transport control leve 296Transport Control Protocol 68transport control protocol 292TRS-80, 155Tru64 214TrueBasic 20Trusted Computer Systems Evaluation

Criteria 300tuple 321TX signal 284

UUART 95UCB 212

Unicode 17Unify Corporation 325UNIVAC 20universal asynchronous receive transmit

95Universe 222Unix and Open Source 199Unix to Unix Copy 213Usenet 213Ushe 236UTP-5 288UTS Global 211UUCP 213UUnet 296

VValue Added Network 222VAN 222VAX 104VAX Units of Processing 70Virtual Address eXtension 104virtual tour of a mid-range mainframe

cente 59virtualization 34Visicalc 153, 157VisiPlot 157Vita Nuova 215VM 34VSAPL 212VT102 93VT103 93VUPS 70Vyssotsky 211

WWagner 236Wait States 121WAN 112Wang 157waterfall model 50

Watson Scientific Laboratory 20WebSphere 117white papers 342wide area network 112Wi-Fi 175Windows 2000 Advanced Server 151Windows 2000 Server has an integrated

TPM 270Windows 3.1 167Windows 3.11 167Windows for Work Groups 167Windows LANS 167Windows NT 166Windows WANS 167wireless LAN 175WordPerfect 157WordStar 153worm 298Wyse 91

XX.12 and X.400 series 285X.25 286X/Open 213x86 119Xenix 158Xenix on the PC 163Xeon 119X-windows 199

Zz800 69z900 69Zilog Z80A 153Zloof 325zOS 35zSeries 2064-216 60Zuse 15zVM 35

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418

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B

ISB

usiness Information Technology

N 0-9689004-0-2

52995

This book is designed for people who interact with, but do not want to become,professional information systems staff. It is a management guide to informationsystems for auditors, executives, and business owners who want to understand theissues and know how to resolve them.

Most of the time these decisions call for an understanding of how and why variousplayers support various options and what the consequences of going along withthem are likely to be. As a result this book is as much a field guide to the players asit is a guide to their technologies.

As a manager, business owner, or management advisor you will often find yourselfhaving to make tough decisions in situations where systems professionals peopleeither hold conflicting opinions or seem to have considered only the alternativethey’re most comfortable with. Whether what’s at stake is Sarbanes-Oxleycompliance or a strategic business opportunity doesn’t matter: it’s their field andtheir professional vocabulary, but it’s your decision and you, not they, will wear theresult.

Preparing you for situations like these is the most fundamental thing this book isabout. Not just helping you past the jargon barrier so their vocabulary doesn’t leaveyou locked out; but getting right to the hard core of the issue: helping youunderstand the real relationship between their ideas about computing and thebusiness problem your organization is trying to solve.

Read this book carefully and you’ll understand that systems decisions aren’t usuallyabout bits, bytes, or megahertz, but about people and the way their ideas andinteractions affect your organization’s ability to do its job.

Talk the talk, but understand the people: that’s the hidden lesson from ninty yearsof business data processing - understand it, and making smarter systems decisionswill become part of your professional repetoire.

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