Mainframe Update

Move over Google Docs, IBM’s back in the game!

2012-01-29T10:18:00.000Z

Over the years, Microsoft has controlled the Office market – with Word and Excel being used everyday by millions of people. Even schools are teaching children to copy and paste etc using the familiar Microsoft products that they most likely also use at home.

People may fondly remember WordPerfect or VisiCalc, or may have tried OpenOffice and other alternatives to Microsoft, but for most organizations, the de facto standard has been MS Office.

And then, as the world became aware of cloud computing, those freethinkers at Google gave us GoogleDocs – an online equivalent for the basic Office functions. And the big advantage was that you could access your files from whichever computer you were on (provided you had Internet connectivity). There was no excuse about bringing the wrong memory stick and not having a copy of the document. I use the GoogleDoc plug-in to Office so that my files are stored in the cloud in case I need something at a client’s site.

Of course, Microsoft also has a cloud-based version of its Office suite called Microsoft Office 365.

But now IBM has thrown its hat in the ring. It has announced the beta of IBM Docs, which is tied into its SmartCloud for Social Business Suite. So how does IBM hit the ground running with its own Office suite? Well, it got its hands on Lotus Smartsuite in 1995, when it also got Lotus Notes.

IBM Docs allows organizations to collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. The plan is that there will only be a Web-based solution – no need for any browser plug-ins. In addition, its LotusLive has been rebadged as SmartCloud for Social Business. This provides users with easy access to social networking, file sharing, meetings, e-mail, calendars, and instant messaging.

The Web site at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/lotus+greenhouse/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs says: “IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite for working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations – together – in the cloud. With IBM Docs there is no desktop software. You only need a browser and an account, and you are able to easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM Docs is simple yet powerful – letting you get started quickly, but delivering the advanced features you need.

Once you’ve signed up, you can create and share documents, you can comment on documents, and you can assign parts of documents to teams to complete. In effect, everything you would look for in a cloud-based Office equivalent. Does it provide workflow features like Microsoft’s SharePoint? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Will it work? It will be interesting to see. The linking with social networking is something that many enterprise organisations will find beneficial. There’s certainly room for another heavyweight to enter the fray. And it should be beneficial for us users if the big players offer more-and-more facilities for us to use as a way of keeping our interest and our business.

I’m sure we’ll be getting far more information about this initiative (and it is still in beta), but I thought it was worth noting now. Personally, I’d like to see a cloud version of the Adobe suite – InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, etc.

More data stored off mainframes – user survey finding

2012-01-23T09:31:00.002Z

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 is now available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook12 – and it’s FREE. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting. And this year, for the very first time, survey respondents indicated that, at their sites, more data was stored off mainframes than on.

This surprising result came from the 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati Web site between 1 November and 2 December 2011. 40% were from Europe and 50% from North America, with 10% from the rest of the world.

46% of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide, while 10% of respondents had 0-200 staff, 6% had 201-1000, 28% had 1001 to 5000, and 10% had 5001-10,000 staff. In terms of MIPS, 34% of respondents had fewer than 1000 MIPS installed, 40% fell into the mid-sized category between 1000 and 10,000 MIPS, and 26% were at the high end.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. Larger, more mature businesses (above 10,000 MIPS) were almost all experiencing some growth, but predominantly in 0 to 10% per year category. Sites in the 1000-10,000 MIPS range were showing a range of results with some sites suggesting a decline while others predicted growth of up to 50%. Sites below 1000 MIPS were experiencing a more complex future, with most expecting a small growth, but almost as many expecting no growth or negative growth (a business-speak euphemism for decline). The mainframe market does appear to be quite fragmented with competitive pressures at the lower end of the mainframe market, and some respondents commented about lack of understanding amongst management about the value of mainframe computing.

It was interesting to see that 6% of respondents had the zEnterprise z114s, with 19% having the z196s models installed. I expect that future surveys we’ll ask how sites are making use of the extra features on these models. Previous surveys have shown that there is a willingness amongst mainframes (especially larger ones) to purchase new models as they become available. In order to benefit from the new features

The big talking point during 2011 was cloud computing and whether mainframers really have been doing it since the 1960s and the impact of offering software (and anything else) as a service. The survey asked whether respondents currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Just 12% (up from last year’s 2%) of respondents said they did. 34% said they didn’t, and the rest weren’t sure. It’s still early days for a cloud computing initiative to move off the PowerPoint slides and into the business environment, so the survey asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 40% said they weren’t at present. Just 18% thought some mainframe applications would be cloud-enabled in the future. It will be interesting to follow these figures in future surveys.

The survey asked respondents which specialty processors (IFL, zIIP, and zAAP) they had. 16% of sites had all three (up from last year’s value of 6%) and a further 20% of sites had two of the three specialty processors (down from last year’s 28%). More sites had zIIP processors (48%) than any other. 36% had IFL processors, and 30% had zAAP specialty processors. 28% of sites don’t have a specialty processor installed.

The survey inquired about what proportion of enterprise data resides on the mainframe and what on other platforms. This produced, for the first year ever, the surprising result that more than half of the respondents use other platforms to manage the lion’s share of their corporate data. 44 percent of sites surveyed have more data on their mainframes, whereas 56 percent of the sites surveyed have more data stored on other platforms. Unfortunately, the survey was unable to drill down to find out why, but we can speculate that it may simply be the growth of data associated with the non-mainframe side of the business. It could be a result of the quantity of e-mails that organizations store for their staff. It could be that non-mainframe data is less well managed and ‘spreads’ into larger data sizes. Perhaps non-mainframe databases are less space efficient. Or maybe, people just create and save Excel spreadsheets and Word documents on Windows servers, where they wouldn’t keep equivalent files on mainframes. Or perhaps sites move their mainframe archive data off the mainframe, but still have it available online on, for example, a Linux distributed system. I’d be interested to hear yiour views on this.

The comments in the survey identified management ignorance of the power and benefits of using a mainframe. This is now a perennial reason given for the decline in mainframe computing within organizations. But cost was also highlighted as a factor mitigating against the successful growth of mainframe computing. One respondent suggested, “software costs are sinking the mainframe”.

Anyway, full details of the responses to many other questions can be found in the user survey section of the Yearbook. It’s well worth a read.

The Yearbook can only be free to mainframers because of the support given by sponsors. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 has been published

2012-01-14T12:42:00.000Z

Every year, about this time, mainframe users are excited to get their hands on the latest edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. What makes the Yearbook stand out is that it’s an excellent reference work for all IBM mainframe professionals – no matter how many years of experience they have.

What makes this annual publication so important? The answer is that it provides a one-stop shop for everything a mainframer needs to know. For example, the technical specification section includes model numbers, MIPS, and MSUs for zEnterprise processors (z196s and z114s). There’s also a hardware timeline, and a display of mainframe operating system evolution.

In addition, there’s the glossary of terminology section explaining simply what all those acronyms stand for, but in a way that means you can understand them.

One section provides a media guide for IBM mainframers. This includes information on newsletters, magazines, user groups, blogs, and social networking information resources for the z/OS environment. Amongst the things it highlights are zJournal, INSIGHT-SPECTRA, IBM Listservs, SHARE’s Five Minute Briefing on the Data Center, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn discussions. As well as user groups such as SHARE and IDUG.

The vendor directory section contains an up-to-date list of vendors, consultants, and service providers working in the z/OS environment. There’s a summary of the products they supply and contact information. There are a number of new organizations in the list this year, and, sadly, a few familiar names have ceased trading.

The mainframe strategy section contains articles by industry gurus and vendors on topics such as: Why incremental process-driven IT modernization is relevant for your business; Network management for the modern data centre; Next-generation mainframe management; Best practices for application release management; Peeling the onion of SFTP: options for securing file transfer to and from z/OS.

For many people the highlight each year is the mainframe user survey. This illustrates just what’s been happening at users’ sites. It’s a good way for mainframers to compare what they are planning to do with what other sites have done. I will be looking at some of the survey highlights in my next blog.

The other great thing about the Yearbook – as far as many of the 15,000 people who download it are concerned – is that it is completely FREE.

It can only be free because some organizations have been prepared to sponsor it or advertise in it. This year’s sponsors were: CA Technologies, Serena Software, Software AG, Software Diversified Services (SDS), Type80 Security Software, and William Data Systems.

To see this year's Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, click on www.arcati.com/newyearbook12. If you don't want to download a large PDF, again this year, each section is available as a separate PDF file.

Don't miss out on this excellent publication.

SharePoint 2007 site collection auditing

2012-01-08T10:03:00.000Z

We start the year with another in ourseries of SharePoint hints and tips from our expert Darren Pritchard.This time he’s looking at how to sucessfully audit SharePoint sitecollections.

To enable/disable SharePoint auditing:

Open the site that you wish to audit
Click ‘Site Actions’
Select ‘Site Settings’
Click ‘Modify All Site Settings’
Under ‘Site CollectionAdministration’ you have ‘Site collection audit settings’
You would see Figure 1.
Here you can select what you wish toaudit
Be very careful, SharePointwill not automatically purge these audit logs. They willcontinue to grow as long as they are enabled. I have seen contentdatabases with 80GB of audit files!

Figure 1: Configure Audit settings page

To trim audit files:

Create the batch file shown in Figure 2. Note: CONTENTDATABASE is the name ofthe database within SQL.
Save it as ‘Purge Audit Logs.bat’
This will need to be run on yourSharePoint Web frontend server as an Administrator. Do not be alarmedif it takes a little while to run. The time it takes depends on theamount of audit logs you are trying to trim.

SET STSADM="c:\ProgramFiles\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web ServerExtensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"

%stsadm% -o trimauditlog -date -databasename 

Pause

Figure 2: Purge Audit Logs.bat

I would suggest running this on asystem without users because it may have an impact on performance.

If you have large amounts of audit logfiles, I would recommend running the trim command on a month’sworth of audit logs at a time. The SQL transaction log file will growvery large during the trim process.

Once you have trimmed the audit logsyou will need to run a shrink database task within SQL to reclaim thespace used during the trim process.

I'd like to thank Darren for his continuing contributions, and a happy New Year toeveryone.

2011 at iTech-Ed Ltd

2011-12-18T10:09:00.000Z

Well, as another year comes partying to an end, and everyone stops checking their e-mails on their smartphones or tablets and finally starts to let their hair down and enjoy a glass of something alcoholic, I thought I’d review the year through the lens of my company – iTech-Ed Ltd (www.itech-ed.com).

January started the year, as most Januaries do, with the publication of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. The 2011 edition is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. The 2012 edition will be available in a couple of weeks. As always the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook includes its annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. And each year, it gets downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals.

February saw the launch of the new series of Virtual IMS user group meetings. The user group is now sponsored by Fundi Software and hosted at www.fundi.com/virtualims. The first speaker was Jim Martin from Fundi Software, whose presentation was called, “Solving the problem when IMS isn't the cause”.

In March, everyone seemed to be talking about cloud computing.

April’s meeting of the Virtual IMS user group included a presentation from Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software. His talk was called, “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”.

In May, Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd and I took part in a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’ section of CA’s May Mainframe Madness month. May also witnessed the launch of the new Virtual CICS user group – again sponsored by Fundi – with its Web site at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. Our opening presentation was from Fundi’s Jim Martin talking about, “Solving the problem when CICS isn't the cause”.

In June, I was asked by ITToolbox to lead a discussion in the Data Center Infrastructure section of their Web site. At the Virtual IMS user group meeting, Gary Weinhold a Systems Engineer and Verna Bartlett Head of Marketing with Data Kinetics talked about, “MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications”.

In July, I was selected for the Destination z (www.destinationz.org/) member spotlight. The Virtual CICS user group saw a presentation from Jeff Geminder, Principal Consultant with CA, called, “Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack”. I was also a guest blogger on the Destination z Web site.

In August, my article CICS Top Performance and Tuning Issues was published in z/Journal. I had a guest blog published on Destination z. The Virtual IMS user group had a presentation from Scott Quillicy, CEO and Founder of SQData. His talk was called, “IMS replication for high-availability”.

For the September meeting, Charles Jones, from the Product Management group at Rocket Software, gave a talk to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. I wrote a guest blog for the Destination z Web site.

October saw a presentation from Rosemary Galvan, Principal Software Consultant – IMS, with BMC. Her talk to the Virtual IMS user group was called, “Database Performance – Could Have, Should Have, Would Have”. I had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

In November, my Mainframe Update blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com was a finalist in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011. Also in November the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey was launched. And Eugene S Hudders, president of C\TREK Corp, gave a presentation to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS Performance – Tuning LSR Pools”. I also had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

And finally, in December, I had an article entitled, Ways to Save Money and Improve IT Services published in z/Journal. The final speaker for the year at the Virtual IMS user group was Suzie Wendler, a Consulting IT Specialist in the IBM IMS Advanced Technical Skills organization, who talked about, “IMS V12”. I chaired a webinar for SQData entitled, “How Important is Continous Availability of Critical Applications to Your Company?”And there was a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

What else, well apart from a full year of writing and consultancy work, I was made an IBM Champion for the third year running.

Looking forward to 2012, we have the launch of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook in January, and a presentation from Andrew Smithson of IBM Hursley on CICS Transaction Gateway V8.1 for the Virtual CICS user group.

If you do celebrate it, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll be back blogging in January.
Trevor Eddolls

Sunk without trace

2011-12-11T10:14:00.001Z

There was a time when using the trace facility was really the final strategy. You’d perhaps have tried everything else to find what was going wrong first. And when nothing seemed to have worked, you’d equip yourself with all the necessary manuals – and that could be quite a few – and run the trace and start the hard job of interpreting the results. And then try to fix the problem. Those days are long gone thanks to more modern software tools, but, to many people, the memories linger on!

I recently bumped into William Data Systems’ Tony Amies, who took the time to show me some of the things he was working on. And one of those things was making trace much, much, more user friendly.

Tony showed me WDS’s ZEN product, which, as you may know, allows lots of network monitoring information to be collated and viewed from anywhere using a browser. Information can appear as coloured boxes, which once you clicked on them display more-and-more information in a clever drill-down manner. Fairly quickly, you can identify the component that has exceeded some predetermined threshold.

WDS has a number of products in the ZEN family and you can use buttons on the browser to switch between them – giving you information about different aspects of performance. ZIM the ZEN IP MONITOR can detect error conditions, then ZEN TRACE and SOLVE (ZTS – which used to be called EXIGENCE) can be used to start, stop, and view traces. Now that has got to be so much easier than in the Old Days!

Tony showed how a TCP trace could be carried out in seconds, explaining that there were lots of commands embedded in it. Tony explained how network tracing can be so difficult. For example, using Enterprise Extender, which allows SNA applications to run over TCP networks, results in encapsulated messages. Tony demonstrated software that was able to look inside the message to see what was there – in terms of different types of header. He then explained how this works with FMH5, UDP, IP, APPN, HPR, and more. He explained that sites using the Cisco load balancing GRE tunnelling protocol can also be opened to see the true header for the message. All very clever stuff – and no manuals in sight.

In fact, on a number of occasions a right mouse click on some information in the display would produce a pop-up box explaining exactly what some term or other actually meant. So there was no need for any manuals. The display could show delays, highlight response time problems, and the TCP window size.

Tony also showed me a piece of software that drew a diagram of a Sysplex Distributor – which shows the IP addresses and links on a mainframe system. The software also highlighted where there were issues. And, like the rest of the software we looked at, you could drill down to find exactly where any problem were. In fact, Tony was sure that this would allow customers to identify potential issues before their users did. Behind the scenes, information from netstat and other commands were being used to drive the display.

We talked about customers being able to build business service views of what was going on their system and how useful that would be for each of their customers. That kind of bespoke requirement wasn’t something that Tony could necessarily build into the software, but all it requires is a knowledge of REXX to make it happen. And most z/OS sites have at least one person who code in REXX.

Lastly, we talked about problem resolution when you have two or more systems that don’t seem to be talking to each other. Currently, you need to log into each system and run traces to find out which of the systems has the problem. Tony plans to implement a ‘grouptrace’ feature that allows the user to tell the software to run a trace on these two (or more) systems. The results will come back from both systems and be visible from the browser. The results will be displayed in timestamp order and it will be possible to see on which of the systems the problem is. As easy that.

Too often we’d be sunk without a trace facility. Now we have an example of a way to be able to use trace across multiple systems and simply click to drill down to identify the problem.

The future - gamification and augmented reality

2011-12-04T10:34:00.001Z

I remember many years ago saying to my children that one day, when they walked around London or any capital city, they’d be able to hold up their phone in front of a statue or building and information would appear on screen explaining what the statue commemorated, etc.

But how about if you could hold up your phone in front of the mainframe or some x86 server, and on screen would appear statistics about usage and performance? You could then take appropriate action to resolve hot spots and capacity issues. All just a dream? Apparently not.

Beverley Head’s blog at IT Wire (www.itwire.com/cloud-computing/51364-bmc-sniffs-out-next-generation-tools) from last week suggests that BMC is exploring how it can harness gamification and augmented reality techniques in the next generation of its systems management tools. Beverley reports Suhas Kelkar, a chief technology officer for BMC, describing the server example I gave above. Suhas adds: “If someone comes across an intelligent solution they should add it to the knowledge base. But hardly anyone does it. But what if you gamify the system and reward people for doing that?”

So there we have it... Augmented reality is the appearance on your phone of information about server capacity. And it could be about anything else. Wouldn’t it be great to hold your phone over a cable and read off the upstream and downstream broadband speeds?

Gamification – a new word, so try to drop into conversations, if you want to sound up-to-date – then is the fun part of using software. The part that is all too often missing!

Interestingly, I found an article about gamification from back in May this year at www.dnitza.com/2011/05/21/gamifcation-making-fun-of-the-web/. Daniel Nitsikopoulos talks about “Gamification: Making fun of the web”. He asserts that: “Gamification is one of the newest and I believe one of the biggest movements in the creative world today. It is the concept that you can apply game mechanics (elements that make games fun, engaging, and in some cases competitive) to things that aren’t typically considered a game, or even fun! From work, to health, to socialising, to cooking, to just about anything!”

So if BMC is looking at gamification and augmented reality, you can bet CA Technologies is as well. And that other big software supplier, IBM! But I would bet that the really exciting stuff is going to come from smaller companies. And I would also predict that these smaller companies will one-by-one be swallowed up by the existing software giants.

It definitely gets my vote as a direction I’d like technology to move in. Some equivalent to Google Goggles that not only identifies what you’re looking at (the Web server, or the z/Linux LPAR, or whatever) and provides current performance information. And then makes it fun to resolve any problems that might have been identified. Maybe when you look at the x86 server, it appears in red if there are issues. Then the length of time you take to resolve the problem is entered onto a leader board. And at the end of the week you can see who is the fastest techie in your team! Or perhaps the only green screen you’ll see will mean ‘game over’!

Managing expectations

2011-11-27T12:11:00.001Z

Have you ever been out for a few drinks with friends. Maybe you’ve had more to drink than usual. What happens next? Well the answer seems to depend on which country you and the people you’re drinking with come from.

It seems that in some countries, people take the view that alcohol is so strong and people are so weak that anything is permissible. You can stand up in court and explain your actions – whatever they may be – by saying that you’d drunk too much. In other countries – like Italy – alcohol is grouped with food in the minds of people. You drink when you eat. You eat and drink with your friends and family. Using the defence of excessive alcohol would seem as absurd as using the defence of having eaten too many burgers to explain antisocial behaviour.

And it’s exactly the same with users. If they expect nanosecond response times to a CICS transaction they will be miffed when a response takes a second or two. Whereas, if they are used to a response taking a few seconds, they will be pleased when it takes less than two seconds for their screen to refresh.

Managing expectations can be the difference between happy users and unhappy users. In the same way it can be the difference between alcoholic destruction of everything on the way home and a great night out.

Banks seem to use the opposite technique. They pretend that they offer great service, but as every customer knows, they don’t. The news is always full of demands that the banks should lone more – particularly to small businesses. Speaking as the owner of a small business, I think this is not the real problem. I think the problem for most small businesses is the fact that banks charge too much for their services.

Now I don’t mind banks charging for the work they do – that’s the same model I use to stay in business! What I object to is the amount they charge. And I think this is part of the problem most small businesses face. For example, here in the UK, I get a lot of dollar cheques from the USA. I get an exchange rate that’s clearly in the bank’s favour and then I get charged for paying the money into my account. I get charged for paying in UK cheques. And I get charged even more for paying in cash!

So I guess my expectations are that banks are going to rip me off. They do nothing to manage that and make things better. And they really are the reason that a lot of small businesses are having a hard time during this recession – or whatever we’re calling it.

Just revisiting the psychology again. There are experiments where two groups of students were given free drinks all evening. Both groups got equally drunk. Then the experimenters explained that one group had drunk alcohol and the other group hadn’t. Once this second group were told they hadn’t had any alcohol, they immediately sobered up. Their expectations changed completely and they now behaved in a different way.

So, while IT strives to offer the best service to its users. It’s important that conversations take place between the two groups so that users can describe their expectations of the service they want to receive, and IT can explain how the service is being delivered and give a realistic idea of what an end user shoould expect. Most sites have SLAs (Service Level Agreements), but these tend to be gathering dust somewhere rather than being constantly referred to. The importance of the conversation is to manage expectations and make sure both groups can continue to work, happy in the knowledge that they are getting or delivering the level of service that everyone expects.

Don’t forget that on Thursday 1 December there’s a webinar entitled: “How Important is the Continuous Availability of Your Critical Applications?” at 2pm GMT. You can register for the event at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/844029904.

And this is the last week that you can complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey at http://www.arcati.com/usersurvey12. We need all the completed surveys by Friday evening.

Continuous availability – no longer a dream?

2011-11-19T15:17:00.001Z

Zero downtime is a goal that many companies are striving for. It sounds so straighforward, and yet it’s not that simple to achieve – especially when it involves the continuous availability of large, high-volume databases. One of the inherent problems is that data replication for high-availability is filled with many nuances that need to be addressed for a successful deployment, including maintaining sub-second latency, active/active considerations, scalability options, conflict detection/resolution, recovery, exception processing, and verifying that the source/target are synchronized properly.

One of the problems that organizations face is the need to address lots of different business issues using, what often involves, multiple software packages. Integrating these different pieces of software – perhaps even from different vendors – can add an extra level of complexity to the job in hand. What those organizations really need is a single piece of software that’s flexible enough to provide a comprehensive solution for changed data capture, replication, enhancing existing ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) processes, and data migrations/conversions. Quite a big ask.

Wouldn’t you be interested in software that offers industrial-strength, near-real-time data integration solutions that include high-performance Changed Data Capture (CDC), data replication, data synchronization, enhanced ETL and business event publishing? And what if it was equally simple to experience the high-speed delivery of mainframe data (IMS, DB2, VSAM, etc) into data warehouses and downstream applications? Too good to be true?

If you’re like me, you carry around a list of capabilities in your head, and tick them off – or more often don’t tick them off – when you give software the once over. So here’s the kind of things I’d have on my list for an integration engine. In general I’d expect:

Concurrent operation across multiple operating system platforms
Multi-step processes within a single script (UNION)
Simultaneous multi-record type file handling
Multi-level array handling (repeating groups) of source data store records/rows
Data filtering and cleansing
Dynamic look-up table processing
Support for data transfer and communication using TCP/IP and MQSeries
Preservation of referential integrity (RI) rules on target updates
Joins/Merges of heterogeneous databases/files.

In terms of data transformation I’d like to see:

Case (If/Else) logic
Extensive date cleansing and formatting
Arithmetic functions (add, subtract, multiply, etc)
Aggregation functions (sum, min, max, avg, etc)
Data type conversions
String functions
Data filtering
XML data formatting
Delimited data formatting.

When it comes to datastore processing I’d want:

High performance bulk data transfer
Concurrent processing of multiple data store types
Creation of target data stores from source data store format
Insert/append to existing target data stores
Update/replace existing target data stores
Delete from existing target data stores
New column/field creation Data Movement.

And for Data Movement, my list includes MQSeries, TCP/IP, and FTP.

If there was also some kind of Integration Center that had an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabling users to quickly develop data integration interfaces from a single control point – that would be good. Additionally, some way to develop, deploy and maintain data interfaces, create relational DDL (Data Definition Language), XML (Extensible Mark-up Language ) and C/C++ structures from COBOL Copybooks, monitor the status of integration engines, and contain an integrated metadata repository – that would be a real plus.

I’d definitely want to find out more about a single piece of software that provided high-performance Changed Data Capture (CDC) and Apply, data replication, event publishing, Extract, Transformation, and Load (ETL), and data conversions/migrations.

So, if you’re like me and want to know more, there’s a webinar from SQData’s Scott Quillicy on 1 December at 2pm GMT (8am CST). To join the webinar from your PC, you need to register before the event at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/844029904. I’ll see you there.

Guest blog – Mainframe security: who needs it?

2011-11-13T10:15:00.001Z

This week, for a change, I’m publishing a blog entry from Peter Goldberg, a senior solution architect at Liaison Technologies, a global provider of cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions based in Atlanta. He works directly with customers to identify their unique data security and integration challenges and helps to design solutions to suit their organizations’ requirements. A frequent speaker at industry conferences on eBusiness security issues and solutions, he can be reached at pgoldberg@liaison.com.

I’ve been helping companies on both sides of the pond solve their data security problems for many years now. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: when I go into an organization that runs Windows, there’s little question of the need for data security. The organization knows it and so do I. When I visit a company whose IT infrastructure revolves around a mainframe, however, the mindset is often quite the opposite. In fact, the biggest data security misconception I encounter is the belief that the mainframe environment is inherently secure. Most IT staff view the mainframe as just another network node. Why? Because it’s universally perceived as a closed environment and, therefore, invulnerable to hackers.

In some cases, it’s the mainframe IT pros who hold this conviction. In other instances, it’s the executive management team. Lack of management attention allows “bad practices” to continue. I can tell you this without reserve: data stored in mainframes needs protection just as much as sensitive information stored on a Windows server or anywhere else. And, as systems continue to support more data, users, applications, and services, effective security management in the mainframe environment becomes significantly more difficult.

News flash: mainframes can be hacked!

For that simple reason, mainframe security should not be taken for granted.

Even though the mainframe is a mature platform, there is a real shortage of mainframe-specific security skills in the market. And, the few mainframe security practitioners who are out there spend a lot of time implementing configuration and controls within their environments as well as putting into place security systems like RACF, which provide access control and auditing functionality. As for other security measures, in my experience, the mainframe people know about encryption, but they’re not terribly aware of newer data security techniques like tokenization as it relates to protecting data within the mainframe environment and beyond.

Tokenization is a data security model that substitutes surrogate values for sensitive information in business systems. A rapidly rising method for reducing corporate risk and supporting compliance with data security standards and data privacy laws, it can be used to protect cardholder information as well as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI).

In fact, for companies that need to comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), tokenization has been lauded for its ability to reduce the cost of compliance by taking entire systems out of scope for PCI assessments. And, even in companies that do not deal with PCI DSS or other mandates, tokenization has proven effective for managing the duplication of data across LPARs and for facilitating the usage of potentially sensitive data for development purposes.

Too often, compliance audits skim over mainframe control weaknesses and there are also fewer mainframe-specific security guidelines. But this does not mean that significant risk is not there. You can apply a risk-based, defence-in-depth approach within the mainframe environment by using stronger mainframe host security controls and by using tokenization to protect the data itself.

To beef up data security on a mainframe, here’s my advice:

Bring in mainframe security experts to identify and remediate risks, and to develop and enforce security policies and procedures.
Develop in-house capabilities and skilled professionals across the mainframe platform to support security initiatives.
Evaluate available security configuration and administration tools – there are some really good ones out there.
Apply an in-depth security strategy that includes secure access and authentication controls, and use them appropriately.
Adopt encryption and tokenization to protect sensitive information. Through their proper implementation, it’s really not that hard to achieve a true high level of protection within the mainframe environment.

Protecting sensitive and/or business-critical data is essential to a company’s reputation, profitability, and business objectives. In today’s global market, where business and personal information know no boundaries, traditional point solutions that protect certain devices or applications against specific risks are insufficient to provide cross-enterprise data security. Combining encryption and tokenization, along with centralized key management, as part of a corporate data protection programme works well – including in mainframe-centric environments – for protecting information while reducing corporate risk and the cost of compliance with data security mandates and data privacy laws.

Don’t be fooled: your mainframe isn’t inherently secure. Doing nothing is no longer an option!

Thanks Peter for your guest blog.
And remember, there's still time to complete the mainframe user survey or place a vendor entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012.

Guide Share Europe – an impression

2011-11-05T14:18:00.000Z

I could only make Day 1 of this year’s Guide Share Europe conference on the 1st and 2nd of November – which was a huge disappointment. For those of you who weren’t there, I thought I’d give you a flavour of my experience.

Firstly, it was at Whittlebury Hall again – which is a magnificent location just over the border from Buckinghamshire into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning and the facilities are excellent. It is in the countryside, so if you’re travelling by train, there’s a long taxi ride to get there. If you travel by car, there’s a huge car park.

The exhibition hall is big, but not so big you get lost in it. By having lunch and coffee in the hall, there were plenty of opportunities to engage with vendors and chat to other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and make new friends. The quality of the coffee and food was good – which translates as excellent when compared to some venues!

But the point of GSE is not the food, it’s the presentations. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I was torn between the CICS and IMS streams. In the end, I split my time between them. I watched Circle’s Ezriel Gross present on Using CICS to Deploy Microsoft .Net Winforms with Smart Client Technology – which was really fascinating. I’m sure we’re going to see more sites integrating their Windows technology with the power of mainframe subsystems. Ezriel made quite a complicated integration seem straightforward and obvious.

Next I watched IBM’s Alison Coughtrie talk about IMS 12 Overview. Another knowledgeable speaker with a lot of information to get over in the time. I certainly think I have a clearer idea of what’s new, and perhaps a small insight into where IBM is taking the product.

After lunch it was Neil Price, who works for TNT Express and chairs the IMS group for GSE, with a presentation entitled Memoirs of a HALDBA. I was so impressed with Neil’s real-life descriptions that I’ve asked him to speak to the Virtual IMS user group. Neil could have gone on for much longer than the time allowed. And I could happily have gone on listening.

Next up in the IMS stream was IBM’s Dougie Lawson. Dougie is another fantastically knowledgeable IBMer, who you may have come across when you’ve had an IMS problem. He talked about The Why and How of CSL. A real bits and bytes expert, who could have talked much longer.

I felt it was time to sit in on the CICS stream and the session I chose was IBM’s Ian Burnett talking about CICS Scalability. Yet again, a fact-filled presentation that would be hard to criticize. I felt my knowledge about CICS (and I used to edit CICS Update) making more sense and falling more into place.

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – as they say. And the evening presentation was How To Cope With Pressure & Panics Without Going Into Headless Chicken Mode from Resli Costabell. A mixture of psychology, NLP, and audience participation made this a memorable session. If you get a chance to see her anywhere – don’t miss it!

After that there were drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Attachmate/Suse and Computacenter, followed by dinner sponsored by EMC and Computacenter. Both were very enjoyable in their own way, and they were an opportunity to chat more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. Obviously, I was telling vendors about sponsorship opportunities with the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and asking users to complete the user survey.

In conversation, I asked a few of the vendors how business was going. No-one admitted that double-dip recession was taking them out of business, but most suggested that they were keeping their heads above water and business generally was flat – but there was some business being done.

An IBMer suggested that over 30 z196s had been sold in the UK and eight of the new z114s. So, that’s good news for them.

My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. I bumped into Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) during the day as he rushed around making sure everything was going smoothly. And that’s why the conference works so well, because people like Mark work so hard to ensure it does.

Well done everyone who organized it and spoke at it. And if you missed it, go next year.

Two things you thought would never happen at IBM

2011-10-30T09:52:00.000Z

I guess any two pundits sitting in a room together 10 years ago and talking about IBM’s future would have been more likely to predict Star Trek-like beaming technology and computers you could talk to than a mainframe that integrated Windows servers and woman landing the top job at IBM.

And here we are. It’s almost November 2011, and both are about to come to pass.

The zEnterprise 196 and the Business Class version, the zEnterprise 114, mainframes come with the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension. Initially this supported AIX on Power blades and Linux on x86 blades. This fit nicely with IBM’s model of the universe because it owns AIX and Linux is, of course, open source – ie it doesn’t belong to anybody. The Unified Resource Manager (URM) controls the operating systems and hypervisors on the mainframe and the blades. But now – the previously unthinkable – IBM promises that it will have Windows running on its HX5 Xeon-based blade servers for the zBX chassis before the end of this year.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition will run on the PS701 blade servers in the zBX enclosures. The zBX extension can have 112 PS701 blades or 28 HX5 blades.

This is clearly important for those sites that use mainframes or are ready to upgrade to mainframes and still have a big Windows-using population. It’s interesting that so many people consider Windows to be the de facto computing platform. I recently had a conversation where Windows laptops were given the metaphor of rats or beetles – they just turn up everywhere – and Linux was given the metaphor of a stealth operating system or a hidden shadow – it was everywhere, but you didn’t see it. Why stealth, well because Linux turns up behind the scenes on routers, on TiVO boxes, on supercomputers, as the precursor to Android on smartphones, making movies at Pixar and Dreamworks, in the military, governments, everywhere!

After Windows on IBM hardware, the next thing we hear is that Virginia M Rometty, a senior vice president at IBM, is going to be the company’s next CEO – starting in January. “Ginni”, aged 54 (as all the releases inform us), succeeds Samuel J Palmisano, who is 60, and will remain as chairman.

Ms Rometty graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in computer science, joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. She moved through different management jobs, working with clients in a variety of industries. Her big coup was in 2002, when she played a major part in the purchase of the very big consulting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. PwC staff were used to working in a different way from IBM’s and managing that culture shift was down to Ms Rometty.

In 2009, Ginni became senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy.

You’ll recall that Sam Palmisano took over in 2003 from Louis V Gerstner Jr, who’d joined IBM from RJR Nabisco in 1993 and helped turn round an ailing IBM. The previous incumbent had been the lacklustre John Akers.

I suppose with Siri on iPhones and the much less serious about itself Iris on Android, we’ve moved some way towards being able to talk to a computer – even if it is a smartphone. Still no sign of Scotty being beamed up, though!

Guide Share Europe annual conference

2011-10-22T11:29:00.000+01:00

The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 1-2 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.

Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacentre, EMC, Attachmate, Suse, CA, Novell, Compuware, Intellimagic, RSM Partners, Velocity Software, and Zephyr. And there will be 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.

There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, Software Asset Management, Tivoli User Group TWS, Tivoli User Group Automation, MQ, New Technologies, zLinux, and the single-session Training & Certification.

That means that at this year’s conference there will be 126 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology. This is slightly less than last year because two of the Tivoli streams that were included last years have been dropped because they were so poorly attended. This year, there will be 12 streams of ten sessions over the two days, plus five keynotes and that one training & certification WG meeting. In all, there are going to be 85 speakers delivering this training.

There is still time to register, and the organisers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.

There are also 16 students attending this year, who are taking the mainframe course at UK universities. The majority of students are from the University of Western Scotland (UWS), but there will also be some from Liverpool John Moores University and possibly some more from other UK universities. The organisers have prepared a series of 101 sessions on mainframe architecture and infrastructure that will give these students as well as trainees and those unfamiliar with parts of the infrastructure a basic understanding of the mainframe and how it works.

Many GSE member companies are taking advantage of the five free places they get to send their staff to the conference. This would cost non-members £1000 in early-bird prices, and more than compensates member companies for the recent rise in the GSE membership fee to EUR 840.

You can find out more details about the conference at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/invite.html.

If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012

2011-10-16T11:19:00.000+01:00

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has been the de facto reference work for IT professionals working with z/OS (and its forerunner) systems since 2005. It includes an annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. Each year, the Yearbook is downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals. The current issue is still available at www.arcati.com/newyearbook11.

Very shortly, many of you will receive an e-mail informing you that Mark Lillycrop and I have started work on the 2012 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. If you don’t get an e-mail from me about it, then e-mail trevor@itech-ed.com and I will add you to our mailing list.

As usual, we’re hoping that mainframe professionals will be willing to complete the annual user survey, which will shortly be up and running at www.arcati.com/usersurvey12. The more users who fill it in, the more accurate and therefore useful the survey report will be. All respondents before Friday 2 December will receive a free PDF copy of the survey results on publication. The identity and company information of all respondents is treated in confidence and will never be divulged to third parties. Any comments made by respondents will be anonymized also before publication. If you go to user group meetings, or just hang out with mainframers from other sites, please pass on the word about this survey. We’re hoping that this year’s user survey will be the most comprehensive survey ever. Current estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 companies using mainframes spread over 10,000 sites worldwide.

Anyone reading this who works for a vendor, consultant, or service provider, can ensure their company gets a free entry in the vendor directory section by completing the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry. This form can also be used to amend last year’s entry.

As in previous years, there is the opportunity for organizations to sponsor the Yearbook or take out a half page advertisement. Half-page adverts (5.5in x 8in max landscape) cost $700 (UK£420). Sponsors get a full-page advert (11in x 8in) in the Yearbook; inclusion of a corporate paper in the Mainframe Strategy section of the Yearbook; a logo/link on the Yearbook download page on the Arcati Web site; and a brief text ad in the Yearbook publicity e-mails sent to users. Price $2100 (UK£1200).

To put that cost into perspective, for every dollar you spend on an advert you reach around 22 mainframe professionals.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 will be freely available for download early in January next year.

World’s smallest mainframe!

2011-10-09T10:13:00.000+01:00

Mainframes are so amazingly powerful and versatile, wouldn’t you like to have one in your pocket? Maybe that’s not possible (yet), but there have been many attempts over the years to shrink down the mainframe to a more manageable size.

I’m not talking about some sci fi shrink ray wielded by some fearsome purple-coloured alien, I’m talking about the use of emulation software to make one lot of hardware successfully interpret instructions designed to be used on completely different hardware – and vice versa. The mainframe programs think they are running on a mainframe and continue quite happily – totally unaware of the work being performed by the emulation software.

Fundamental Software Inc (FSI) gave us FLEX-ES, which ran on Intel chips and allowed developers to test their mainframe applications on their PCs. The PC itself ran Linux and FLEX ran under that – emulating a range of mainframe hardware devices including terminals and tape drives. Fundamental also sold hardware allowing real mainframe peripherals to connect to PCs.

In 2000 a company called T3 launched the tServer based on FLEX-ES.

UMX Technologies also offered Intel server emulation – using UMX’s Virtual Mainframe software. The company offered Windows compatibility as well.

Then there was Hercules, an Open Source software implementation of mainframe architectures. Hercules runs under Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OSX. Hercules was created by Roger Bowler and was maintained by Jay Maynard. Jan Jaeger designed and implemented many of the advanced features of Hercules, including dynamic reconfiguration, integrated console, interpretive execution and z/Architecture support – according to their Web site. IBM stopped licencing its operating systems for Hercules systems, so users were left with running older public domain versions of IBM operating systems or illegally running newer versions.

Platform Solutions Inc (PSI) developed Open Mainframe servers, Open Systems servers, and NEC D-Series storage arrays. The company’s System64 product line consolidated z/OS, Windows, and Linux operating systems in one secure operating environment based on Intel Itanium 2 processor technology. At the time, Platform Solutions had a strategic partnership with T3 Technologies. In 2008, IBM took them over.

Sim390 was an application that ran under Windows and emulated a subset of the ESA/390 mainframe architecture. The emulator supported most TCP/IP operations (via socket calls using an emulated IUCV interface), and contained a Telnet 3270 (tn3270) server for remote log-in (with IP address filtering), as well as local 3270 sessions. It was possible to run it on a very small machine, such as a Pentium 75MHz with 16MB memory. So says the Sim 390 Mainframe Emulator home page.

But now you don’t need to worry about litigation, old Web sites (and older emulators), or potentially dodgy bits of software. You can have the IBM System z Personal Development Tool (zPDT), which enables a virtual System z architecture environment on x86 and x86-compatible platforms.

The IBM zPDT consists of software that is authenticated and enabled by a USB hardware key, loaded on to the Intel and Intel-compatible platform, running Linux. The zPDT comes with one, two, or three virtual engines, which can be defined as System z general-purpose processors, System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), System z Application Assist Processors (zAAPs), System z Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), and Integrated Coupling Facility (ICF).

As well as the current IBM operating systems and software, it also supports a variety of real and emulated hardware devices such as disks, tapes, printers, card readers,etc. System z customers, service providers, business partners, and ISVs can get the simpler version as part of the Rational Developer for System z Unit Test (RDz-UT) offer.

So now you can get your hands on a very small mainframe.

Lumbering sluggers come out ducking and weaving

2011-10-01T20:13:00.004+01:00

OK – that’s as far as I intend to go with sport metaphors. I’m talking about IBM and Oracle and where their long-term war is taking them next.

You’ll remember that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems early last year for $7.4 billion. Since then, IBM has been hoovering up customers. In August, market researchers IDC were saying that IBM had grown its Unix revenues by 15 percent in the second quarter and its market share by 6 percent. Adding that Oracle had lost share.

IBM claims that in the second quarter, its Power Systems unit acquired 334 customers from competitors, with 210 of those coming from Oracle. And, just to show that they are on a war footing and it’s not just friendly rivalry, IBM says that its formal migration program, which entices customers to move to IBM systems, has gained 7,210 server and storage customers from rivals since its inception in 2006.

There is a third player on the pitch – HP – which has been experiencing pretty dire times itself recently. IBM’s saying it’s acquired 110 users from HP. HP recently announced that Meg Whitman, the former CEO at eBay, will take over from Leo Apotheker, who’s only been there a year. Why dump Apothekar? No other reason than the company losing half it’s market value in the time Apothekar has been in charge!

There were even rumours (and, who knows, it might still happen) that Oracle would scoop up HP and add it to its own portfolio. Others suggest that the problems Oracle experienced with Sun’s SPARC hardware business may convince it to keep away from HP’s Itanium. Perhaps IBM might buy HP? That last sentence should come enclosed in tags!

But after a longish period of haemorrhaging its Sun SPARC users and having to put up with IBM’s suitably smug grins, Oracle has now announced its high-end SuperCluster system powered by its new T4 SPARC chip. With an estimated 50,000 SPARC customers, it’s a business well-worth hanging on to.

The SuperCluster T4-4 is a general-purpose system offering a claimed 33 percent more price/performance than IBM’s largest Power servers and (again claimed) more than 50 percent more price/performance than an Itanium-based Integrity server from HP.

The SuperCluster is powered by Oracle’s eight-core T4 chip, which Oracle claims offers five times the performance of the current 16-core T3. The SuperCluster also includes the capabilities of Oracle’s existing Exadata database system and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box offering, both of which are powered by x86 chips from Intel.

The SuperCluster runs the current Solaris 10 operating system or the new Solaris 11, and will run any applications that its SPARC customers might run.

We can only wait and see what IBM will produce when it comes out of its corner. It certainly knows that the fight is back on.

Web 3.0 and Facebook

2011-09-25T09:53:00.000+01:00

Keen as I am on selling my company’s services to help other organizations make the best use of social media, I never thought that I would be focusing a blog on our old friend Facebook. And yet, this week’s announcements at the F8 developer conference seem to have taken Facebook out of the ‘me-too’ duel with Google plus and Twitter and, in a quantum leap, put it way ahead of the game. Bringing Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web closer.

Facebook recently allowed us to separate our real friend from our ‘Facebook friends’ in a similar way to Google plus’s circles. Then they gave us the ‘Subscribe’ button, allowing us to filter what we read. We can subscribe to ‘all’ updates, ‘most’ updates, or ‘only important’ updates rather than get news of all the goings on of our friends. But then – like Twitter – you can subscribe to people you don’t even know, following their statuses and profile updates. Interesting, but, in many ways, underwhelming. Then they announced Timeline, which is a replacement for the current profile page. And then the big one – Open Graph.

Open Graph (a new class of app) will apparently enable Facebook users to share experiences in realtime. Users will be able to instantly share activities with their friends without being required to grant apps permission each time. The more business-oriented amongst you will realize that Facebook users will be sharing more data with friends, so with Graph Targeting the marketing people will be able to deliver specific marketing messages to the ideal target market.

But, apart from Mark Zuckerberg getting even more shedloads of money, this announcement moves us a step closer to the Semantic Web – or Web 3.0 as it’s sometimes called. Way back in 1999 Tim Berners-Lee said: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy ,and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

The Semantic Web will, in many ways be computer driven rather than human driven, and will integrate information from many different sources. This is dependant on meta data being avilable – and in many ways, this is what will happen with Facebook’s new approach.

We can turn our Web pages into graph objects using the Open Graph protocol tags and the familiar Facebook Like button on those Web pages. The tags look like:

In addition to the Open Graph protocol’s four required properties:

og:title –t he title of the object as it should appear within the graph, eg a film title.
og:type – the type of your object, eg "movie".
og:image – an image URL, which should represent the object within the graph.
og:url – the canonical URL of tha object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, eg http://www.itech-ed.com/blog000.htm.

Facebook has added:

fb:app_id – a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page.

And recommends using:

og:site_name – a human-readable name for your site.
og:description – a one to two sentence description of your page.

When a user ‘likes’ a Web page using a Like button, a News Feed story is published to Facebook.

Wikipedia suggests that: “There are some who claim that Web 3.0 will be more application-based and centre its efforts towards more graphically-capable environments .” This is what Facebook’s Open Graph appears to be.

It also seems that some companies, such as those providing music streaming services, video streaming services, and newspapers will be able to customize the ‘Like’ button to say ‘listen’, ‘watch’, or ‘read’, as appropriate. Then, once someone has shared the content using these new buttons, other Facebook users will be able to access the content within Facebook provided the content supplier has created a compatible Facebook app.

Mainframers probably already know that IMS has a page at www.facebook.com/IMSFans, and CICS has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/CICS/133227520048745. You might not know that the Virtual IMS user group has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/Virtual-IMS-user-group/282385116069, and the Virtual CICS user group has a page at www.facebook.com/pages/Virtual-CICS-user-group/163022600420053.

Interesting times for Facebook and definitely putting some distance between it and its nearest rivals – for a while.

Mainframe maintenance – a new paradigm with new challenges

2011-09-18T11:49:00.000+01:00

For many organizations, we’re beginning to see a new model of how IT customer support can be organized – and the model is coming from management who are completely platform-agnostic. To them, IT is IT – it doesn’t matter whether something runs on a mainframe or a distributed platform. And this new way of working brings with it new challenges.

This whole change in staff structure is also being encouraged by the advent of the zEnterprise hybrid machines with their zBX blades running everything from AIX to, potentially, Windows. A consequence is that a mainframe specialist could be dealing with a Linux error message, or a Windows SharePoint guru might be trying to understand what’s going on inside CICS. What can you do to help them?

Or let’s suppose in a more traditional mainframe environment, for whatever reason, you lost some of your top technical people. Perhaps they got jobs elsewhere or perhaps they retired early, but suddenly you find yourself with a huge knowledge gap. Maybe you can transfer someone across from the distributed team. Or maybe you can recruit one of the new generation of youngsters who are learning the benefits of mainframe computing. But whatever you do, there will be a fairly long period of time during which anything out of the ordinary occurring is going to leave everyone scratching their heads and searching Google – whereas, previously, your in-house expert knew exactly what to do. So, in this situation, what are you going to do?

Let’s not worry too much at this stage about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets. Let’s simply focus on the problem. How can any organization, irrespective of how its IT team is constructed, ensure that appropriate expertise is available at all times to whichever staff members are available?

Obviously you can have the manuals, and some could be on the IBM mainframe portal, but that doesn’t give you speedy access to the necessary information. A Google search will reveal hundredsof pages of results, but it takes a degree of expertise to sift through those and find the correct one quickly. And someone without any expertise could spend a very long time reading solutions to completely different problems before ever finding the right one. Not a satisfactory way to provide IT services to customers – whether internal or external to the organization.

So what would be a good solution? How can these issues of staff working outside their comfort zone be dealt with in a way that is good for the business? And what kind of a solution will still be able to ensure those business-critical mainframes are being supported in a year’s time, in five year’s, or even further into the future?

This is where a new breed of solutions that can address this coming challenge are positioning themselves. One of these, Softlib with its iSolve product (www.softlibsw.com/mvs.aspx), allows an organization to combine all its IT-related information into a single virtual library. That means users – your harassed staff – have to search in only one place, not as previously in many places, to find a solution to any problem. And once you have a single location for information available, you can allow product champions and other IT-literate staff access to it – which should result in more empowered and satisfied users and fewer calls to the Help Desk.

It makes sense to organize the information in this single virtual library using themes, so CICS information might be one theme, IMS another, Linux a third, etc. The information in the library starts from IBM and third-party software vendors’ manuals, and can be supplemented with information from newsgroups and other online resources. Plus, you can add your own technical expertise.

Access to the information can be from a Web browser or a terminal server. It can be hosted locally, or as a cloud-based resource. The advantage of the cloud route is that the information is looked after by Softlib and they already have access to a huge number of the resources you’ll need. So you can start using the facility almost immediately. Plus the online documentation is automatically updated when new information becomes available. Other benefits include knowledge usage analytics that can help address missing or outdated knowledge, and seamless integration with CRM, bug-tracking, Service Desk, content-management applications, etc.

All in all, Softlib’s iSolve product has a lot to offer most mainframe sites, and certainly provides an answer to the question of what to do if you restructure your IT customer support and need to extend the working expertise of your staff onto other platforms such as AIX and Windows. It also offers a solution to the problem of losing key mainframe experts in a mainframe-only environment.

Get the size of all site collections for a Web application

2011-09-11T09:49:00.002+01:00

Get the size of all site collections for a Web application

This week, Darren Pritchard, our SharePoint guru, lays out clearly exactly what needs to be done in order to find out the size of all site collections for a Web application in SharePoint 2007.

The first step is to create a batch file containing:

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"
%STSADM% -o enumsites -url SiteStats.txt
Pause

Pretty obviously, where it says , you need to change that to the name of the Web application that you need to produce the statistics for.

Next you need to copy the batch file to your Web front-end server and run it.

The output will be in a file called SiteStats.txt. Open the file and for each site collection you will see ‘StorageUsedMB=’ and a value. It’s the value that you’re interested in.

On a completely different topic: on Tuesday 13 September the Virtual CICS user group meets. Rocket Software’s Charles Jones will be discussing “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. More details about how to register can be found on the user group Web site at fundi.com/virtualcics.

Create custom permissions – for SharePoint

2011-09-02T19:36:00.000+01:00

It’s been a while since we’ve published one of iTech-Ed Associate Darren Pritchard’s SharePoint 2007 beginners’ guides. This time he’s explaining custom permissions and how to create them.

Let’s start off by defining what we’re talking about. Specifying custom permission levels give you more control over the degree of access users can have to SharePoint sites, site collections, or site content. In effect, you create a new security group.

So, let’s run through the steps:

From the site collection click ‘Site Actions’
Click ‘Site Settings’
Under ‘Users and Permissions’ click ‘Advanced Permissions’
You will then see a list for permission level group
Select the ‘Settings’ drop down
Click ‘Permission Levels’
Click ‘Add a Permission Level’
You will then be able to create your own security group.

It’s worth remembering that only this site and all its sub-sites will have access to your new group.

Below is a list of permissions that can be set. Please note that selecting one may also result in others being selected because they are required as part of your selection.

List Permissions:

Manage Lists – create and delete lists, add or remove columns in a list, and add or remove public views of a list.
Override Check Out – discard or check in a document that is checked out to another user.
Add Items – add items to lists, add documents to document libraries, and add Web discussion comments.
Edit Items – edit items in lists, edit documents in document libraries, edit Web discussion comments in documents, and customize Web Part Pages in document libraries.
Delete Items – delete items from a list, documents from a document library, and Web discussion comments in documents.
View Items – view items in lists, documents in document libraries, and view Web discussion comments.
Approve Items – approve a minor version of a list item or document.
Open Items – view the source of documents with server-side file handlers.
View Versions – view past versions of a list item or document.
Delete Versions – delete past versions of a list item or document.
Create Alerts – create e-mail alerts.
View Application Pages – view forms, views, and application pages. Enumerate lists.

Site Permissions:

Manage Permissions – create and change permission levels on the Web site and assign permissions to users and groups.
View Usage Data – view reports on Web site usage.
Create Subsites – create subsites such as team sites, Meeting Workspace sites, and Document Workspace sites.
Manage Web Site – grants the ability to perform all administration tasks for the Web site as well as manage content.
Add and Customize Pages – add, change, or delete HTML pages or Web Part Pages, and edit the Web site using a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible editor.
Apply Themes and Borders – apply a theme or borders to the entire Web site.
Apply Style Sheets – apply a style sheet (.css file) to the Web site.
Create Groups – create a group of users that can be used anywhere within the site collection.
Browse Directories – enumerate files and folders in a Web site using SharePoint Designer and Web DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) interfaces.
View Pages – view pages in a Web site.
Enumerate Permissions – enumerate permissions on the Web site, list, folder, document, or list item.
Browse User Information – view information about users of the Web site.
Manage Alerts – manage alerts for all users of the Web site.
Use Remote Interfaces – use SOAP, (Simple Object Access Protocol) Web DAV, or SharePoint Designer interfaces to access the Web site.
Use Client Integration Features – use features that launch client applications. Without this permission, users will have to work on documents locally and upload their changes.
Open – allows users to open a Web site, list, or folder in order to access items inside that container.
Edit Personal User Information – allows a user to change his or her own user information, such as adding a picture.

Personal Permissions:

Manage Personal Views – create, change, and delete personal views of lists.
Add/Remove Personal Web Parts – add or remove personal Web Parts on a Web Part Page.
Update Personal Web Parts – update Web Parts to display personalized information.

Armed with that information, you’re now in a position to try to create a new security group and give a person or a group of people a different level of access from what they had previously.

IMS systems and costs - analysis

2011-08-29T10:41:00.001+01:00

I blogged about IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) at the end of July, saying that it has been around since 1968 and originated as a bill-of-materials program for NASA’s Apollo programme. I said that IMS effectively comes in two parts – there’s the Transaction Manager (TM) part and the Data Base (DB) part. I talked about different types of database, and I mentioned the Virtual IMS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

Today I want to pose the questions: how much does an IMS development/test system cost? And how many development test systems does a site typically have installed?

It’s a bit like asking: how long is a piece of string? Obviously every piece of string has a length, but it is unknown, a quantative answer can’t be given. And by implication, whatever else is being discussed will contain a degree of indeterminate uncertainty!

Our experience at iTech-Ed (where we administer the Virtual IMS user group) is that a single IMS development test system can cost an organisation between US$1,000,000 per year and $2,000,000 per year (and possibly more in some cases).

There are some sites that run their development systems on dedicated machines that can be larger than many average-sized organizations’ production systems.

However, there is an additional complication. We believe that, although IMS is a huge revenue earner for IBM, they will waive their fee for software for organisations that are development shops and don't use it for production.

We also estimate that the personnel costs for installing and maintaining IMS development systems can amount to about half a million US dollars per year.

And the number of IMS development/test systems can vary hugely from 1 or 2 true development systems (plus test, QA, etc) in smaller shops, to larger customers, who may have any number from around ten to perhaps 30+. We know of some users with 300+ test IMS regions, but the bulk of the bell-shaped curve is skewed to much lower values. The reason we believe the average is ten or slightly above is because of the amount of administrative effort these test systems take to maintain.

The waters can be muddied further by the fact that organizations can negotiate deals on price with IBM, but are then discouraged from sharing information about those prices with others.

Our conclusion is that the cost to the organisation of running a development system depends on the size of the installation. US$1-2M is a good estimate of the cost for each IMS development/test system, with 10 being a reasonable estimate of, on average, how many development/test systems exist.

And, of course, if you have any further information on this, we would be really interested to hear from you.

The PC at 30

2011-08-21T10:16:00.000+01:00

In the future, IBM will be known as the PC maker of choice for most people, and those PCs will be running a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based on CP/M. Well, that was the view of some people 30 years ago when IBM gave birth to its first PC.

It was on 12 August in a ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, New York that the IBM 5150 made its first appearance. And because IBM was known for making mainframes, this device was called a ‘personal computer’.

IBM didn’t invent the idea of small personal computers, they just wanted a part of a new and growing market place. In those days you could buy small computers like the Sinclair Spectrum, and slighty bigger boxes from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Osborne, and Tandy. The big mind-shift for the IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida, was to construct their PC from parts that were available off-the-shelf. Up until then, IBM had always designed and made what they needed. However, time was precious and development was faster by shopping to get the parts. It was a decision that allowed clone makers a foot in the door.

IBM wrote the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), the part that’s loaded when the machine boots up. Next they needed an operating system. In the same way they were buying hardware components, they thought they’d buy the OS. The best one around was CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) from Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. The story goes that IBM’s representatives waited to see him but he didn’t want to deal with men in suits. Remember back then how ‘cool’ computing was. As a consequence, IBM looked for another source for the operating system. They found Bill Gates. He provided PC-DOS, which was a rewrite of Seattle Computer Products’ (SCP) 86-DOS. The rest, as they say, is history.

Because the 5150 was made from these off-the-shelf component, other companies were quick to copy it. These clone makers badged their machines as IBM compatible. It seems a while since anyone put one of those stickers on a PC! However, because they couldn’t copy the IBM BIOS, they were never 100% compatible in those days. Now, of course, it’s not an issue. And many companies have come on the scene, made a lot of money making PCs, and disappeared again.

The first PC came standard with 16 kilobytes of memory, upgradeable to 64K, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77MHz, a display/printer adapter card, and a 12-inch green CRT monitor. You could then buy IBM’s dot-matrix printer and the necessary cable. This meant you’d be looking at over $3000 for the whole lot!

And now, IBM doesn’t have a PC business. It sold it to Lenovo in 2004. In 1996, Caldera acquired the assets of Digital Research from Novell, and later changed its own name to The SCO Group, and more recently the TSG Group.

It’s always hard predicting the future, even if you invented it!

We’re all friends now

2011-08-14T10:50:00.000+01:00

There used to be a time when selling software was a cut-throat game. A salesman would turn up saying how good their product was and quietly poison the prospective client’s mind against alternative products from other vendors – listing their weaknesses and down-playing their strengths. In fact, I’ve even been paid to write documents for sales teams to use doing exactly that!

But now there is a much more grown-up approach to business. It seems that nowadays sales people are working together to move products. And where their own product may be gappy in some way, they are recommending the software of an erstwhile competitor. The benefits of this cooperative approach means that the customer gets a better service from vendors and a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the products. And it also means that those companies are able to sell more products – which, after all, is how you stay in business!

So what prompted these thoughts? At this week’s SHARE in Orlando, Florida CA Technologies started off by announcing a new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite for Linux on System z and a new capability for CA Solve Operations Automation. There have been lots of anecdotes appearing on the Internet of organisations benefitting hugely from virtualizing their Linux servers on System z and eliminating the server sprawl that preceded it. And, clearly, Linux continues (after its slow start) to be one of the fastest growing segments of the mainframe market. So anything that helps to make zLinux users’ lives easier has got to be a good thing.

According to CA’s press release: “The new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite includes enhancements across product areas, which extend integrated management capabilities designed to control costs, improve performance, increase user productivity, and more efficiently manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux on System z.. It also adds tape management capabilities for Linux on System z, along with improvements that help CA Technologies customers install, deploy, and service their CA z/VM products quickly and more effectively.”

The new capability in CA Solve Operations Automation means Linux applications can be managed as if they were System z applications, which reduces the need for mainframe Linux operations expertise.

The synergy comes with the announcement of a partnerships between CA and INNOVATION Data Processing and Velocity Software, which, they claim, are designed to help customers increase cost savings by optimizing Linux management. CA will distribute INNOVATION Data Processing’s UPSTREAM for Linux on Z and UPSTREAM for UNIX on Z, and Velocity Software’s zVPS Performance Suite.

UPSTREAM for Linux on Z is, they say, an intuitive, easy-to-use, data protection solution for what was once distributed data that is now the foundation for Linux applications being consolidated on the mainframe. UPSTREAM for Linux on Z can help reduce backup, restore, and disaster recovery costs, while increasing business resiliency by enabling customers to leverage the use of existing mainframe resources to meet their enterprise data protection needs. The UPSTREAM for Linux on Z solution is designed so that users can easily schedule timely backups and still meet the need for immediate reliable recovery; of a file, disk volume, or an entire data centre with confidence.

zVPS offers, again according to their press release, easy-to-use graphical and Web-based tools to help analyse capacity requirements, establish operational alerts, and determine chargeback usage. Its detailed information helps IT staff optimize performance and effectively manage the cost of their Linux on System z environment. By gathering data from Linux on System z and distributed environments, such as VMWare, Microsoft, Linux, and Unix servers, zVPS supports server consolidation projects and facilitates decisions on the most cost-effective placement of workloads.

Cynical observers, who are slightly longer in the tooth, will remember a time when Computer Associates would have bought the company (in that Victor Kiam, Remington Rand sort of way!). Clearly, CA Technologies is now all about ‘working with’ other vendors.

IBM’s lawyers can take the day off!

2011-08-07T10:14:00.000+01:00

IBM’s dark-suited legal team can relax a little following the news that three organisations have agreed to drop antitrust complaints filed against IBM in Europe and the USA. The companies involved are T3 Technologies, NEON Enterprise Software, and TurboHercules.

Back in October 2009, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) started investigating IBM’s mainframe monopoly following complaints from T3. Back in 2000, T3 launched its tServer low-end mainframe based on the FLEX-ES technology from Fundamental Software Inc (FSI). IBM is saying T3 withdrew its appeal for a ruling in the US courts in May this year. IBM also says T3 has withdrawn its European Commission complaint, alleging antitrust behaviour by IBM.

IBM also says that NEON has dropped its European Commission complaint. This makes sense because in June NEON agreed (in the sense that a person with their arm twisted agrees) to stop reselling and distributing its zPrime product and requested customers to remove and destroy their copies. zPrime was controversial since it first appeared in July 2009 because it allowed mainframe users to run workloads on specialty processors rather than on the main processor. IBM’s revenue stream is based on main processor workloads. So you can see why users would welcome such a product (and the consequent savings they would make) and why IBM would not. As a consequence claims and counter claims flew back and forth between the two companies until the resolution in early June. Since then, NEON’s IMS products have been acquired by BMC.

Finally, TurboHercules has dropped complaints about IBM with the EU. TurboHercules, a French company, was set up in 2009 by Roger Bowler, who created the open source Hercules mainframe hardware emulator. TurboHercules allows mainframe operating systems and applications to run on x64 and Itanium processors running Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris as the host environment for Hercules. The organisation was part funded by Microsoft (obviously, no lover of mainframe technology).

But it’s not all good news for IBM. It’s still the subject of antitrust probes by the US DoJ and the European Commission. So, those lawyers can’t take off too many days!

And on a completely different topic: don’t forget it’s the Virtual IMS user group meeting on Tuesday with Scott Quillicy, CEO and Founder of SQData talking about IMS replication for high-availability. There are more details at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

All change!

2011-07-31T12:21:00.000+01:00

It’s been a funny old week. IBM offering apps for mobile phones instead of sticking strictly to big iron, and Google buying a slew of IBM patents. When the British surrendered to the rebel American army at the end of the war of independence they played a tune called the world turned upside down. That’s what this week feels like.

It seems that Windows 7 smartphones aren’t really up there with the top three yet, because IBM has only made its app available to the app store for iTunes, Android, and the teenagers’ favourite, Blackberry. For IBM, the idea is to make their social networking platform, IBM Connections, available on smartphones – like Facebook and Twitter (and other social media). To be fair, you could access IBM Connections through a browser on these phones, but now there’s a proper app. Obviously there are different processes for making the app available for the different organizations, which will affect how quickly it will be before you can download the app on your device. The good news is that the app is free.

So what is IBM Connections? According to IBM’s Web site: “IBM Connections is social software for business that lets you access everyone in your professional network, including your colleagues, customers, and partners.

“The latest capabilities in IBM Connections, such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and to work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.”

It seems that the ideation and media gallery modules are natively available in the mobile apps. This allows users to vote on ideas, comment on ideas, and manage the ideas from their phones. In addition, users can take photos and upload them – so they can be shared immediately.

Built in to IBM Connections 3 are ‘moderation’, ideation blog’ and ‘media widget gallery’. Moderation allows users to review content in blogs, forums, and files before lications and approve, reject, or delete as appropriate. There’s a template available for each community to generate ideas, gather feedback, and come to consensus on the best ideas. This is the ideation blog. The media gallery widget is obviously somehwere to upload and share photos and videos.

Meanwhile, Google has confirmed that it bought 1,029 patents from IBM. These include SEO, servers, routers, relational databases, object-oriented programming, and fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips. It seems that no-one is revealing how much was paid.

Why would they buy so many patents? Perhaps to avoid litigation because they are using someone else’s idea. Or perhaps it’s to stop a rival company using someone else’s idea. It may be little more than synchonicity that Google has recently launched it’s Facebook-like Google plus. The more cynical among you may suggest they are looking for a way to stop Facebook doing something as yet undisclosed that will affect their business! Or it could be to do with the Android versus iPhone smartphone war. Or maybe its because Oracle is seeking billions of dollars in damages and royalties because of Google’s use of Java in Android phones. Or maybe, late in the day, Google has realized how important patents are in the modern business world.

Interestingly, Google was after 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks, but lost out to a consotium including Apple and Microsoft, who paid $4.5 billion for the patents. This could be the year of patent sales.

So there you have it. A week when the king of big iron turns up on the smallest of smart devices, and when Google gets itself a stash of patents. What will next week bring?

IMS – getting better all the time

2011-07-24T10:41:00.000+01:00

IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) has been around since 1968 and originated as a bill-of-materials program for NASA’s Apollo programme. So why are so many Fortune 500 companies still using it today? Isn’t it “your dad’s technology” and completely inadequate for today’s tasks? Well, the answer is a resounding NO!

IMS effectively comes in two parts – there’s the Transaction Manager (TM) part and the Data Base (DB) part. The transaction manager is like CICS in that users sit at screens (which could be connecting using browsers on laptops) and access and modify data in the database. Under the bonnet, a message queueing system ensures that transactions don’t get lost and can be backed out in the case of an error. All pretty much standard stuff. The more interesting part is the database. This is the reason that IMS is in use at banks and insurance companies (and many other organizations). The database structure allows data to be retrieved speedily from what are often very large databases. It’s this incredible speed that organizations value. In addition, they know that the information retrieved will be correct and up-to-date.

So let’s have a look at the database component – and this is where you realize that you’re not using technology that was invented in the 1960s! The databases available and their structure have been updated over the years to ensure that users are still able to get to their data faster than using other technologies. IMS databases store data hierarchically. This is like a pyramid design where higher layers give access to lower layers by using data stored in fields. This is quite different from DB2 and other databases that connect data in a relational manner. Going back to our pyramid, we have segments of data stored at each level and each segment contains these fields I mentioned above.

There are four types of database that can be used with IMS, although two of them are very similar and often grouped together. The original database type available was (and still is) the “full function” database. This uses DLI calls to access the data and makes use of both primary and secondary indexes. The access methods used to get to the data can be – and there’s quite a long list here – HDAM (Hierarchical Direct Access Method), HIDAM (Hierarchical Indexed Direct), SHISAM (Simple Hierarchical Indexed Sequential), HSAM (Hierarchical Sequential), and HISAM (Hierarchical Indexed Sequential). Typically, sites tend to use HDAM and HIDAM. The data is actually stored using VSAM (Virtual Storage Access Method) or OSAM (Overflow Sequential), which only exists for IMS files. OSAM improves performance by optimizing the I/O channel program for IMS.

The next two types of database are the “fast path” databases, and these use VSAM. These can be used in situations where the transaction rates are high – and that’s why IMS is so successful in larger organizations. These two database types are called DEDBs (Data Entry DataBases) and MSDBs (Main Storage DataBases). What distinguishes them from full function databases is that there is no indexing. Many sites have replaced their MSDBs with VSO (Virtual Storage Option) DEDBs.

The most recent type of IMS database is the HALDB (High-Availability Large DataBase). They were first introduced with IMS 7 in order to handle very large amounts of data in the database. With V9 of IMS came the ability to reorganize the data online and so not need to take a database offline to reorganize (optimize) it – which, of course, increased the availability of the data.

Many separate databases can be grouped together to produce a single logical database that will be used by the transactions running on the system.

As you can see, since those days of moon rockets, IBM has beefed up IMS databases so that they can handle extremely high transaction rates. Then it increased the amount of data that can be stored in the database itself. And finally IBM increased the availability of that database to produce a product that is trusted and relied upon by organizations that need to be able to ensure the integrity and availability of their data.

If you’re interested in IMS, you’ll be interested in the Virtual IMS user group. This is a free-to-join vendor-independent user group that holds virtual meetings every other month and always includes a guest speaker talking about an IMS-related technical topic. You can find out more at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

Command economies, decentralization, and the z114

2011-07-17T09:45:00.000+01:00

It comes and goes. It’s like a pendulum swinging in one direction, running out of steam, and then swinging in the completely opposite direction. And it applies to countries, economies, and the way people view computing. Let me explain...

During the 1970s, computing, where it existed, was very much a centralized affair. The gods of the mainframe pretty much controlled what anyone was able to do. It was like Stalinist Russia. Everything came out of the centre. You didn’t get it, unless someone at the hub of things deemed it necessary for you to have it.

Currently in the UK, we have the opposite approach in terms of our model of how things should work. Quite logically, you might think, if you live in a rural area with rolling fields full of wheat or livestock, your concerns are completely different from those of someone living in a post-industrial run-down urban area. Of course, this localism easily lends itself to the criticism of postcode lottery. Anyway, we have little islands of individuality separate from each other. Unfortunately, the reality is that political areas tend to include more than a monoculture of just rural or just urban populations. Plus you have different needs for different age groups – you can see where this idea falls down when applied to the real world, but hang on to the little islands metaphor.

Now let’s turn time back to 1989. We find the Berlin wall coming down and the whole centralized power base of the USSR and it’s Warsaw Pack allies crumbling. In the world of computing, we find the balance of opinion has moved right away from mainframes. In the early 90s, their death was confidently predicted. In its place we had millions of underpowered PCs running DOS-based operating systems. And as the 90s progressed we saw the triumph of Windows and Microsoft. We also saw that antithesis of centralization, Open Source software. Unix started life in 1969, and Linus Torvalds’ Linux arrived in 1991. Even IBM, which had developed and standardized the PC in the early 1980s, was working on the development of other platforms. 1988 gave us the AS/400 – now the IBM System i and which now runs on the POWER platform. The RS/6000, running a Unix variant called AIX, arrived in the 1990s and also now run on POWER hardware.

So, having been empowered to make their own decisions and choices of hardware and software, what have users done since then? Well, in the PC world, they go for big servers that are virtualized in order to benefit from the control that gives them. It makes back-ups and business continuity easier.

And now, here we are in 2011 and IBM announces a Business Class (basically not a top-end machine, more one for the everyman mainframe user) zEnterprise – the z114. It’s gone back to being a centralized piece of hardware because not only is it a mainframe, it’s a POWER7 box, and it has x86 blades. So that gives users a smaller footprint, less power consumption, and control of everything using the IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager and the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX). The POWER7 blades mean that AS/400 and RS/6000-heritage users have a home. And the x86 blades not only run Linux x86 applications unchanged, but, by the end of the year, are expected to run Windows applications too.

The culture shock at many sites will come when the distributed applications teams (and they may have many different names) discover that all the things they’ve been planning to achieve (virtualized desktops, virtualized servers, etc) are just part of the techniques that the mainframe people take for granted. And the mainframers are going to have to understand that for many of the people in the other teams, it’s in many ways still about 1992 in terms of business recovery times etc. But when the teams do come together, the synergy is going to be very beneficial for the organization that allow it to happen.

This new mainframe, unusually, comes with a published price tag – $75,000. As part of the package you get the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer to analyse data faster at a lower cost per transaction, and the IBM WebSphere DataPower XI50 for integrating Web-based workloads. The new hardware runs the latest version of z/OS – 1.13. You get 3.8GHz processors (the zEnterprise 196 uses 5.3GHz processors), and you can configure up to 14 of them with 10 specialty processors – zIIP, zAAP, and IFL.

The pendulum has now swung completely back. We have a single box capable of providing all the different computing needs of an organization.

He CICS, he scores!

2011-07-10T09:57:00.001+01:00

Sadly, as a title, it only works if you’re in the parts of the world where CICS is pronounced ‘kicks’ and where people play football (and getting the ball in the back of the net is very important!). But wherever you are, I want to talk about IBM’s transaction processing system whose full title is Customer Information Control System and which runs under z/OS and z/VSE.

Basically, CICS allows users to sit at their screen and run transactions against data. It’s reckoned that about 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use CICS for banking, insurance, and various industrial systems. CICS is incredibly resilient with users potentially logging in through browsers, and the application programs they use being written in a wide variety of programming languages. The most recent version is CICS TS 4.2.

CICS first appeared in July 1969 – the year a man first walked on the moon and films such as Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and True Grit were nominated for Oscars. The DFH prefix for CICS messages has been apocryphally attributed to stand for the Denver Foot Hills. Development of CICS has been at the Hursley UK site since 1974.

CICS programs were pseudo-conversational – which means that they appeared as if they were conversational, while actually not being. This design meant that valuable resources were not locked waiting for a user to respond to a message. In fact coding to maximize what could be done while using the minimum amount of resources was a trick that COBOL programmers were forced to learn. Programs were multi-threaded, which meant one copy of the code could be used by more than one transaction.

System calls to CICS (eg reading a record) originally required the use of a macro call – hence the name macro-level CICS. During the 1980s we got command-level CICS. Command-level-only CICS came in the 1990s and support for macro-level application programs went.

In terms of programming languages, early users had COBOL and PL/I, and, of course, Assembler. More recently, we’ve seen Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). CICS transactions can now be invoked using an HTTP request, so CICS transactions can act as servers in a POX or REST conversation. JCICS classes allow CICS services to be called using Java. CICS programs can be Web service providers or requesters.

The new CICS Explorer Eclipse-based graphical tooling interface for CICS provides a modern-looking management interface to CICS.

If you are interested in finding out more about CICS, you’ll be interested in the Virtual CICS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. You’ll also be very interested to know that there’s a user group meeting on Tuesday 12 July at 10:30 CDT. The meeting uses Citrix GoToMeeting so you don’t need to leave your desk, and will include a presentation by Jeff Geminder, who’s a Principal Consultant with CA. The title of the presentation is: Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack. Jeff says; “In today’s complex multi-platform world, how can businesses stay ahead of the curve by reducing outages and minimizing downtime? Specifically, how can we tell whether CICS is or is not the culprit. In effect how can we find that needle in the heterogeneous haystack and get the right people in the right place at the right time.”

To find out more and to get details about how to register for the webinar, go to www.fundi.com/virtualcics/meetings.htm.

Where do the tablets go?

2011-07-02T18:52:00.000+01:00

So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.

On top of that, you’ve got another layer of IT. People who use laptops with Windows and/or people who use Linux, and possibly bits or Solaris dotted around. These people have more interesting lives. They have to fight to get the best performance. Their back-up strategy is good if they can recover to last night! They probably still insist on people using XP as their Windows operating system because Vista was no good and it’s a bit of a jump to Windows 7. Plus they’re probably coming to the end of a virtualization project to reduce the number of server boxes they’ve got lying around. Parhaps they’re installing Citrix to virtualize desktops, or SharePoint to produce an intranet and join up all the separate islands of computing.

Plus you’ve got remote users, who are logging in over somebody else’s wifi. Or they might be using the 3G network on their smartphone. It’s your fault, of course, because you spent so long changing your CICS and IMS applications so they could be used in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. But, I guess you have strategies in place to secure the connection, and secure what applications they can run, and what data they can see.
In fact, you’re probably convincing senior managers in your organization that it really was their idea all along to combine the strengths of mainframe computing with the flexibility of distributed systems. What your organization needs is a nice z196 mainframe – perhaps one of the planned-but-not-quite-announced Business Class (BC) machines.

For those of you who’ve spent the past year on Mars, the z196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, Linux, and (coming soon) Windows, all on the one box. At this stage, I should point out that there are very strong arguments for going to zLinux. It’s been around for 10 years now, and is just becoming an overnight success – as they say.

So, there you are thinking that you can use your mainframe experience and expertise to tidy up all the other computing areas in your organization and get them under your control when HR tells you they have supplied everyone on the board of directors with an iPad. Now, you might think this is a good opportunity to bring some of the board into the 21st century, but it creates yet another rip in the secure blanket you've been throwing over the company’s computing infrastructure. Can you set up a security policy for iPads? Well, yes, if they come into a Microsoft server – in the same way you would for Mac users. Can you allow board members to download apps? Or can they have only pre-approved ones? Where do you start building proper security? It’s back to herding cats!

And don’t think I’ve singled out iPads, Androids have similar issues. You can download firewalls and anti-virus software for them, but it’s not the same as RACF!

And it might not just be board members – you may still have road warriors that want the small form factor of a tablet. The issues of theft or forgetfulness compound your security problems.

My suggestion at this stage is to wait for Windows 8 tablets, and hope that the policies laid down by the non-mainframe ITers will apply to them. And by then, Windows will be running on our z196 box. So everyone’s a winner!

What’s a mainframe, Daddy?

2011-06-25T12:22:00.002+01:00

After years of sliding my security card in the lock and entering the machine room/data centre and seeing the mainframes in there change from Sci-Fi-style boxes with flashing lights to more mundane-looking boxes. From seeing simple DASD with less capacity than the memory stick in this laptop be replaced with cache controllers and more sophisticated data storage devices. It always seemed that there were plenty of mainframes around and any normal person (me) was constantly being offered tours round installations. So it comes as a bit of a shock when a youngster clearly has no idea what a mainframe looks like or what it does!

OK, no-one may have actually said those words as such, but that was the message. Plus, I was with some friends on Saturday when the conversation turned to discussing what use a mainframe was in this day and age! As Arcati Director, Mark Lillycrop, so eloquently put it recently, mainframes are thought of as ‘your dad’s technology’. Most of the people I was chatting to felt that mainframes were relics of the past and anything they can do, a few servers could do just as well!

So for many of us mainframe verterans, our job is to get out there and spread the word. We need to tell people exactly what a mainframe is, what it can do, and how people are interacting with them all the time, but don’t realise it. That way, the new generation of youngsters that are beginning to get access to mainframe technology at universities and elsewhere will arrive with a knowledge of what mainframes can do, and why working with them can be so enjoyable.

So let’s just start with the absolute beginner’s guide to mainframes. They are computers – just like your laptop – except that over the years they faced and solved all the problems about back-ups and restores, security, and high-speed data access. They have been around for a long time – which is a good thing because lots of people have moved the technology forward. They allow millions of users controlled access to information – allowing them to create, modify, and save data from almost any data entry device you can think of, including browsers.

Mainframes have been virtualized since the 1980s, and some of the software first saw the light of day in the 1960s. Most Windows data centres have only been virtualizing for the past five years! It’s true that laptops etc are everywhere – in your home, at work, etc – but mainframes are working away in the background. Everytime you take money from an ATM (cash machine) your bank is running a transaction on a mainframe. And it is banks and large financial institutions that use mainframes. And they do it because of the reliability. They do it because, should there be an outage, they can recover back to almost the last second before they went down. Almost no transactions are lost. And as a bank customer, I like that. Lots of non-mainframe-using sites think they are doing quite well if they can recover data back to last night! You see the difference in scale here.

Mainframes run an operating system (z/OS, but could be z/VM or z/VSE) and on top of that are a number of subsystems – you might think of them as apps (but big ones!). These subsystems include CICS and IMS. Now, both of these have been being developed since the 1960s and provide ways of accessing data very quickly and securely. They allow users to fill in virtual forms. And they store data in a way that means it can be accessed very quickly.

Another ‘app’ you may have heard of is DB2. DB2 is a comparative youngster, having arrived in the 1980s. It stores data in a ‘relational’ way rather than the more traditional ‘hierarchical’ way. DB2 is a database that can exist on Windows machines as well as mainframes (and many devices in between).

Mainframes can also run Linux (z/Linux) and all the Linux applications. That makes them very cost-effective replacements for sites with numerous ageing Linux servers. Linux has been available on mainframes for just over 10 years.

And there’s plenty of software available to control all aspects of this mainframe behemoth. And you can link them together at different sites in different countries round the globe.

So if anyone asks you what’s a mainframe, you can tell them that it’s the most successful server architecture ever devised and it’s all around them doing important work.

IBM – C

2011-06-19T10:10:00.000+01:00

IBM celebrating its 100th birthday makes you think you should write its age in Roman numerals – which is what I did in the title. How does a venerable old organization avoid being put out to grass and stay ahead of the business game? How does it become synonymous with cloud computing, smarter planet, and data analytics? I guess the answer is by completely re-inventing itself.

The truth is that IBM is not the controlling influence it once was, but that’s a good thing. No longer does it decide what customers want and try to sell it – it now listens to its customers. Another good thing.

In the 1970s, IBM was the king of computing with the combined revenues of the BUNCH significantly less its own. The BUNCH were Burroughs (still around as UNISYS), UNIVAC (still around as UNISYS), NCR (which was acquired by AT&T for a time and eventually sold its computer manfacturing business to Solectron), Control Data Corporation (now called Syntegra), and Honeywell (whose computer division became part of Groupe Bull).

During its lifetime, we’ve seen the birth of Hewlett-Packard (72-years-old), Intel (43-years-old), Apple (35-years-old), Google (12-years-old), Facebook (7-years-old), and other companies that have become kings of their not-so-small niches.

IBM itself was (obviously as we’re celebrating 100 years) founded in 1911, but was then called the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation. It originated with the merger of four companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Corporation, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company. The name International Business Machines didn’t arrive until 1924 (so more partying in 13 years time!). Bundy Manufacturing first appeared in 1889. The Tabulating Machine Company arrived in 1896.

The famous Thomas J Watson Sr joined the company in 1914 and soon became president. In 1956: Tom Watson Jr took over as CEO. Through the 1960 we get the System/360, VM, IMS, CICS, and many other things that we’re still familiar with today. In 1981 IBM invented the Personal Computer.

The early 1990s were a bad time as IBM announced its first loss. CEO John Akers talked about breaking up IBM into smaller companies that could compete better. In 1993, Lou Gerstner took over the reigns and things started to improve. In 1995 IBM acquired Lotus and its Notes software. 1995 also saw the launch of the much-admired ThinkPad laptop computer. And 1996 gave us DB2.

But over time, IBM has moved away from opportunities. It sold off its Lexmark printing business in 1991. It sold its networking business to Cisco in 1999. And it sold its PC business to Chinese-based Lenovo in 2005. But it’s still a big company, In 2011, Fortune ranked it as the 18th largest in the USA, and the 7th most profitable. Forbes ranked it as the 31st largest in the world. And it has thousands of patents under its belt.

The zEnterprise 196 hardware shows that IBM is planning for a long future. It allows all the good things about mainframes to be spread across other platforms. Plus, people are slowly grasping the amazing things they can achieve with zLinux on mainframes. Big Iron isn’t rusting away!

And IBM always had a fun side (honest!). In 1997 the Deep Blue computer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess. And in 2011 a computer called Watson won the Jeopardy game show.

Happy birthday Big Blue.

Mainframes, cloud, and trans-derivational searches

2011-06-12T10:21:00.001+01:00

Communication is a bit of a hit-and-miss business at the best of times. Suppose I was sitting in a large comfortable leather armchair and I wrote the word ‘chair’. I would be thinking about my armchair. You might be sitting at your computer on an office chair with wheels and no arms. When you read the word ‘chair’, you might think that your office chair was what I had in mind. Perhaps a trivial example, but you get the idea.

What happens if I write a complicated sentence and it’s not immediately clear what I’m saying. You would read it and perform a trans-derivational search in your mind to try to find meaning. What is a trans-derivational search? Well, it’s a bit like going to Amazon and typing the word ‘cloud’ into the search box. Amazon will search in ‘Books’, ‘Film, Music & Games’, ‘Kindle’, ‘Electronics’, etc and display all the answers. You can then make a choice. When it happens in your mind, you do a similar search and select the search result that seems to be the best fit for the unclear sentence.

The reason I mention this is because when one person says the words ‘cloud’ and ‘mainframe’, the image in their mind may be quite different to the image in anyone else’s mind. I like to think of mainframes as interesting and powerful bits of kit that keep the business world turning. Someone else may picture rusting hardware that should have disappeared in the 1990s! It’s much the same with the word ‘cloud’. One person may envisage an outsourcing opportunity, while another may view cloud as a security nightmare – a disaster waiting to happen. You can see now just how tricky this communication stuff really is!

There are people who argue that the mainframe is a cloud already. Suggesting that both are resource that can be dynamically allocated and de-allocated on demand, and can be made available within a company with the necessary security and management controls.

Typically the users of cloud computing have x86 platforms and need to be able to get what they want when they want it – ie on demand. They use primarily Amazon, Google, or Microsoft services. And, of course, everyone is now talking about cloud with announcement of Apple’s iCloud.

Going back to the mainframe, recent surveys have shown mixed interest in cloud computing from mainframers. It seems that the closer to the coal face (or whatever the mainframe metaphor for systems people might be) people are, the less interested they are in cloud. Whereas more high-level thinkers are interested to see what advantages cloud computing offers their organization.

Same words, different mental picture. It’s that communication conundrum again.

If you do have any experience of using cloud and mainframes, I’d be interested to hear about your experience over on IT Toolbox (http://datacenter.ittoolbox.com/groups/strategy-planning/data-center-infrastructure-sp/featured-cloud-computing-in-a-mainframe-environment-4234328).

And for those of you who are IMS professionals, don’t forget the Virtual IMS user group meeting on Tuesday. Gary Weinhold and Verna Bartlett from Data Kinetics will be talking about MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications. Full details including how to register are on the Web site at www.fundi.com/meetings.htm.

Cloudy but good

2011-06-06T10:10:00.000+01:00

All this talk about 2011 being the year of the cloud rings true. I say that because marketing hype is usually a bit ahead of the curve. But I realize that I’m using cloud computing a lot these days – and I don’t mean (necessarily) for work.

Firstly, I’m using Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. This is a small piece of code that’s free to download from http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect. Once installed, you can save all your Word etc files on your laptop AND there’s a copy in Google Docs. Now, the reason I find that so useful is not simply because I know my documents are backed up (and to be honest that’s a really important reason and the one that I’d use as a selling point to most people), but it also means that I can access the documents from other computers. I have two laptops that I use all the time, and a third one, that’s usually away at users’ sites. I can now access my documents wherever I am and not have to say that I’ll send on the information after the meeting (or whatever).

Google also say on their site that this system allows users to simultaneously edit their files – which again is a great idea, although it’s not something I’ve tried.

Previously to using Google Cloud Connect, I used my Pogoplug for the same reason. I’ve mentioned Pogoplugs before in these blogs because they are so useful. It provides my own personal cloud. A Pogoplug is a little piece of kit that connects to your router. I then have four or five memory sticks plugged into it, but I could have a 2TB external hard drive. I can upload files to the Pogoplug from anywhere using a simple browser interface (https://my.pogoplug.com/) and I can share files with people, so they can see photos I’ve taken or short videos, or even Office documents. And, again, it provides me with a back-up copy of my important files.

The third piece of cloud computing I use is Wyse PocketCloud. I’ve downloaded the free app for my Android smartphone and I’ve downloaded the software for my laptop. Once they’re password synchronized, I can control my laptop from my phone. Which means, if I haven’t got a document with me, I can use my phone to launch Word on my PC and read the document. Last week I sent a document from someone else’s computer to my e-mail address. I used the PocketCloud software to log-on to my e-mail, download the file and print it. So when I returned back to base, there was the document ready for me to take to the next meeting (a school governors meeting – they don’t have wifi, hence I couldn’t be paperless). I’ve sat in McDonalds and called up files! It is a really impressive piece of software. Now, with the other cloud facilities mentioned above, I don’t know how much I’ll need to use it. But it just seems so amazing to be able to do it!

What I’m suggesting is that cloud computing is getting in under the radar and people are beginning to use it already. So, when IT departments suggest rolling out Cloud services in whatever form that takes for them, they will be pushing at an open door. There won’t be usual user resistance because the users will be perfectly happy with the concept. And, of course, mainframers will be saying that they’ve been using these cloud concepts since the 1960s – or whenever they first started working with mainframes.

Which all goes to show that 2011 really is the year of the cloud.

Custom branding with SharePoint

2011-05-29T10:24:00.002+01:00

Custom branding with SharePoint

For those of you working at new SharePoint 2007 sites, I have more of Darren Pritchard’s excellent beginner’s guides. This time he’s looking at custom branding.

There are a few different parts to custom branding a SharePoint Web application. You will need SharePoint Designer to create and change the pages. You will need to create a new master page and a CSS file to apply to the master page.

SharePoint Designer is a free application that is available from Microsoft at www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42&displaylang=en. SharePoint Designer allows you to open your SharePoint Web application to see and access all the component parts and elements of the application. You are able to navigate through the whole site, which will give you a better idea of how a SharePoint application is built. Be carefully not to change anything unless you know what it is – you could break the Web application if you remove or change the wrong thing!

SharePoint Designer also allows the pages and code to be edited, which is good news for someone new to SharePoint because everything is available within one location.

Let’s start with master pages. These are the templates that are applied to all pages on a SharePoint Web application. They are written in ASP.NET 2.0. When applying custom branding to a SharePoint Web application, this is where the majority of the development will be carried out.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to style the master page (just like on most Web pages). Within a SharePoint Web application, there is a ‘core.css’ file, which can be found in the ‘_styles’ folder. You won’t be able to navigate here without using SharePoint Designer. This is used by all of the master pages that come by default in a Web application. This file should not be changed. It is best practice to create a bespoke .css file and use this to override the core.css. This means that you will not affect the default master page styles that are used by other pages.

Content PlaceHolders Controls are regions of content on a master page that are predefined but customizable within SharePoint. So, for example, the PlaceHolder is in bold, which is housed within an HTML table:

<table border="0" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="100%" class="customcss.class" >
    <tr>
      <td>

      <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server">
      <SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/>
      </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

      </td>
    </tr>
</table>

This is an example of a table that will contain the search placeholder shown below:

Any images that are referenced from within the master page must be able to be viewed by all users. Otherwise, users will be asked to log-in every time they refresh the page if the don’t have permission to the library where the image is stored.

I would suggest creating a folder for your master page within the ‘http://Your App/Style%20Library/images’ and locating all of the images there. This will use the standard image locations from the master pages, but keep them separate so that they can be identified easily during future development or maintenance.

When you’re ready to import branding into a Web application, you need to use the following guidelines.

To import a master page:

1 In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2 Navigate to http://your site/_catalogs/masterpage

3 Click File

4 Click Import

5 Add your master page here.

To import an image:

1 In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2 Navigate to http://your site/Images

3 Click File

4 Click Import

5 Add your image here.

To import a CSS file:

1 In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2 Navigate to http://your site/_styles

3 Click File

4 Click Import

5 Add your CSS file here.

Good luck with your modifying your branding.

For the journey

2011-05-22T10:37:00.001+01:00

There’s an accurate, but much-overused, metaphor for life as a journey. Well, coming soon, this metaphor has been taken a stage further by giving us a destination – Destination z. According to the Web site at www.destinationz.org, Destination z is a community where all things mainframe converge to keep you informed. The new destinationz.org site becomes live in summer 2011, and when it launches, members will be connected to a new global community of peers – mainframe users, business partners, academia, consultants, and others.

An inaugural enewsletter (tentatively called zNEWS) will be sent out in June, formally announcing the destinationz.org community.

In fact, Destination z has been around since 2007 and had 26 founding members. Since then, more business partners, supporting members, and academic members have joined, bring the number of members to 100 by the end of 2010. This next phase broadens the membership to include IBM System z clients and it’s planned to provide numerous resources and benefits.

Here’s their logo:

According to an article on the MainframeZone Web site: “The latest phase will bring value to mainframe clients and their employees by providing rich Web content, connecting the community through social media, and creating a ‘one-stop shop”’for everything z through an index of key resources, including IBM and partner product content, customer stories, and links to blogs, forums, an online mentorship program to introduce students to the mainframe community, and more. These members can access all the resources available through the Website and can opt to be included in special communications from both the IBM Destination z Team and IBM Business Partner members.”

To my mind, anything that helps the community of mainframe users has got to be good, and I’ve pre-registered to become a member. You might like to do the same.

And while we’re on the subject of moving things around, you might be interested to know that the IBM Information Champion programme has changed its home location.

For the past few years, it has been sitting at www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/, but it is now on IBM’s developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerworks/champion, and they’re promising that the shorter URL of www.ibm.com/champion will work. There’s also a new logo:

I’ve been a ‘Champion’ each year since 2009. You can see me my profile at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/profiles/html/profileView.do?key=d5b16dc4-2a16-4a1b-86d5-dc4d1cd7d318&lang=en.

The change of location is, I believe, part of IBM’s strategy to raise the profile of this programme and help increase awareness of mainframes to the general public.

Hopefully, after the summer, with these two initiatives, information and other resources for mainframers will be more readily available and easier to locate.

All change in the office

2011-05-15T10:07:00.001+01:00

It started with me looking for the best ‘office’ application to run under Honeycomb (Android 3) on a tablet – but I got sidetracked. It seems that Oracle has dumped OpenOffice, and Microsoft has a beta of Office 365 – it’s new cloud variant of the ubiquitous office software.

Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.

It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.

Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.

The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.

If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.

Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?

Mainframe chatter

2011-05-08T20:58:00.001+01:00

Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd, and I were asked to take part in CA’s May Mainframe Madness. We were part of a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in their ‘House of Mainframe’ section on 5 May. It was enjoyable chatting to other mainframe professionals and it was very interesting the direction the conversation took.

Clearly, there were two main strands to the conversation. One was the difficulty of convincing (converting?) non-mainframers of the potential of the mainframe. The second was the success of z/Linux at installations.

Looking at z/Linux success first, Murray Theriault told us: “I think what sold it for me was the idea that I could put up 100 z/Linux machines on the same box and have a very small footprint, not to mention no power costs”. Similarly, Marie Kennard added: “Same here – the app we’re putting onto zLinux currently runs on dozens of boxes, most of which are reaching EOL and needed replacing”. Someone else reminded the group about Aliantz in Australia, saying that they’d “flipped their whole farm to z/Linux in a weekend with little to no outtage”. This led CA’s Reg Harbeck to comment: “zLinux seems to be taking over a decade to become an overnight sucess...”

So it appears that z/Linux is making headway in those sites that already have a mainframe and Linux servers. And it’s definitely the case that the arguments for doing so are irrefutable. Moving some of the applications or even all of them from other Linux platforms is a positive step and the sites doing so are going to see huge benefits in terms of performance, reliability, and, of course, cost savings both in man-power and outages.

But even the success stories seem to be the result of a battle between mainframers and management whose model of computing and whose expectations are the result of using Microsoft Windows. A lot of the hour long discussion was spent on how to get managers in organizations that have mainframes to appreciate what they have, and to understand how to exploit the mainframes potential. The truth is that there’s an even bigger battle to be fought and that’s to get IT people and IT managers at non-mainframe sites to appreciate the opportunities that a mainframe brings.

During the discussion it was said that ‘good news’ mainframe stories don’t make much of an appearance in the IT press. If they did, that would be one way that people would get to hear about mainframes. Mark suggested that many people view mainframes as: “Old, expensive, and your dad’s technology”. And yet, anyone who takes money out of an ATM (hole-in-the-wall) machine is probably linking to IMS on a mainframe. They just don’t know it. The press were not only blamed for sins of omission, but also sins of commission – for printing the same old stories containing the same old wrong assumptions about mainframes.

I reminded the chat room about William Data Systems ZEN product family and how users can control their network from the latest iPad gizmo, or get reports on their smartphones about what’s going on on their network. And, obviously, there was a lot of talk about cloud computing and mainframes – and how they go together like “peas and carrots” (well Forest Gump would have said that if he’d been logged in!). The point is that mainframes aren’t “your dad’s technology”, they very much embrace the very latest technologies and do it in a way that is secure and comes with all the benefits of years of successful operation in banks and airlines, etc.

I did think to run a competition, at this point but I don’t have a prize to give out. However, I would be interested in hearing people’s ideas of how managers and staff at mainframe sites and the rest of the IT world who aren’t mainframers can be convinced of the importance and proven-reliability of mainframes. You can e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com with your comments and I’ll put them together in a future blog.

Other topics that we discussed during our hour included the importance of virtual meetings with the current financial constraints when organizations are less-and-less keen to fund travel/hotels/food etc for people to attend. We looked at green computing and how this issue will most-likely grow in importance with future regulation. The fact that the word ‘legacy’ is actually a compliment. (How many of you have printers that don’t work with Vista or Windows 7, and just have to live with it?) And we suggested names for the next version of z/OS including z/2020 and z/Cloud.

All-in-all it was an enjoyable ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’. Good luck CA for the rest of the month of mainframe madness.

Installing and removing solutions from SharePoint

2011-05-01T10:25:00.001+01:00

I said a couple of weeks ago that I have been working with iTech-Ed Associate Darren Pritchard at a site that was fairly new to SharePoint 2007. Darren has written some beginner's guides for them and we thought other sites new to SharePoint might benefit from the information.

Here are Darren's instructions for installing a new SharePoint solution.

First locate the .wsp file that you want to install into SharePoint 2007 (SP2007), then place it (the .wsp file) into the c:\temp folder on the SP2007 server.
You'll need to create a batch (Install Solution.bat) file the first time, and then afterwards you can just edit it. The batch file looks like:

SET STSADM="c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\STSADM.EXE"
%STSADM% -o addsolution -filename <WEBPART NAME>.wsp
Pause

Replace the tag '<WEBPART NAME>' with the name of your solution and save to c:\temp on the SP2007 server. Then, on the SP2007 server, run the Install Solution.bat file from within the c:\temp folder. You should then see that the solution has successfully been installed.

Next you need to deploy the solution to your Web applications. To do this, open SharePoint Central Admin and click 'Operations' and 'Solution Management'. From there you'll see your new solution, click on the solution name to enter the properties.

Click 'Deploy Solution'. Then change 'Deploy To?' to your Web application and set the 'Deploy When?' to when you wish to deploy the solution. Finally, click 'OK'. This will deploy the solution to your Web application.

Don't forget that you have to activate the solution in your Web application. To do this, click Site Actions/Site Settings/Modify All Site Settings. Then under 'Site Collection Administration' click 'Site Collection Features'. Locate your new solution and click 'Activate'.

You can now use this solution within your Web application.

In terms of house-keeping, backup the .wsp and .bat file from c:\temp and the job's done.

If you need to remove (or retract) the solution then use the following instructions.

From SharePoint Central Admin click 'Operations' then 'Solution Management'. Click on the name of the solution that you want to remove to enter the solution properties.

Click Retract solution. Make sure that 'Retract From?' is set to 'All content Web Applications'. Set the 'Retract When?' setting and click 'OK'. This will remove the solution from all the Web applications.

Create the following batch file (Remove Solution.bat):

cd c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
stsadm -o deletesolution -name <SOLUTIONNAME >.wsp
pause

Replace the tag '<SOLUTIONNAME>' with the name of your solution and save to c:\temp on the SharePoint2007 (SP2007) server. Then run the Remove Solution.bat file from within the c:\temp folder. This will remove the solution from your SP2007 farm.

Delete the .bat file that you just saved in c:\temp on the SP2007 server.

The solution is now removed.

There'll be more of Darren's SharePoint hints and tips in future blogs.

Network management issues

2011-04-24T10:40:00.000+01:00

I want to know what’s going on on my network – what do I do? Well this seemingly simple question has a complicated answer, which is historical and all to do with the separate worlds of the mainframes and everyone else coming together to give us our current complicated environment. Just to summarize, mainframes used SNA and VTAM to communicate and everyone else used TCP/IP. Sometime in the 1990s, all this came together. In addition, we now have people on iPads and smartphones using our networks – in fact, we can have people on iPads and smartphones controlling our networks!

So, in terms of software, what are our choices for network management?

IBM has Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for mainframe networks, which allows you to monitor VTAM and TCP/IP networks and identify problems within those networks.

CA has its CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP IP and CA NetMaster Network Management for SNA products, which allow users to “proactively manage” their network. And there are a number of other more specialized products including CA NSM NetMaster Option, which lets you “manage your mainframe networks from CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management”.

SDS has Vital Signs for IP and Vital Signs for VTAM, which are both monitoring software.

William Data Systems has a whole range of products including ZEN OSA MONITOR for OSA performance monitoring and management, ZEN IP MONITOR (IMPLEX) for IP performance monitoring and management, ZEN EE MONITOR (FERRET) for APPN/HPR and EE monitoring and management, ZEN TRACE and SOLVE (EXIGENCE) for network problem determination, ZEN FTP CONTROL (FTPALERT) for audited FTP monitoring and management, ZEN EE SECURITY (APIAS) for secure EE deployment across any network, and ZEN AUTOMATION for automating network and operational tasks.

In fact, William Data Systems has just release Version 4.7 of ZEN TRACE and SOLVE, which includes more customer-suggested z/OS network tracing and solution capabilities to help busy z/OS network support people do more in less time – they claim.

If you are plagued by mainframe network issues, you may well be interested in the new features they’ve incorporated into ZEN TRACE and SOLVE V4.7, including:

The new “Peek” function, which provides in-flight viewing of active IP traces. This means that it is now possible to view an active trace while it is still running, tracking its progress ‘in-flight', and then stopping it when the condition being sought in the trace is detected. This can save considerable CPU costs and user time.
Traces originally captured in OSAENTA, libpcap, or Sniffer format can now be imported into ZTS. This can make network problem solving both faster and easier.
As well as being able to accept commands from the operator console, ZEN TRACE and SOLVE now adds the ability to issue any commands (including ZTS commands) from JCL. When combined with the capabilities provided by the new import features, this enables different trace formats to be automatically imported into ZTS for analysis. This greatly simplifies the whole network problem solving process.
Tracing of IPv6 is now faster and easier with the provision of improved Flow display text descriptions for recognizable packet contents, as well as the capability to search using IPv6 format addresses.
Tracing packets in large Sysplex environments is inherently complex, but ZEN TRACE and SOLVE v4.7 now makes it easier by providing improved facilities for expanding encapsulated data used by Sysplex protocols such as GRE and VIPA Route. Being able to view and expand encapsulated payload data is a vital tool for rapid problem diagnosis in large Enterprise networks.

If you’re finding network management is an issue, it might well be worth a look.

How to create a custom Web Part for SharePoint

2011-04-15T19:06:00.003+01:00

I’ve been working recently with Darren Pritchard at a site that’s fairly new to SharePoint. They came up with a number of fairly basic ‘how to’ questions and Darren has put together some basic information for them. It seemed that if these new SharePoint users and had lots of questions, then so would many other sites. So it made sense to make this information available to the SharePoint community as a whole. This site was using SharePoint 2007.

The first thing to do when creating a custom Web Part is to set up a development environment. You need to create a development SharePoint 2007 (SP2007) server and give it a name. For SharePoint 2007 you need Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008). It’s worth noting that you can’t use Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010).

Install VS2008 onto your development SP2007 server. Next install the VS2008 SharePoint plug-in called “VSeWSSv13_AMD64_Build-433.exe”. This can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=fb9d4b85-da2a-432e-91fb-d505199c49f6. This plug-in adds the Web Part project to VS2008. Once this is in place, you’ll be able to actually create a custom Web Part.

Open VS2008, then click ‘File/New/Project’. Find the ‘Visual C#’ list and expand that. Next click ‘SharePoint’, and in the right-hand box click ‘Web Part’. Give your new project a name. The naming convention is og.wp.%Name%, where:
og = your organization (abbreviated, eg use gs if you’re company is called ‘Great Shoes’, etc.)
wp = Web Part
.%Name% = the name of the Web Part.

Make sure you tick ‘Create directory for solution’ – see Figure below.

Next you’ll see a trust level box. Make sure that it looks like this:

And click ‘OK’.

You can now go ahead and write your Web Part using Visual C#.

The next stage shouldn’t be missed – it’s testing your custom Web Part. You need to tell VS2008 where to deploy the Web Part. Click ‘Project’, ‘%PROJECT NAME% Properties’. On the tabs click ‘Debug’ and change the ‘Start browsers with URL’ box to point to your test site, eg http://yourdevelopmentserver:5003/. Click the cross in the right hand corner to save the changes.

To deploy your Web Part, click ‘Build’, ‘Deploy %PROJECT NAME%’. This will add the solution to SharePoint central admin and deploy the solution to your test site. You can add your Web Part to your test site in the same way that you would add any other Web Parts, and now you can test it.

It’s useful to know how to retract a test Web Part. Open your project in VS2008, click ‘Build’ and then ‘Retract Solution’. This will retract the solution from your test site and remove it from SharePoint central admin. You now need to manually remove the pointer from your test site. To do this open your test site and click ‘Site Actions/Site Settings/Modify All Site Settings’. Under Galleries click ‘Web Parts’ and delete your development Web Part.

Assuming that your Web Part worked as planned (finally!), you’ll want to deploy your solution into your live environment. Firstly, locate your project, eg ‘C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects’, then double-click on your new project, and locate the debug folder. Within this you should find %PROJECT NAME%.wsp. Finally copy this .wsp file onto your Live SharePoint Server.

I’ll share Darren’s full instructions for installing a solution another time.

Taking the tablets!

2011-04-12T11:28:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I was talking about how William Data Systems had integrated their ZEN z/OS network management suite of products with iPhones and iPads and they’d also just included Blackberry and Android phones. I’d been particularly impressed how an iPad user had been able to identify where a problem was occurring and taken steps to rectify it. More recently, the iPad 2 has become available, and I thought it was definitely time to to investigate whether I ought to get myself a tablet device.

Now, I feel that I can argue a business case for using a tablet device. I need to browse the Internet when I’m at home, travelling, and with clients, and sometimes a phone just isn’t a big enough screen and a laptop is just too big and bulky to easily carry around. I also regularly need to browse Word documents – minutes of meetings, proposals, articles that I’m writing, etc etc. I also use Excel regularly – for all the things that you’d use a spreadsheet for. And I give presentations and talks that make PowerPoint a must-have – plus an easy way of connecting to a projector.

And, for me, that’s kind of the core usage – a big phone or a small laptop – it’s all down to form factor. A 10 inch book size device seems like the Goldilocks solution. But it has to be more capable than a gloried Netbook with widgets!

So let’s look at my nice-to-have list. It’s got to be fast. It’s got to have USB ports so I can swap files around easily. It’s obviously got to have wifi, and when I’m connected to the Internet I want access to Flash files (I really like those flipbooks rather than downloading and reading giant PDFs). I need it to play AVI files – my back catalogue of films etc would keep me amused while waiting at airports. And two built-in cameras facing opposite ways for Skyping and photographing whatever I can see.

I’d quite like an HDMI port so I can connect to a TV. I’d like a music playing app – like media player. I’d also like something like Dreamweaver so I can work on Web sites, and something like Photoshop so I can edit images. And possibly something like InDesign so I can produce newsletters etc. And I’ll need a firewall and antivirus software.

So, that seems to mean that an Android tablet is probably out and a PC-style tablet is what I want.

Now, the cost of devices varies in different countries, but I’ll give you the UK prices. An iPad 2 with wifi starts at just under £400. The Motorola Xoom is going to be £499. It has HDMI, 32GB of storage (plus an SD card slot), and twin cameras. The Advent Vega is £249.99, but that still uses Android 2.2 not 3.0 (Honeycomb). There’s a 10 inch Dell Streak coming. The Asus EeePad Transformer comes with a mini-HDMI port at £380. And Toshiba has an intereting-looking Android 3 tablet coming soon.

For PC-based tablets, Amazon has a 10.2" Windows 7 Tablet PC with 1.3MP Webcam, G-Sensor, HDMI Port, 3x USB2.0 ports for just under £300. The Zoostorm 3310-9500 SL8 is priced at just under £500. The Asus Eee Slate, which comes with just about everything you could want costs nearly a thousand pounds.

And that’s really the problem. Anything meeting my wish list is extremely expensive, and anything else seems little more than a glorified boy’s toy! It seems that unless I get my hands on something that’s so impressive I’m prepared to pay the extra money, for the moment I will bide my time and see what comes available as we move into the summer. Prices are bound to drop and performance is bound to increase. Don’t you think?

CA provides May Mainframe Madness

2011-04-03T12:18:00.003+01:00

Last week I was talking about the benefits of virtual user group like the Virtual IMS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualims) and the Virtual CICS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualcics). I was suggesting that attending this kind of group meant you didn’t need budgeting approval for time away from the office (meals, hotel rooms, travel, etc) and so made life easier for busy mainframe professionals. CA has taken this idea one step further – they’re devoting the whole May to mainframes, and doing it all virtually!

Details of CA’s May Mainframe Madness can be found at www.ca.com/content/page/May-Mainframe-Madness-2011.aspx.

CA describes it as the largest mainframe-focused event of its kind. They also say it’s the, “largest virtual Mainframe trade show in the world”. The information on the Web page currentlys says: “Every day brings new insights, tools and strategies to help you understand and maximize the strength and relevance of 21st century mainframe solutions. There are more than 100 valuable sessions over every business day in May, so you won’t want to miss a thing! Learn what’s new and find out how mainframe solutions from CA Technologies are leveraging Mainframe 2.0, CA’s innovative strategy to change the way the mainframe is managed forever.”

You can register now for the event at www.ca.com/mmm – which redirects to a registration page. CA claims that registration takes only 90 seconds, and go on to say: “The event will feature keynote presentations on everything from debugging to new backup and recovery techniques and 150+ virtual sessions and demos, as well as technical sessions, customer case studies, on-demand education materials, and various mainframe exhibits for approximately 7,500 professionals around the world.”

So why am I telling you about CA’s event in May? Don’t they have their own PR people who get paid to do it? Well, the reason I’m mentioning it is because I’ve been invited to take part, along with long-time friend, colleague, and iTech-Ed Associate, Mark Lillycrop, who’s CEO of Arcati Ltd – the people who produce the much-valued Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, which is freely available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. Mark and I will be available in what CA calls the Networking Lounge. This is a place where people can take part in scheduled chats as well as watch videos and have unscheduled chats with other attendees.

Other areas in CA’s virtual mainframe extravaganza are the Auditorium, the Job Role Resource Center, and the Exhibit Hall.

Mark and I haven’t finalized a time and date for this event, nor have we agreed on the topics we will be chatting about – but I’m sure it will be great fun and very informative. I’m also sure that I’ll let you have the exact details via this blog, Facebook, or Twitter in plenty of time. And I look forward to meeting you then and hearing your questions.

And if you’re looking for a virtual event to attend, then next Tuesday (12 April) at 10:30 CDT, Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software, will be talking to the Virtual IMS user group. The title of his presentation is: “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”. You can find out more about the event including how to register at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

New virtual CICS user group

2011-03-27T11:01:00.000+01:00

How many times have you come away from a conference or a presentation and thought wow, that was really useful? Perhaps one small nugget of information from the speaker has opened a door for further development of work at your site. And most technical presentations are full of gems of information – both for the novice user and those more technically experienced.

But how often have you had to fight to justify attending meetings with other professionals? How often have you struggled to build a business case showing that a particular event or conference really will pay back more than it costs in your time off work, the cost of staff to cover your absence, travel costs, subsistence allowance, and hotel fees?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to attend a highly professional technically-oriented seminar or presentation without having to leave your company’s offices – without, perhaps, even having to leave your desk?

And wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a single place where you could go and find out a little bit about the latest CICS product announcements, including a link to get more information if you wanted it? How cool would it be if there was a list of tools that ran on CICS with a brief summary of what each product did? And what about some way of finding out whenever someone published a new article about using CICS in IBM Systems Magazine or zJournal, or wherever – wouldn’t that be useful?

Well, the great news is that the all-new Virtual CICS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualcics provides all that and more. On the Web site you’ll find a list of useful applications that enhance CICS, and a list of CICS service providers. You’ll also find the latest product announcements and articles.

In addition, every other month (that’s six times a year) there will be a webinar. Using Citrix GoToMeeting, you’ll be able to stay at your desk and interact with other members of the user group and listen to the latest presentation by an acknowledged CICS expert. In the months when there isn’t a webinar, there will be a newsletter sent to all members keeping them up-to-date with the latest news.

And if you’re wondering how much this kind of high-quality service is likely to cost you, the answer is nothing – not a penny! Membership of the user group is free – you just need to sign up at www.fundi.com/virtualcics/register.htm. And the webinars are completely free to members. We’ll e-mail you a link about a fortnight before the webinar with all the information you need.

So, if you’re a CICS professional, this is the user group specifically tailored for you.

Why not join right now?

You may also be interested to know that the Virtual IMS user group has been running since November 2007. You can find out more about that at www.fundi.com/virtualIMS.

Johnny head-in-the-clouds

2011-03-20T11:08:00.000Z

Almost everyone is predicting 2011 will be the year when cloud computing becomes a reality for many organizations. CA produced surveys towards the end of last year showing this to be part of the planning of most of the organizations they surveyed. Other surveys, like BMC’s and the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook found that cloud computing wasn’t quite on the radar of many of the people who actually do the day-to-day systems work.

This week has seen a report from IBM suggesting that 70 percent of small and medium businesses – perhaps not its usual massive mainframe users – are either planning to, or already do, deploy cloud-based IT infrastructures to improve their performance and reduce costs. For the report, IBM surveyed 2,112 business and information technology decision makers at midsize businesses around the world, and the publication is called Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective.

Also in the report was a finding that these same SMBs were moving from cost control to growth in terms of cloud computing. The report says that 62 percent of surveyed organizations are planning to increase their IT budgets in the next year or so. Now one spin on that would be that the world is out of recession and all’s good with the world. An alternative way of looking at it is to say that most sites have reduced or kept spending the same for the past two years and there’s a huge amount of pressure – like a boiling kettle – to update hardware and software.

The survey also found that 70 percent of respondents are actively pursuing business analytics to help give them some kind of insights into the huge amounts of data they’ve generated. The survey also found that 66 percent of respondents say they are embracing the benefits of cloud computing to optimize costs and redundancy while increasing uptime and scalability.

Obviously cloud computing is new to so many of the organizations surveyed and perhaps not surprisingly it was found that more than 70 percent are looking for local business partners with industry expertise for more of a consultative – rather than a purely transactional – relationship.

In other news (as they say) the new CEO at HP, Leo Apotheker is looking to make his company a leader in the development of infrastructure and platform Cloud services with an open Cloud, which many people assume will compete directly with Google's similar Cloud-based offering.

My final words of ‘wisdom’ on this matter is that we all think we know what we mean by cloud, but for many organizations it might be like shopping for a ‘car’ or ‘automobile’. You could end up with a Rolls Royce or second-hand Reliant Robin! As you work your way down into the nitty gritty details of what your organization needs, you can find cloud computing to be a fairly nebulous term!

CICS tools

2011-03-13T11:39:00.001Z

I've been putting together a list of CICS tools and I thought I'd share some of the information I'd found.
So far, I've found 110 products from 31 vendors - including ASG, ASPG, Attachmate, Axios Products, B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH, BMC Software, C\TREK Corp, CA, Circle Computer Group, Computer Application Services, Compuware, Cue, Metamon, Data21, Enterprise Research Inc, Foundation Software, GT Software, H&M Systems Software, H&W, Hostbridge Technology, IBM, Lee Technologies, MacKinney Systems, Macro 4, Matter of Fact Software, NETEC, International Inc, Rocket Software, Rosebud Management Systems, SDS, Serena Software, SOA Software, and UNICOM Systems.

The products allow users to do everything from development to sorting, from debugging to connectivity. The problem, I guess, from the CICS user's perspective is which product to choose. It's not like going to the supermarket and choosing between tins of beans from different vendors, it's more like making a choice between which menu item to choose at different restaurants. You assume that some are larger portions or come with better service. Some come with a side salad, at other restaurants all vegetables are separately priced.

The best I can do is create a list of products and briefly summarize what each product does - monitor, sort, management, tuning, etc. It's still very much down to the users to speak to each vendor and see what extras they get with their purchase and whether the product will integrate with the other third-party products already installed.

Below is a list of the CICS-related products that I've found so far. If you know of any others then please e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com and let me have the information. Or tell me if a company's gone out of business or a product doesn't really exist anymore, etc.

I am already aware of many products that work with CICS that aren't necessarily CICS-specific, so I haven't included them.

Abend-AID for CICS (Compuware), ASG-TMON for CICS TS for z/OS (ASG), Autoinstall (MacKinney Systems), AUTOMON/BATCH for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), AUTOMON/CICS for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), BOS-skip (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), BOS-pack (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), BOS-help (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), C\FLOW (Circle Computer Group), C\TREK (C\TREK Corp), CAFC (NETEC International Inc), CA CICSORT (CA), CA DADS Plus for CICS (CA), CA InterTest for CICS (CA), CA SOLVE:Operations Automation for CICS (CA), CA SymDump for CICS (CA), CA Verify for CICS (CA), CDDF (NETEC International Inc), CICS Application transformation tools (IBM), CICS Batch Application Control (IBM), CICS Business Event Publisher for MQSeries (IBM), CICS Configuration Manager for z/OS (CICS CM) (IBM), CICS Deployment Assistant for z/OS (IBM), CICS Interdependency Analyzer (IBM), CICS OTTO (Online Transmission Time Optimizer) (IBM), CICS Performance Monitor (IBM), CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS (CICS PA) (IBM), CICS Subsystem Management tools (IBM), CICS Transaction Gateway (IBM), CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (IBM), CICS Universal Client (IBM), CICS VSAM Copy (IBM), CICS VSAM Recovery (IBM), CICS VSAM Transparency (IBM), CICS/CEMT from Batch (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Comet for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Fax (MacKinney Systems), CICS/FCTD for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/FileServ for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Forward Recovery System (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Hotprint (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Juggler for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Log View (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Mapr II (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Menu II (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Message (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Morning News (MacKinney Systems), CICS/On Line File Utility (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Qeditor (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Qsort (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Response Time Monitor (MacKinney Systems), CICS/SignOn (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Spooler (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Spy (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Swap (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Timeout (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Windows for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS-DupS (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-Lock (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-SSO (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-View (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS2PDF (Computer Application Services, Inc), Command/CICS (ASPG - Advanced Software Products Group), Dump Detective for CICS (MacKinney Systems), Easy Help for CICS (MacKinney Systems), Eden Server (Rosebud Management Systems), Energizer for CICS (BMC Software), eSendIT (MacKinney Systems), Fault Analyzer (IBM), Help/Windows for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), Inter-Program Command Processor (IPCP PLUS) (SDS), IpServer (Data21), Ivory Service Architect (GT Software), KEYFAST (H&M Systems Software), MacKinney Batch to CICS (MBC) (MacKinney Systems), Macro Level Interpreter (MacKinney Systems), MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for CICS (BMC), MAINVIEW for CICS TS (BMC), Megapacker (H&M Systems Software), METAMON for CICS (Cue-Metamon) METAMON Power Tools (Cue-Metamon) MFAST/ES (H&M Systems Software), PEngiONL (CICS) (Foundation Software), PIE/CICS Availability Plus for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS Dynamic Menus for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS MultiCICS for z/OS) (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS NetGate for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS NonStop CICS for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PlexSpy Application Status Monitor (Matter of Fact Software), REPRO for CICS (Circle Computer Group) RMode31 (MacKinney Systems), Rocket FYI/CICS (Rocket Software), ROPES (Axios Products), Show and Tell II (MacKinney Systems), SoftQuery (H&M Systems Software), SOLA (SOA Software), StarTool DA (Dump Analyzer) (Serena Software), Strobe for CICS (Compuware), Synchro (Macro 4), SYSB-II (H&W), Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS (IBM), Tools4CICS (Data21), TraceMaster CodeTrack (Macro 4), Track (MacKinney Systems), UCCF/Server for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), Verastream Bridge Integrator (Attachmate), Vital Signs for CICS (Lee Technologies), WebTek (H&W) WIRE (Web Interface Rules Engine) (Hostbridge Technology), Xpediter/CICS (Compuware).

Cloud initiatives from IBM

2011-03-06T10:26:00.000Z

2011 has been dubbed by some as the year of the cloud – the year when cloud computing comes off the PowerPoint slides and onto a computer near you. Others have muttered wisely about similarities with client-server computing, which for many years was the ‘technology of the future’ at every presentation and never quite arrived the way we were promised.

Anyway, this week saw announcements from IBM about cloud computing. It announced Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.2, which creates virtual server images in minutes and automates the management of virtual environments and hybrid cloud systems. The software is also claimed to help to better protect data in the cloud. And the software provides ‘image management’ of a virtual environment, which means that as computing needs change the number of virtual machines can be scaled up and down.

Provisioning Manager works stand-alone or with other Tivoli management products. It works across Power-based servers and Intel x86 instruction set-based servers. It can manage LPARs (logical partitions) or WPARs (workload partitions) on AIX servers. It also manages virtual machine images provided by VMware ESX Server, Citrix Systems XenServer, and Red Hat’s open source KVM (but not Microsoft’s Hyper-V, yet) on x86 servers.

The beta availability of new hybrid cloud management capabilities were announced by IBM at the PULSE 2011 conference. Tivoli Provisioning Manager and other components can manage virtual machines across an internal enterprise cloud and an external public cloud. However, this doesn’t extend to other public clouds, yet.

Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (also in beta) utilizes VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection. By doing so, it offloads the back-up function from the virtual machine and ESX Server host to a VMware vStorage back-up server. Storage Manager is then able to request more frequent back-ups, ensuring greater data protection without placing excessive demand on virtualized system resources. It also allows smaller and faster back-ups that replicate only data blocks that have changed since the previous back-up by making use of VMware’s Changed Block Tracking.

The same week saw a discussion about cloud computing at the CeBIT expo in Hannover in Germany. There it was suggested that the adoption of cloud computing was being held back by issues such as security and reliability. One solution to the security issue was to use private clouds or shared private clouds. Another challenge that was highlighted was bandwidth (or the lack of it). They focused on the amount of data that would need to be moved around in a cloud environment might be too much for the existing infrastructure. The fourth issue the conference identified was interoperability – and the need for standards was highlighted. My personal opinion is that too often computing (and technology in general) has been held back by standards – the very fact that there are far too many of them! Have you ever tried to use someone else’s phone charger to charge your phone, only to find it has a completely different connector (let alone different amps and volts, etc). But you remember SOA and the plethora of standards, etc – OK rant over.

I’m sure this blog will return to cloud announcements, developments, and set-backs many times during this year!

Blending mainframe technology with Apple, Blackberry, and Android – makes you think!

2011-02-27T10:20:00.000Z

I don’t know whether you’re going to be at the SHARE conference in Anaheim (California) from 27 February to 4 March, but one of the interesting things to see is the William Data Systems stand (booth 211).

They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.

The company say that this mobile technology extends ZEN’s whistle-blower ability to monitor SyslogD, filter the results by many criteria, launch automation commands or REXX procedures, and transmit the important alerts to mobile devices, all in real-time. I think this sounds pretty impressive and I was lucky enough to have a demonstration of the technology a few ago.

Originally the technology was restricted to iPhone and iPad users, but now it’s extended to the other ‘smart’ technologies that organizations use.

Their press release mentions SyslogD. In fact, this is probably the most useful resource that many IT departments ignore or only refer to long after they should. Having this kind of information on your phone seems almost futuristic.

Anyway, if you are at Anaheim, take a look.

On a completely different topic… I was pleased to receive the following e-mail during the week:

“On behalf of IBM, it is with great pleasure to recognize you as a 2011 IBM Information Champion. We would like to thank you for your leadership and contributions to the Data Management community. You continue to be among a very small group to be chosen for this recognition. Congratulations.”

This makes three years in a row.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about the Information Champion programme here (www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/)

Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey

2011-02-19T12:12:00.000Z

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 has been available for download free from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11 for nearly a month now. Each new Yearbook is always greeted with enthusiasm by mainframers everywhere because it is such a unique source of information. And each year, many people find the results of the user survey especially interesting.

The 100 respondents who completed the survey on the Arcati site did so between 1 November and 3 December 2010. 32% were from Europe and 52% from North America, with 16% from the rest of the world.

44% of the respondents worked in companies with upwards of 10,000 employees worldwide, while 14% of respondents had 0-200 staff, 10% had 201-1000, 14% had 1001 to 5000, and 14% had 5001-10,000 staff. In terms of MIPS, 50% of respondents had fewer than 1000 MIPS installed, 24% fell into the mid-sized category between 1000 and 10,000 MIPS, and 22% were at the high end.

Looking at MIPS growth produced some interesting results. Larger, more mature businesses (above 10,000 MIPS) were almost all experiencing some growth, but predominantly in 0 to 10% per year category. Sites in the 1000-10,000 MIPS range were showing a range of results with some sites suggesting a decline while others predicted growth in excess of 50%. Sites below 1000 MIPS were most likely to be experiencing growth of less than 10%, with the largest percentage (of these three groups) predicting a decline. The mainframe market does appear to be quite fragmented with competitive pressures at the lower end of the mainframe market, and some respondents commented about lack of understanding amongst management about the value of mainframe computing.

With the environment and environmental issues getting so much coverage in the media these days, the survey asked whether IBM’s recent green initiatives on things like power consumption and cooling had made the mainframe more or less attractive. Nearly three-quarters (72% – the same as the previous year) said that IBM’s green initiatives made no difference at all. 17% felt it made the mainframe a little more attractive, and 11% felt it made the mainframe a lot more attractive. Clearly “greenness” isn’t much of a selling point for mainframes.

With so much talk about Cloud Computing, for the first time the survey asked the mainframe population for their opinion. It asked whether respondents currently used their mainframe for cloud computing. Only 2% of respondents said they did. 34% said they didn’t, and the rest weren’t sure. Bearing in mind that it is still early days for a cloud computing initiative, the survey asked whether respondents were planning to adopt cloud computing as a strategy. 22% said they weren’t at present. 8% thought some mainframe applications would be cloud-enabled in the future, and a similar number thought most would be cloud-enabled in the future. However, 4% didn’t see a use for cloud computing. It will be interesting to follow these figures in future surveys.

The survey asked respondents which specialty processors (IFL, zIIP, and zAAP) they had. 6% of sites had all three (down from last year’s value of 12%) and a further 28% of sites had two of the three specialty processors (up from last year’s 12%). More sites had zIIP processors (44%) than any other. 36% had IFL processors, and 24% had zAAP specialty processors. 36% of sites don’t have a specialty processor installed.

It seems that at many sites, mainframes are losing out due to management ignorance. The survey quotes one respondent who said: “We do not expect to have a mainframe within 2-3 years. The CIO sees the mainframe as obsolete and expensive, whether or not either of those is true”. Another respondent complained: “Our architects do not understand mainframes and seem to be mostly knowledgeable about Windows. Project funding is project based and not enterprise based, hence a tendency to prefer perceived cheaper solutions, eg Windows.”

The appearance of the z196 processor had a big impact within the industry. High-profile TV appearances of Watson on Jeopardy keep people familiar with the name IBM. However, there is still a lack of understanding of what a mainframe does and what it can do amongst far too many IT managers and other corporate executives.

Anyway, full details of the responses to many other questions can be found in the user survey section of the Yearbook. It’s well worth a read.

The Yearbook can only be free to mainframers because of the support given by sponsors. This year’s sponsors were CA Technologies, Canam Software, DataKinetics, and Type80 Security Software.

IBM’s Transactional Analysis Workbench

2011-02-13T11:51:00.001Z

Now I’m not here to tell you what software to buy and what to ignore, but if you haven’t had a look at IBM’s Transactional Analysis Workbench software yet, I think you should. It’s one of those pieces of software that kind of joins up the dots and allows you to see the bigger picture when you thought there was a performance problem. It can help identify performance issues in one subsystem – CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ, or even z/OS itself – when the symptoms of the problem are appearing in a completely different subsystem.

20 years ago, the world was a much simpler place. You’d be running IMS or CICS, and you’d be picking up data from your IMS database or DB2. But what was so simple, was the fact that the users of the data would be company employees. So, if there was a problem, you could use a fairly specific monitor to identify the location of the problem and fix it. Nowadays, you still run CICS and/or IMS as your transaction manager, but it can be linked to WebSphere MQ, and data can be coming from non-Z servers as well as IMS DB and DB2. But what makes life even more complicated is that the users are not just your staff, but also customers and potential customers, as well as automated systems that could be using your data in some mash-up appearing somewhere else entirely. Which means that it’s even more important to fix a slow-running system. And that means it’s vitally important to be able to quickly and easily identify where the problem actually is.

From a business perspective, there may be a single transaction that goes away, gets some data, and displays it. From a technical perspective, that single, say, CICS transaction may involve an IMS transaction running, and a DB2 intervention, and something involving MQ, before the results get back to the user’s screen. Now, if you think the problem lies with CICS, you can use CICS Performance Analyser to identify the problem. Or with IMS problems you can use IMS Performance Analyzer. Or for DB2 you can use DB2 Performance Manager, etc. But, what if the symptom appears to be IMS, but is really MQ? How can you combine this analysis to get to see the big picture of what’s happening on your system? This is where Transactional Analysis Workbench comes in.

You can check out the Web site to get all the specific details of why it’s a wonderful product, but I’d like to highlight just a couple of points. Transactional Analysis Workbench automated the collection of the data needed for problem analysis, and it provides a session manager to manage problem analysis through its life-cycle.

Rather cleverly, it allows slightly less-experienced or less highly-trained staff to identify the source of the problem. And then, when the ‘experts’ are available, it allows them to look in great detail to determine the problem. This is because the product links closely with other tools.

Transaction Analysis Workbench can provide a window into other subsystems that impact CICS and IMS performance. And by using information from SMF, OPERLOG, and other data sources such as CICS-DBCTL transaction performance, IMS address space resource consumption, WebSphere address space performance, MQ and DB2 external subsystem (ESAF) performance, APPC transaction performance, and IRLM long-lock activity, it can give an insight into what’s changed and where the problem might be originating.

Joined up software has got to be a good thing. And a product that can link closely with more specific monitoring or analysis tools has got to be a great help in finding out what’s different today compared to yesterday that’s causing a sudden drop in performance. But take a look yourselves.

The importance of mainframe performance

2011-02-06T14:23:00.001Z

It’s so easy to forget, or just take it as read, that mainframes have been able to successfully run with five nines availability for well over a decade. What that means is achieving 99.999% of scheduled uptime. In other words, it means that unscheduled downtime is less than five and half minutes in a year! Now that kind of amazing performance is something that boxes running other operating systems can only dream of. Some are working towards that level of availability, but others (you know who I’m thinking of here) aren’t even close.

But I wasn’t thinking about performance in that sense. We just take it for granted the operating system is going to be always working. What I was thinking about was the performance of the major subsystems running under z/OS. It’s very important to take steps to ensure that CICS or IMS are performing optimally. Monitoring software can be installed that will identify when preset thresholds are reached. They help identify bottlenecks and then the appropriate action can be taken to resolve them. This is the kind of stuff systems programmers have been working away at for years. They’ve been using faster processors, faster I/O, more efficiently-coded transactions, until every component is working as well as it can.

In previous blogs, we’ve talked about monitoring software that can arrange for alerts to be sent to designated staff as text messages or e-mails – allowing them to access the nearest iPad or laptop and take steps to resolve the new problem.

As well as CICS and IMS, there are monitors for DB2, WebSphere, and z/OS itself. These can all be integrated and produce wonderful moving graphs or other displays that allow users to tell at a glance whether everything is OK or whether a slight tweak to the subsystem is required. In addition, we’ve had software that learns how to maintain high performance and make appropriate changes on-the-fly, without any human intervention.

But the problem that many sites now face is what they can do if, for example, IMS users are reporting slow response times, but the problem appears to be coming from outside the IMS subsystem rather than from inside it. For example, what appears to be an IMS performance problem could be a CICS, DB2, WebSphere, or z/OS performance problem. The challenge facing systems programmers in this situation is to correlate performance data in IMS with activities in these other systems in order to discover the cause of the slow response time.

One new solution is Transaction Analysis Workbench, which is an IMS tool. If you’re interested in how to approach this type of situation, how to gather the necessary information from multiple subsystems, and then analyse, diagnose, and resolve the problem, you’ll be interested in the webinar from the Virtual IMS user group this week.

The Virtual IMS user group runs free webinars every other month. During the webinar, a technical expert shares their hard-won knowledge with the rest of the group. The webinars use Citrix GoToMeeting, which means you don’t have to face the hard task of convincing your company to fund your user group experience – you just sit down at your laptop and log in.

Anyone wishing to join the webinar needs to join the user group – which is also free. The next meeting is at 10:30 Central Standard Time on Tuesday 8 February. The user group’s Web site (where you can join) is at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 - now available

2011-01-28T00:29:00.002Z

Every year, about this time, we welcome a new edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. It really is the standard reference work for all IBM mainframe professionals – whether they’re grizzled old-timers nearing retirement or that new batch of recently graduated enthusiasts, and everyone in between.

Why is it such an important publication each year? The simple answer is that it provides a one-stop shop for everything you need to know. For newcomers (and people moving to an area slightly outside their comfort zone) there’s a technical specification section that includes model numbers, MIPS, and MSUs for z196 and z10 processors. There’s a hardware timeline, and a display of mainframe operating system evolution. In addition, there’s the glossary of terminology section explaining simply what those acronyms mean.

One section provides a media guide for IBM mainframers. This includes information on newsletters, magazines, user groups, and social networking information resources for the z/OS environment. Amongst the things it highlights are zJournal, INSIGHT-SPECTRA, IBM Listservs, SHARE’s Five Minute Briefing on the Data Center, blogs, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn discussions. As well as user groups such as SHARE and IDUG.

The vendor directory section contains an up-to-date list of vendors, consultants, and service providers working in the z/OS environment. There’s a summary of the products they supply and contact information. There are a number of new organizations in the list this year, and a few have ceased trading.

The mainframe strategy section contains articles by industry gurus and vendors on topics such as: XML and SOAP data binding for enterprise applications; DataKinetics solutions for mergers and acquisitions; Thinking outside the box – monitoring DB2 security on z/OS; and CA Mainframe Chorus.

For many people the highlight each year is the mainframe user survey. This illustrates just what's been happening at users’ sites. It’s a good way for mainframers to compare what they are planning to do with what other sites have done. I will be looking at some of the survey highlights in my next blog.

The other good thing – as far as many of the 15,000 people who download it are concerned – is that it is completely FREE.

It can only be free because some organizations have been prepared to sponsor it or advertise in it. This year’s sponsors were CA Technologies, Canam Software, DataKinetics, and Type80 Security Software.

To see this year’s Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, click on www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. If you don’t want to download a large PDF, again this year, each section is available as a separate PDF file.
Don’t miss out on this excellent publication.

Virtual IMS user group

2011-01-16T10:26:00.001Z

With so much of IBM’s software now in its 40s, it’s no wonder that using it requires quite a lot of knowledge. And many people have developed a whole range of nifty tips and tricks that they can use when things go wrong or to help make things work better. That’s where user groups come in. A user group provides an opportunity for people to share their hints and tips with others, and, in return, learn some tried-and-tested new ones.

One problem that managers sometimes have with staff going to user group meetings is that they are unavailable at work should there be a problem. In addition, there is often a cost associated with going to meetings – travel costs, meals, parking, subsistence, etc. That’s where the Virtual IMS user group scores. Not only do members get all the benefits of user group membership, but there’s no need for them to leave the office – they just join the meeting through their computer (hence the ‘virtual’ part of the name).

And the Virtual IMS user group is going to be busy in 2011. If you’re not already a member and you’d like to be, then go to www.fundi.com/virtualims and sign up. User group membership is FREE. This year there is an exciting programme of presentations at the virtual meetings – using GoToMeeting – starting on 8 February at 10:30 CDT with a presentation by Fundi Software’s Jim Martin entitled, “Solving the problem when IMS isn’t the cause”.

Jim describes the presentation like this: “Users might report slow response times from IMS, but you suspect that other systems are responsible. For example, what appears to be an IMS performance problem could be a CICS, DB2, WebSphere, or z/OS performance problem. Your challenge is to correlate performance data in IMS with activity in these other systems in order to discover the cause of the slow response time. In this session, we discuss how to approach this type of situation, how to gather the necessary information from multiple subsystems, and then analyse, diagnose, and resolve the problem.

On 12 April the user group meeting includes a presentation from Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software. His presentation is entitled: “Simplify and improving database administration by leveraging your storage system”. Ron is a database professional with over 30 years of related experience. He has developed relational database software, implemented large database systems, conducted database design reviews, and consulted with companies around the world on various aspects of relational database technology, database management tools, and integrated data management solutions.

On 14 June Ronnie Parker from Logic Online talks about: “The ripple effect of making changes”. The session describes storage-aware data management tools. These tools integrate storage-based fast-replication facilities with database management systems to provide fast and non-disruptive IMS and DB2 backup and cloning solutions. Storage-aware data management tools improve database backup, recovery, and cloning solutions by using storage-based fast-replication facilities to copy data; saving time and host CPU and I/O resources. The session explores how storage-based fast-replication facilities offered by IBM, EMC, and Hitachi storage systems can be used to backup, recover, clone, and refresh IMS and DB2 systems.

And there will be more great sessions in the second half of the year.

The user group is very grateful to Fundi Software for stepping in to sponsor the group (in much the same way that BMC sponsors the IMS Listserv at http://imslistserv.bmc.com/scripts/wa-BMC.exe?LOGON). Fundi Software is an Australian software product development company. Established in 1982, Fundi is today one of the leading providers of tools for IMS and CICS systems. Taken from the Zulu language, Fundi means “expert”.

The Virtual IMS user group is an independently-operated vendor-neutral group run by and for the IMS user community. The Web site contains an up-to-date list of IMS-related software that can be used with IMS; IMS news (information about new IMS products and new versions of existing products); a list of IMS consultant (let me know if your company needs to be added to the list); links to recent IMS articles that are available on the Internet; and links to IMS resources – in fact, it’s a one-stop shop for IMS professionals and other people interested in IBM’s Information Management System.

Find out more at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

Mainframe computing 2011

2011-01-09T09:44:00.000Z

This is the time of year when people make predictions for what we can expect to see in the coming year, so here are my predictions...

I predict that the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook will appear in early January and be downloaded by around 15 000 mainframe professionals. The Yearbook includes an annual mainframe user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section.

I also predict the Virtual IMS user group will restart its virtual meetings and newsletters early in the New Year. Virtual IMS is a user group established as a way for individuals using IBM's IMS hierarchical database and transaction processing systems to exchange information, learn new techniques, and advance their skills with the product. The first virtual meeting takes place on Tuesday 8 February at 10:30 CDT. The presentation is by Fundi Software’s Jim Martin and is entitled, “Solving the problem when IMS isn't the cause”. Users might report slow response time from IMS, but you suspect that other systems are responsible. For example, what appears to be an IMS performance problem could be a CICS, DB2, WebSphere, or z/OS performance problem. Your challenge is to correlate performance data in IMS with activity in these other systems in order to discover the cause of the slow response time. This talk will explain how to do it.

With all the hype about cloud computing, 2011 is the year cloud computing will become commonplace. In many ways, this is a major technology change that is being driven by users. They like the simple life (or should I say, we like the simple life). It’s very easy to turn on your browser and have all the applications you want just there waiting for you – like the apps on your phone. You then use the applications as you want them. Users are looking for the same simplicity in their working environment and organizations are going to have to provide this paradigm-shift way of working.

And talking of smart phones, I predict that the device of choice is not going to be a small laptop or netbook, but a large smart phone (or small tablet). Something that you can fit in your pocket, but has everything you need to do a day’s work on it. And, of course, cloud computing makes this easier too.

I predict there will be more GUI-looking software on mainframes so that youngsters will feel right at home using the technology. And I predict there will be much more mainframe automation going on – which will allow the few experts available within an organization to do more work with fewer resources.

Social media will have embraced all sizes of businesses, so if you want to find out what IBM or any other major (or less major!) vendor is up to, you’ll be able to do it in the Twitter, Facebook, whatever, environment you are currently familiar with.

In the consumer market, I predict more people watching TV programmes through laptops and smart phones. It’s so easy and convenient to catch the latest news on a smart phone.

I predict that mainframes will NOT disappear in 2011.

I predict the arrival of more mainframe monitoring apps on smart phones – so you know straightaway if there is an issue with the network etc. You’ll then pull out your tablet or laptop and solve the problem using the nice GUI on the software.

I’d also like to predict world peace and harmony – maybe next year!

2010 mainframe review

2010-12-19T10:49:00.001Z

As this will probably be my last blog of 2010, I thought it would be traditional to review what’s happened in the mainframe world over the past year.

2010 will probably be remembered as the year of the cloud because it was the year when cloud computing started to be taken seriously across the industry. Microsoft opened its ‘mega data centre’ in Dublin and promoted its Windows Azure environment for development, service hosting, and service management based on the cloud. Google worked with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, and launched a version of the Google App Engine for enterprise users. Amazon promoted its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. And many people suggested that mainframes have offered cloud computing all along – we just called it something else!

IBM’s acquisitions this year include: National Interest Security Company, Initiate Systems, Intelliden, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, BigFix, Storwize, Datacap, Unica, OpenPages, Netezza , PSS Systems, and Clarity Systems.

The big story of 2010, of course, was the launch of a new mainframe range in July. The zEnterprise 196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, and Linux all on the one box. And all this is controlled from the mainframe console by the new Unified Resource Manager. This new mainframe can be thought of as a virtualization hub that manages other workloads in the data centre.

For people who like to stay current with the latest version numbers and dates of major products, CICS 2.1 has been available since the middle of 2009, DB2 10 was announced earlier this year, as was z/OS 1.12, and IMS 12 should be generally available early in the New Year.

The battle between IBM and NEON Enterprise Software (provider of the zPrime product, which allows users to run traditional workloads on specialty processors) has rumbled on in the courts for a year without any sign of an outcome. The European Union regulators have taken IBM to task for not allowing its operating system to run on other hardware, and for not being fair to so-called ‘spare-part’ vendors. The first complaint came from T3 and TurboHercules, saying that IBM ties its mainframe operating system to its mainframe hardware – and thereby destroys the emulation market.

For me and iTech-Ed Ltd it was a good year. I was given the accolade of IBM Information Champion again this year. My blog at Mainframe Update (mainframeupdate.blogspot.com) was again a finalist in the Computer Weekly annual blog awards. I was interviewed by CIPS (the Canadian Information technology Professionals). You can download a podcast of the interview from the CIPS Connections site at stephenibaraki.com/cips/v610/trevor_eddolls_2010.html. I was invited by CA to be on their expert panel for a webinar called “From Here to Eternity: The Mainframe as a Mainstay of the Enterprise” discussing cloud computing. Other panellists were Jon Toigo, CEO, Toigo Partners International; Keith Winnard, IT technical services, JD Williams; and Dayton Semerjian, general manager, mainframe, CA Technologies; and control of the session was maintained by Michael Krieger. iTech-Ed helped produce the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2010, which is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook10. The 2011 edition will be available in January. IBM Systems Magazine's Mainframe Extra eNewsletter was quite taken by one of my regular blogs and they included it in their "Links We Love" section. My articles on cloud computing and IMS was published in the October/November issue of zJournal. The links for the articles are www.mainframezone.com/it-management/ims-and-cloud-computing and www.mainframezone.com/it-management/sidebar-cloud-computing-origins-and-evolution. Exciting things are happening with the Virtual IMS user group that iTech-Ed runs. After a short hiatus, a new sponsor for the user group has been found and webinars and newsletters will continue for members and guests in the New Year. Look out for more details.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Should you refrain from using Chorus?

2010-12-12T13:04:00.000Z

On 6 December, CA announced that CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management were available. As it’s so close to the Christmas festivities, I thought I’d introduce this blog with a Christmas-cracker-style pun – well, it is that time of year!

Originally announced in May, CA Mainframe Chorus is designed to simplify mainframe management, and it does this, the CA press release tells us, through integration, automation, and modernization. Looking at this in more detail, the product helps:

Reduce the time and effort required to securely manage the mainframe environment.
Enable faster problem resolution and improved service levels.
Increase productivity for current expert mainframe staff and more rapid on-ramping of new staff.

“On-ramping”? That’s what we call a nominalization – a word referring to something you can’t put in a wheelbarrow! It sounds very dynamic, and each of us thinks we know what it means, but, of course, no-one actually does because you can’t see it or touch it etc. But let’s not pick holes in press releases or we could be here all day. And, as they say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And, as I said at the start, it’s coming up to Christmas.

Mainframe Chorus is designed to display information using a graphical user interface making the experience more familiar to younger mainframers’ previous experience of IT. This is all part of CA’s strategy to encourage younger people to work on mainframes and deal with the challenge of what’s been described as an ageing workforce. Of course, it’s not just youngsters who benefit from the new-look presentation of information, other mainframe experts can easily derive information from the screen displays.

The seven underlying products that support CA Mainframe Chorus for Database Management include CA Detector for DB2 for z/OS; CA Insight Performance Monitor for DB2 for z/OS, and CA Subsystem Analyzer for DB2 for z/OS. CA apparently plans to add additional roles such as security, storage, and workload automation in the future.

Mainframe Chorus for DB2 also allows users to optimize DB2 for z/OS performance by pro-actively monitoring thresholds and alerts that help to identify and resolve bottlenecks promptly. The data visualization capabilities allow administrators to display historical data to predict trends.

So, is Chorus a product you should refrain from using? Obviously not. It makes the mainframe easier to manage, it speeds up the identification and resolution of problems, and it extends the range of people who can use mainframe management software. If this is the sort of thing you need at your site, then it’s definitely worth a look.

Who cares about SyslogD on a mainframe?

2010-11-28T13:29:00.001Z

Unix System Services (USS) on a mainframe basically allows Unix applications to run and communicate. Running under USS is Syslog Daemon or SyslogD. This is an important system component because it’s part of z/OS’s Intrusion Detection and prevention Services (IDS). SyslogD receives detailed event messages, such as security violations, as well as messages from many other communications services such as FTP and AT-TLS, plus messages from routers, switches, and other network-based devices.

So, in the event of a hacker trying to log-on to your mainframe, how would you know? And when would you know? Surprisingly, many sites appear to ignore the information written to SyslogD completely! While other sites look at what has happened, perhaps a minute ago, perhaps an hour ago, perhaps yesterday!

What you probably need is some way to be alerted about what’s happening now. And, as this is 2010, you probably want the alert to come through to your mobile phone. And you then want to be able to jump on any browser, see where the trouble lies, and fix it. What are the chances of there being software that does that?

Well, let me confirm that it does exist and I’ve seen it.
WDS (www.willdata.com) has rather nice mainframe-based HTTP server software that front-ends their mainframe monitoring products. It’s called ZEN and it allows users of their products to access information through a browser – almost any browser. Their products are called ZEN EE Security, ZEN IP Monitor, or similar, but are perhaps better known by their old names of Ferret, Implex, etc. The products can monitor APPN, EE, FTP, IP, SNA, OSA, and USS. Each of these programs effectively has a DLL that allows them to plug in to the HTTP server. This can then respond to messages by ignoring them, sending a command, running a REXX EXEC, or sending an e-mail. It’s completely automated and configurable to what the users want. ZEN can also run utilities such as PING, TRACEROUTE, and NSLOOKUP commands. And, in addition to input from WDS’s programs and SyslogD, it also receives network messages and ECMS console contents.

For the end user, working from a browser, windows can be opened and closed, resized, refreshed, whatever. The windows can show number data and regularly-updated graphical displays. In fact, a variety of different graphs can be monitored in different windows at the same time, allowing end-users to monitor what’s going on in real-time. The drawing of the graphs is all handled in JavaScript (JSON, in fact), and AJAX is used so only the parts of the display that change are sent from the server to the browser, which speeds up communication considerably. It’s possible to drill-down through the alert information on screen, for example, to one particular type of alert, on a particular day, during a particular time range.

Now, the type of display I want on, say, a 17 inch laptop screen is not the same as on a 3 inch smart phone screen. You might think this would be a bit of a fly in the ointment. The truth is that WDS has a solution to even this problem.

Looking to the future, what else could we ask them to do with their excellent end-user interface? Might it not make sense to automate the monitoring of other things and use the browser-based interface to see what’s going on? Is there a way this could be done for, say, other Linux boxes? We’ll have to wait and see.

But whatever software monitor you choose, and however you choose to display it, it makes sense to ensure that SyslogD is not being ignored.

Cloud and the future of mainframes

2010-11-20T16:15:00.001Z

CA Technologies released a survey on Wednesday entitled “Mainframe as a Mainstay”. The survey was conducted on 200 senior level US-based mainframe executives by Decipher Research. Amongst the results was the information that 73% of respondents confirmed that the mainframe is – or will be – part of their organization’s cloud computing strategy. The question posed at CA’s recent webinar was whether that result came as a surprise.

Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of cloud computing. In fact, I’ve an article about cloud computing and IMS in the current issue of zJournal. It struck me that these results were very much in line with the recent results, also published by CA, from a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne, a market research company based in the UK. They conducted more than 300 interviews during August with European IT decision makers. Their report was called “Mainframe - The Ultimate Cloud Platform?”. They found a slightly higher figure of 79% of organisations believing the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. The also found 70% of respondents agreeing that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.

On the other hand, only 10 per cent of mainframe sites in BMC’s survey in October said that using their System z machines to run cloud computing or SaaS applications was an important priority for them in the coming year. Quite a difference! Similarly, my own straw poll at the Guide Share Europe conference at the beginning of November, in an IMS session, found that no-one seemed interested in cloud computing. I think that reflects real-life economics in that they were very much focused on what was available now that would make the business run better and their lives easier – how they could do more with less.

I think what we’re seeing is a difference between the attitude of mainframe staff, who want to get the job done with the tools available now and the pressure of fewer staff etc, and senior managers who are looking more strategically towards the next step.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey has a couple of questions about cloud computing. It will be interesting to see the results from that. And, by-the-way, if you haven’t completed a survey yet, you can do so by going to www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

Among the survey’s other findings we see:

A majority (80%) responded they will be maintaining or increasing spend on mainframe staff in the next 12-18 months.
More than three-quarters (76%) will maintain or increase their investment in mainframe software during the next 12-18 months.
Nearly half of respondents (46%) are looking for industry leadership from vendors on the evolving role of the mainframe in the enterprise.
61% of respondents don’t believe the IT industry does enough to promote mainframe career opportunities to recent graduates.
35% believe that recent graduates are not as proficient in mainframe technology as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago.
61% said that hiring either took much longer than expected, took long enough to negatively impact their IT operation or are still looking for talent after more than six months.

Picking up on the 35% of respondents who believe recent graduates are not as technology proficient as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago, webinar panellists were asked whether this was something they were seeing in the workforce.

I think the truth is that even the ancient Greeks felt that youngsters weren’t as good as they used to be! Certainly when I started working on mainframes, we were a mixed bag of youngsters, and many of those less capable or that-way-inclined left – leaving the enthusiasts and the highly technically-capable. I assume the criticism can always be applied. New people at any job just aren’t very good. And once they are quite good, they’re promoted to a different one.

We hear the mainframe referred to as a dinosaur – even though we know signs point in the opposite direction – in addition, the mainframe has a reputation as older technology with a middle-aged workforce, so the panellists were asked whether the fact that 52% of those surveyed cited Facebook and LinkedIn as the most effective recruiting tools came as a surprise.

My first response whenever a sentence includes the words mainframe and dinosaur is to point out that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 160 million years. Humans have existed for say 200,000 years. Draw your own conclusions!

I’m not at all surprised that middle-aged people are using Facebook and LinkedIn and many other examples of social media. At the end of 2008, the answer may have been surprising, at the end of 2009 it may have surprised some people, but not at the end of 2010. These are IT people we’re talking about – of course they’re going to know what’s going on in the cyber world. I also imagine, next year, that figure will be much higher than 52%. Mainframers know about social networking. Look how many of them blog and are on Twitter.

You can find more information about the survey at www.ca.com/us/news/Press-Releases/na/2010/CA-Technologies-Survey-Reveals-Mainframes-Role-as-Anchor-in-Cloud.aspx.

Mainframes still not all turned off yet!!

2010-11-14T10:31:00.000Z

BMC published an interesting survey at the end of October. There were more than 1700 mainframe users participating in the survey, and about half of the organizations surveyed have revenues in excess of US$1 billion. I think it’s generally assumed that the total number of mainframe sites globally is between 6000 and 7000.

Highlights of the survey included the findings that 84% of respondents expected to see growing or steady MIPS usage on the platform, with almost 60% anticipating that the mainframe will attract new workloads over the next year.

Against that, 37% agree that it will be a viable platform, mostly running legacy applications and not attracting new workloads. In addition, 4% considered that the mainframe is not a viable platform and companies should consider their exit strategies over the next five years.

The survey found, perhaps not surprisingly, that reducing IT costs in the next year was an important issue. 65% of respondents stated that reducing costs was one of their top four priorities. Other topics in those top four priorities were disaster recovery (34%), application modernization (30%), and business/IT alignment (29%).

The survey found more than 50% of large IT shops indicating they would expand their use of specialty engines in the next 24 months, with zIIP engines being the specialty engine of choice.

The also survey found a strong interest in hybrid management tools across z/OS, z/Linux, and other operating systems. Monitoring and event automation was cited as an important cross-platform tool by 74% of respondents, with similarly high responses for system/task automation (73%), workload/batch management (69%), and performance tuning (66 percent).

The survey found that 50 percent of respondents plan to migrate to DB2 for z/OS V10 in the next 18 plus months.

Tucked away in the report we find 10% of respondents saying that using their System z machines to run cloud computing or SaaS (Software as a Service) applications was an important priority for them in the coming year.

If you’re interested in surveys, you’ll be interested to know that you can still complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 user survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. The new Yearbook will be published early in January next year.

And if you want to find out more about mainframe users’ opinions about cloud computing, you can join a CA webinar entitled From Here to Eternity: The Mainframe as a Mainstay of the Enterprise. It’s on Wednesday 17 November between 11:30am and 12:30pm EST. One of the panellists is yours truly. You can sign up for the webinar at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/726909922.

BTW the title of this blog refers to the much-quoted prediction by Stewart Alsop, editor-in-chief of InfoWorld in 1991, that the last mainframe in the world would be unplugged in 1996!

2010 Guide Share Europe Conference success

2010-11-07T11:34:00.001Z

This year’s Guide Share Europe Conference was again held at Whittlebury Hall in the beautiful countryside in the very south of Northamptonshire, near the Silverstone circuit and Towcester racecourse, and not too far away from Milton Keynes. It was held this week on Tuesday and Wednesday (2 and 3 November). And it was a great success.

To help stay connected, the conference centre offered free Wi-Fi in public areas, and the conference provided 14 streams of seminars with five sessions per day – a staggering 140 presentations over the two days. In addition to the CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise security, large systems working group, network management working group, and software asset management streams, there were four streams for Tivoli users, DB2 LUW, zLinux, and new technologies. So there was definitely something for everyone. Most of the presentations were available on the free memory stick given to delegates, and the rest will be downloadable from GSE’s Web site.

I sat in on a few of the IMS presentations and the birds-of-a-feather expert panel session. It was a real pleasure to witness the conversations after a presentation when younger members of the audience would be chatting to older members, who were all keen and able to answer the newcomers’ questions. There was a lot of sharing of information and learning going on in a completely supportive atmosphere.

It was also a pleasure to catch up with old friends. And, among the 400 people registered, there were plenty of old friends I did catch up with and plenty of new friends made. 321 people attended on the Tuesday and 315 people were there on the Wednesday. The conference dinner on the Tuesday evening was attended by 230 people.

In addition to the high-standard presentations, there were 29 vendors in the exhibition hall where coffees and lunch were served. The vendors were also a source of technical information, and included IBM, Verhoef, Rocket Software, ezLegacy, CA Technologies, BMC, Compute (Bridgend), Blenheim Software & Inspired Solutions, and many others. Their presence helps keep down the cost of attending.

The GSE is the European association of companies and individuals using IBM hardware, software, and solutions. GSE is a non-profit association run by its members for its members. You can find out more details from their Web site at www.gse.org.uk.

Towards the end of the Wednesday there were the prize draws as different vendors gave away prizes. Many happy conference-goers gratefully left with new Kindles or iPlayers or some other technotoy in their bags.

The conference was well organised by Mark Wilson – the Chairman Large Systems Working Group & UK Conference Manager – and his team, and well worth attending by delegates and vendors. All-in-all, there was something for everyone to benefit from.

Well done to everyone on the organizing team and the presenters. And, if you didn’t make it this year, you missed something very good. See you there next year, perhaps.

On a different note: there’s still time to vote for Mainframe Update as your favourite blog in the category, Individual IT Professional Male. The IT Blog Awards 2010 are being organized by Computer Weekly. Click here to vote.

And, there’s still time to complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 mainframe user survey. You can find this at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. If you’re a vendor, then you can ensure your entry in the Yearbook is up-to-date by going to www.arcati.com/vendorentry.

Android rules OK!

2010-10-31T14:15:00.001Z

There’s nothing I hate more than being cornered at a party (or conference or anything else) by an iPhone user who wants to explain to me in excruciating detail how clever his phone is. I tend to liken these iPhone worshipers to members of the Young Communist League in the 1950s, who would not just happily forgive anything said or done in Moscow but describe it as a good thing. There’s just no reasoning with them, and they’re very very boring! But now, I have a secret weapon. I have an android phone. And I can bore them back by showing them my apps – until they go away like Mormons on a Sunday afternoon and knock on the door of the next house down.

I’ve recently acquired a Samsung Galaxy Apollo, which is a slightly cut-down version of their top-of-the-range Galaxy S. It seems to do everything I want and, of course, being an android phone, it has access to the thousands of free apps.

Now, it’s confession time, I think the iPhone is better at photography than my phone. I don’t have a flash with the camera, I can’t move the focus point round on the screen, and it doesn’t create composite photos to allow for lighting, so what would have been a shaded area becomes clearly visible. I’m also waiting for Android 2.2 (FroYo), which will offer more facilities.

But, and for me this was a deal breaker, it doesn’t need iTunes. Oh how restrictive iTunes is to its users! Now, again, I have listened to hours (or perhaps it just seemed that way) of explanation of why iTunes is a good thing – and my mind pictures dutiful Young Communists... With my android, I have downloaded apps to my phone, and downloaded them to my computer and copied them across to my SD card and installed them that way. Yes, iPhone fanatics, android phones (like almost every other type) allow you to add memory to your phone. I used the 4GB SD card I bought for my previous phone.

I installed XandPlayer so I can watch AVI files. I have video of my younger daughter getting her degree last year on my old SD card that I can watch. I’m sure I will put other AVI files onto the card soon to watch at a later time. It’s got loads of music already. Up until last week, I couldn’t watch an AVI on an iPhone. Obviously, I could have converted all my AVIs using their precious iTunes, but why should I? VLC player has just become available on an iPhone without needing to Jailbreak it. So iPhones can now play AVI files – welcome to the 21st century.

I installed Skyfire, which is a browser that allows you watch Flash files on Web sites. Apple takes the position that Flash will disappear when HTML5 becomes widely adopted and so iPhones don’t need the facility. I’m sure that Apple is correct. However, until that day in some distant future, and to ensure backward compatibility with all those Flash files out there, users need a flash player.

I could tell you about all the fun apps I have installed – Google Sky Map, Kindle, AroundMe, and many others, but I’m sure something similar is probably available for the iPhone.

Now, I know we’ve got the new Nokia phones with Symbian, the new Windows 7 phones, and Blackberry as the other big players in the market. But it strikes me that Apple set the bar very high with its iPhone and has shot itself in the foot with the restrictions placed on it. If iPhone Version 5 doesn’t offer something that no other company has thought of, or some degree of openness, then I believe that, like the Apple computer, the iPhone will be the phone-of-choice for die-hard Apple supporters only, while the rest of the phone-producing community steal all their best ideas, add more of their own, and sell more phones to very willing customers.

Now don’t go away with the idea that I am now some kind of android worshipper, I’m just someone who’s happy with his new phone. End of.

PS: don't forget it's Guide Share Europe at Whittlebury Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. More details at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/invite.html.

PPS: don't forget to complete your mainframe user survey for the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

Mainframe security

2010-10-24T13:34:00.001+01:00

RACF (Resource Access Control Facility) from IBM has been around for so long that I guess we take it for granted. It is one of the “big three” External Security Manager (ESM) products for mainframes. The other two are ACF2 (Access Control Facility 2) and Top Secret, both of which are owned by CA. But, as they like to say on impartial radio and TV programmes, other security products are available!

For example, Alexandria, Virginia-based Type80 (www.type80.com) provides SMA_RT, which functions as a security monitor program product that looks for patterns of abuse and sends real-time alerts. It supports systems environments across multiple CPUs and over geographically diverse locations.

Las Vegas, Nevada-based Vanguard Integrity Professionals (www.go2vanguard.com) provides solutions for identity and access management, audit and compliance, security administration, and intrusion detection. For security management there’s Vanguard Administrator, Vanguard Advisor, and Vanguard SecurityCenter. For audit and compliance they provide Vanguard Analyzer, Vanguard incompliance, Vanguard Enforcer, and Vanguard Policy Manager. For access management there’s Vanguard Authenticator, Vanguard ez/SignOn, Vanguard ez/Token, Vanguard Tokenless Authentication, Vanguard ez/Integrator, and Vanguard PasswordReset. And for intrusion detection there’s Vanguard Enforcer (again).

Naples, Florida-based Advanced Software Products Group (ASPG) (www.aspg.com) provides a number of data security products including: MegaCryption, its file level encryption tool; ReACT, which automates the password reset and synchronization process; ERQ (Easy RACF Query), its automated ISPF RACF administrative and reporting utility; CryptoMon its ICSF analyser; and Secure/FTP, which provides a full audit trail of all FTP commands that were executed or attempted and offers online monitoring of all active FTP sessions.

While mentioning encryption, IBM has its Integrated Cryptographic Service Facility (ICSF) and a Cryptographic Coprocessor. And, of course, in terms of security, there’s also IBM’s Tivoli zSecure Suite.

Hackensack, NJ-based Bsafe Solutions (www.bsafesolutions.com) offers: Bsafe/Enterprise Security for MVS TCP/IP for network security; Bsafe/Security for CICS-MVS, providing extended security for DB2, IMS, and VSAM; and Bsafe/Enterprise Security for CICS, providing control of mainframe security from a PC.

Torrance, CA-based Data21 (www.data21.com) has ZIP/390, which enables zSeries batch jobs to send and receive PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) files.

Aliso Viejo, CA-based Quest Software (www.quest.com) has a number of security products that came with its acquisition of PassGo Technologies. Its mainframe security tools include: GoPlex, a full screen interface allowing users to control and view users logged on to any of the PassGo’s MultSess, NC-Access, or NCI/XF products; NC-Pass Network Security Managers, which protect information by directing the user to permitted applications only using their user ID and password; Defender ME uses tokens that provide security – there’s Defender ME VSSE for VTAM Session Security, Defender ME Secure for active network security, and Defender ME Authenticator for almost everything; NC-Syncom provides password synchronization spanning multiple systems, servers, networks, and applications; and NC-Access, a session manager. In addition, for VTAM networks, Quest provides: MultSess, a session manager; and NCI/XF, a programming tool for tailoring, customizing, and extending functionality for 3270 terminals and developing single point of entry VTAM network systems.

There’s definitely other mainframe software products out there, and it’s interesting to see just what is available.

Mainframes and cloud computing

2010-10-17T10:01:00.000+01:00

Picking up IT trade papers might make you think that the only real players in the cloud computing world were Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Microsoft, with its ‘mega data centre’ in Dublin has been enthusiastic about its Office Web Apps and Facebook integration. Its Windows Azure is an environment for development, service hosting, and service management based on the cloud. It’s designed to allow developers to compute, host, scale, store, and also manage the Web apps they create. Google is working with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, and plans to push the Web as a platform for enterprise-standard software development. Google now has a version of the Google App Engine for enterprise users. Amazon has its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a Web service providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers. So where does that leave the mainframe?

To answer that question, Vanson Bourne, a market research company based in the UK undertook a survey that has now been published and is called Mainframe – The Ultimate Cloud Platform? Vanson Bourne conducted more than 300 interviews during August 2010 among IT decision makers. The sample comprised respondents in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

The survey results were published by CA Technologies, who revealed that 79 percent of IT organisations believe the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. They also found that 74 percent of respondents believe that the mainframe will have a role in any cloud computing initiative, with 70 percent agreeing that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.

Interestingly, and quite independently, the 2011 Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has two questions about cloud computing in its user survey. If you haven’t completed a survey yet, you can, by going to www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

According to CA’s Dayton Semerjian: “This survey provides indisputable evidence of the mainframe's agility to perform in new IT models such as cloud computing, and on-going durability as a critical data centre platform for decades to come”. Semerjian added: “CA Technologies is addressing these needs through its revolutionary mainframe management strategy, Mainframe 2.0”.

The survey also found that 82 percent of respondents stated that they intend to use the mainframe in the future either as much or more than today – which, sadly, implies that one in five sites are reducing their mainframe usage.

54 percent of respondents felt that the most pressing issues facing them in the next 12 months is an increased demand for training.

When asked why the mainframe is considered a valuable organisational asset, responses included reliability (55 percent), its position as an established technology (52 percent), platform cost-effectiveness (48 percent), and IT attitudes toward change (40 percent).

Linked to training is the problem of an increasingly ageing experienced workforce and a reduction in the number of experienced people available to work on mainframes. The study concluded that 44 percent of IT organisations are grappling with staffing issues created by the greying workforce and difficulty in hiring new staff, and they are concerned that these challenges will make the mainframe less viable in the future.

Managing mainframes from your phone

2010-10-10T19:39:00.000+01:00

William Data Systems has come up with a clever way of managing your mainframe network from an iPhone. Now as soon as you see the word iPhone, you probably think it’s an app and you’re going to have to get all your users synchronizing with iTunes before they can use it or update it. The truth is, it’s a much cleverer idea than that!

Let’s start at the beginning, WDS (William Data Systems) has a z/OS network management suite called ZEN, which has a number of really useful components that you can find out more about from their Web site (www.willdata.com). Their customers wanted an easy way to keep up-to-date with what was happening with their networks. And one thing everyone has these days is a mobile (cell) phone – so why not come up with a way of monitoring the network from your phone?

What WDS did, was to utilize the browser on iPhones – Safari, the same one that comes as standard on Macs – and allow users to monitor and manage their mainframe networks from there.

Now because Safari is an integral part of the iPhone, the technology works for all iPhone users. As I said at the beginning, there’s no problem of resynchronizing every user by getting them to plug their phones into iTunes. There’s no fuss about accessing the App Store. It’s all there on the browser.

As more-and-more companies are asking for z/OS network monitoring and management to be done remotely when needed using a single mobile device that support people would be carrying with them, this solution seems to tick all the boxes. If a problem is found, then the techie can find a laptop and fix it, or use the phone to call the service centre and get someone there to fix it. Either way, the problem is solved, perhaps before users have begun to notice. Interestingly, the solution can be used from an iPad. In that case, the screen is big enough for a techie to actually use instead of a laptop – and solve the problem immediately.

What if your organization doesn’t use iPhones? What if you’ve rolled out Blackberrys? Well in that case, WDS has a solution available. If your organization uses Symbian or Android (or anything else), then WDS are developing a solution for your smart phone right now.

It may all seems like something from a 1990s sci fi film, but monitoring your z/OS network from your mobile phone is a solution that’s available now.

And finally, as a mainframe professional, I am hoping that you will be willing to complete the annual user survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. If the company you work for is a vendor, consultant, or service provider, then please ensure their information is included in the vendor information form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011

2010-10-03T10:32:00.000+01:00

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has been the de facto reference work for IT professionals working with z/OS (and its forerunner) systems since 2005. It includes an annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. Each year, the Yearbook is downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals. The current issue is still available at www.arcati.com/newyearbook10.

Very shortly, many of you will receive an e-mail informing you that Mark Lillycrop and I have started work on the 2011 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. If you don’t get an e-mail from me about it, then e-mail trevor@itech-ed.com and I will add you to our mailing list.

We’re hoping that mainframe professionals will be willing to complete the annual user survey, which will shortly be up and running at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. The more users who fill it in, the more accurate and therefore useful the survey report will be. All respondents before Friday 3 December will receive a PDF copy of the survey results on publication. The identity and company information of all respondents is treated in confidence and will never be divulged to third parties. If you go to user group meetings, or just hang out with mainframers from other sites, please pass on the word about this survey. We’re hoping that this year’s user survey will be the most comprehensive survey ever. Current estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 companies using mainframes spread over 10,000 sites.

Anyone reading this who works for a vendor, consultant, or service provider, can ensure their company gets a free entry in the vendor directory section by completing the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry. This form can also be used to amend last year’s entry.

As in previous years, there is the opportunity for organizations to sponsor the Yearbook or take out a half page advertisement. Half-page adverts (5.5in x 8in max landscape) cost $650 (UK£390). Sponsors get a full-page advert (11in x 8in) in the Yearbook; inclusion of a corporate paper in the Mainframe Strategy section of the Yearbook; a logo/link on the Yearbook download page on the Arcati Web site; and a brief text ad in the Yearbook publicity e-mails sent to users. Price $1900 (UK£990).

To put that cost into perspective, for every dollar you spend on an advert you reach around 25 mainframe professionals.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 will be freely available for download early in January next year.

Where are they now?

2010-09-26T12:19:00.001+01:00

The Mainframe Zone blog at www.mainframezone.com/blog/role-of-isvs-and-the-mainframes-success ran a story about the role of ISVs in the mainframe's success. This prompted a number of responses on MainframeZone at LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=2196066&type=member&item=29244200&commentID=-1#lastComment). More importantly, it resulted in an explosion of trips down Memory Lane for me and my colleagues.

We remembered the time Goal Software took us by helicopter to watch motor racing. We laughed at some of our trips abroad funded by companies that are also no longer with us. Our all expenses paid meals out, etc etc, and we concluded that the sign of a company in peril was inversely proportional to amount and the cost of things they’d give away to consultants and journalists.

Anyway, the original Mainframe Zone article said:
"In 1970, primarily due to anti-trust pressure from the Federal Government as well as an independent lawsuit by Applied Data Research, IBM made the decision to “unbundle” software costs and hardware costs. This meant that over the past 40 years independent software vendors (ISVs) have been able to compete on a even basis with IBM for mainframe software product sales.
"Starting with ADR’s Autoflow, a fairly large number of ISVs have successfully marketed system and application software products that have significantly added value to mainframe systems."

The blog went on to ask which non-IBM software products have been significant to the success of the mainframe?

What fuelled our first trip down Memory Lane was a response from Scott Hatanaka. He said: “There have been many influential ISV software products over the years. Many of them STILL market leaders”. He went on to list:
File-aid, Abendaid, Xpediter (Compuware)
Omegamon (formerly Candle, now IBM)
SAS
The UCC products 1,7,11 (now CA)
ACF2, already mentioned
MIM (formerly STAM/SDSI-formerly Duquesne software, I think, formerly Legent, now CA)
Connect:Direct (formerly Sterling Commerce, now IBM)
Syncsort

David Mierowsky suggested, “Candle and Omegamon – the original performance monitors set the standard”.

Dave Thorn added. “Don't forget the performance and capacity management products: MICS, BEST/1, MXG to name just a few”.

Eyal Rothfeld gave us another list of: “non-IBM software products (from ISVs) that, in my humble opinion, have been most significant to the mainframe's success:
Operations Management:
4D/New Dimension Software (Later: BMC Software) – Control-M and Control-x suite.
Enterprise Output Management:
LRS – VPS suite.
Important tools:
Sorts: Syncsort
Comparisons: Serena/Comparex.
File Transfer: Connect:Direct(formerly Sterling Commerce, now IBM)
File-aid, Abendaid, Xpediter(Compuware)
Performance Management:
Performance Optimizers: CA/PMO & QuickFetch
Serena StarTool APM, Application Performance Manager, (formerly known as StarProbe)
Application performance measurement & analysis tools – Compuware/Strobe products
TMON – ASG.
Omegamon – Candle, now: CA)
ICF Catalog Management:
Softworks – The Mechanic & later Catalog Solution (and today: Dino Software/T-REX)
Storage Management:
Innovation DP – FDR suite.
Security management:
Top Secret – CA
Vanguard Integrity Professionals – SecurityCenter and the MF Security Management solutions suite.
Systems management:
Phoenix Software International – (E)JES.
Session Managers:
Unicom – Pie suite.
NetPass.
Tubes.
Statistical analysis:
SAS.
Databases:
Software AG – ADABAS.
Sapiens and DB1.”

Michael Swanson, President at ISAM Inc quoted some figures. He said: “If you want the Top 10 ISV products in terms of market share (products in the most data centres), they are:
SAS – SAS Base – 80-89%
CA – CA-1 – 70-79%
Syncsort – SyncSort – 60-69%
Compuware – File-AID for MVS – 60-69%
Merrill Consult – MXG – 50-59%
LRS – VPS Base – 50-59%
ChicagoSoft – MVS/Quick-Ref – 50-59%
CA – CA-11 – 40-49%
Compuware – XPEDITER/TSO – 40-49%
CA – CA-JCLCheck – 40-49%”

One of the most interesting threads I’ve read in a while – check it out.

SharePoint software enhancements

2010-09-19T18:41:00.000+01:00

Sometimes SharePoint 2010 isn’t quite as easy to use as perhaps its users would like. Not to worry though, there are a number of useful software products out there that are free and can plug those gaps. Let’s have a look at some of them.

The first I want to mention is .NET Reflector V6.5 from Cambridge UK-based Red Gate Software (www.red-gate.com). There is a paid for Pro version, but most times, the free one will do. It explores and analyses compiled .NET assemblies, allowing users to view them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL (Intermediate Language). It supports all .NET assemblies including 4.0 (at the moment you’re probably using it with 3.5 with SharePoint). The list of things it can do is quite long, but here are just some: it find usages of classes and methods, including virtual method overrides; it finds where types are exposed or instantiated; it supports Linq query expressions, Lambda expressions, and anonymous methods; it provides code URL support; users can jump to a class or method straight from their code in Visual Studio. You can download a copy from reflector.red-gate.com/download.aspx.

The second one on my list is CAML Query Builder from Brussels, Belgium-based U2U. You can download the software from www.u2u.net/res/Tools/SharePointCamlQueryBuilder.aspx. What you get is an application page where you can build a CAML query. The CAML query itself is stored in a list from where you can further work with it. CAML (Collaborative Application Mark-up Language) is an XML-based query language that helps users query, build, and customize Web sites based on Windows SharePoint Services. The XML elements define various aspects of a WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) site. This tool helps users build their CAML Queries.

Number three on my list is Fiddler2. This is a Web debugging proxy that logs all HTTP(S) traffic between a computer and the Internet. The software allows users to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and generally ‘fiddle’ with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes an event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler can be downloaded from www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/version.asp.

In order to get things done to SharePoint 2010, a knowledge of PowerShell can be quite important. PowerShell is a scripting language that uses cmdlets to get things done. Cmdlets perform an action and usually return a Microsoft .NET Framework object, which can then be piped (connected) to another command in the pipeline. This way, quite complicated commands can be created from simple building blocks. To make life easier, users can download PowerGUI Script Editor – a graphical user interface and script editor. The latest version is 2.1.1, and it can be download from www.powergui.org/downloads.jspa.

So, if you are using SharePoint, these four free applications will make your life easier.
I’d be interested to hear of any others that users would recommend.

Cheaper mainframe data access?

2010-09-12T10:24:00.001+01:00

Accessing mainframe data and applications (including CICS) just got easier and perhaps cheaper with the announcement by HostBridge (www.hostbridge.com) of HostBridge for zIIP – shortened to HBzIIP.

HostBridge – the software rather than the company – aids mainframe integration. The HostBridge base product runs under CICS and intercepts CICS data before terminal data streams are generated as output or expected as input. HostBridge then auto-converts the data to XML documents for integration with other applications, distributed systems, Web applications, and anything using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The HostBridge base product is a prerequisite for all other HostBridge products, modules, and connectors.

The company has now released HostBridge Version 6.5. The extra appeal of this version is that users are able to reduce their costs by moving integration/SOA workloads to the zIIP specialty engine. The other advantages the company promises include the development of Web services with greater speed and flexibility, and the ability to add Web 2.0 functionality to integration/SOA initiatives.

zIIP (z Integrated Information Process) specialty engines allows organizations to increase mainframe processing capacity for specific workloads without higher licence fees. As we’ve said before, when looking at NEON’s zPrime product amongst others, users need to pay to have the zIIP processor activated, but then pay less for usage of the main processor because the work is being processed on the zIIP engine. For most mainframe users, it can be quite a complicated spreadsheet calculating whether using zIIP or zAAP (z Application Assist Processor) specialty processors is worthwhile. But once you’ve got them, the more processing you can run on them, the less money you pay IBM each month.

Quoting from the press release, the new version offers the following advantages:

HostBridge Process Automation Engine.
The new HB Process Automation Engine is a JavaScript-based development/runtime facility that lets users integrate any CICS application or CICS-accessible data source (DB2, VSAM, DL/I, Datacom) with any distributed systems. HB Process Automation also allows users to orchestrate and automate complex CICS transaction processes as a single service.
Web 2.0/Lightweight Services.
Newly-supported services technologies include REST, E4X, XPath, JSON, and Atom. They offer simpler alternatives to formal SOAP/WSDL-based services for faster, more agile integration of CICS data and business logic into new composite applications and mash-ups.

If your looking at XMLing your mainframe applications and you have zIIP running workloads already, then it’s worth a look.

A look at SharePoint

2010-09-05T13:04:00.001+01:00

Let me start with an apology for talking about a non-mainframe technology. I suppose my justification is that this a major piece of software in data centres running Windows. I’ve recently completed two weeks of training on SharePoint 2010 for administration and design – and, I suppose, that’s why it’s on my mind.

Microsoft SharePoint has been around for a while and 2010 is probably the most sophisticated version there is, but what is it? I thought in some ways it was a bit like CICS – but definitely not CICS. And I thought it was a bit like Lotus Notes – but, again, not Notes. It’s difficult to encapsulate easily because it’s software that needs other pieces of software to work (more on that in a moment). It’s far more feature-rich than a simple intranet. In fact, in many ways, it provides a new way of working – a new paradigm – for organizations that might purchase it.

Let’s start off with why businesses might be tempted to buy SharePoint. I suppose that once you get above 20 staff, it gets harder to have that immediacy of information that small sites benefit from. With 50 staff, let alone 200+ it can be days (if ever) that news reaches you about other staff (weddings, baby photos, etc) or corporate news (shortlisted for prizes or being mentioned in trade papers). The natural consequence is that people start e-mailling all staff – so rather than just three 4MB pictures of the new baby (or whatever) needing to be backed up, there are suddenly 200+ versions of the same thing in everyone’s Outlook in-box. Using SharePoint gives you an easy way of sharing news and offering items for sale. It’s also incredibly easy to pick up RSS feeds – like the BBC news and weather.

But if that’s all you’re doing with SharePoint, you’re definitely missing a trick.

Before I look at that, let me just talk about how SharePoint links with other Microsoft products. You need to have Active Directory (AD) and Internet Information Services (IIS) which you probably do. You also need SQL Server, which you may not already have installed. And then you need Microsoft Office and Outlook. You also need to know how to use Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, and to make life easier there’s about half a dozen non-Microsoft tools that can be used. (I’ll talk about them in a future blog).

The reason I said it’s a paradigm shift is because many organizations will welcome some easy way of sharing news etc, but many won’t realize that they have a problem for which SharePoint is the solution. It’s too easy to continue working in the same old way and not take advantage of things like workflows and sharing.

What made Notes and Domino so powerful was collaborative working. And the word ‘collaboration’ appears right at the top of any list of SharePoint features. Yet many people still have a view of computing in which small individual islands work away, perhaps printing off a copy of a document for final checking before it is sent out. This is the way we worked in the 80s and 90s, but in 2010, we can share documents. Word has given us the ability to track changes for at least 10 years, and yet many people seem unwilling to collaborate in this way.

Workflows are hidden gems. People often complain to me about documents not getting to the right people for checking or not knowing who has a draft version of a document – or, even worse, not knowing whether the version in front of them is the latest one. Built-in to SharePoint 2010 is the ability to define parallel as well as serial workflows. So your document can be checked by two people at the same time before being sent on to a third person for final checking. No more problems with important people not seeing the document or any other procedural failure.

I’ll just quickly mention My Sites. These are replacements for My Documents or Documents (depending on which version of Windows you’re familiar with) plus they are like your own little home page of information.

Users get to SharePoint through their browser. You can add all sorts of things to the pages they see using what are called Web parts. This could include bits of JavaScript, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.

SharePoint 2010 works properly with Internet Explorer (of course), but also Firefox and other browsers – I think it’s great that Microsoft are becoming browser agnostic (you might mention EU case law!).

You can set up SharePoint to provide your own internal intranet (if that isn’t tautology) and act as an external internet server – so you are hosting your own Web pages.

Also, you can use SharePoint to front-end your applications. The advantage of this is users have to go to your intranet – so they see your corporate news and personal items of interest – and from there they launch their usual applications (such as finance or whatever’s specialized for their organization). There’s no need to run SharePoint in parallel with Citrix or anything else.

On the downside, licences for all the products can be very expensive. And it all works so much better if you’re using 2010 versions of everything (or the latest where there isn’t a 2010 version). You will need someone who speaks C# and can use PowerShell commands to maintain SharePoint and push its usage forward amongst members of staff who are perfectly happy working the way they always have.

But if you can’t have a mainframe, and you’re a moderate to large organization, then there are lots of benefits to be had from using SharePoint. There’s certainly more features than I’ve had space to mention here.

Now all I need to know is how to become an MVP!

Getting your money’s worth

2010-08-30T13:21:00.000+01:00

If you’re looking for value for money, then you can’t do much better than attend the 9th annual UK 2010 Guide Share Europe Conference to be held on 2 and 3 November at Whittlebury Hall, Northamptonshire – if you’re using your sat nav, it’s NN12 8QH. This will be the largest UK GSE conference in their history and boasts 13 streams on the Tuesday and a whopping 14 streams on the Wednesday. You can get more information at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/Email01.html. Registration is now open.

Secondly, there’s now a Version 2.0 available of ZEN, the cost saving z/OS network management suite from William Data Systems. This new version includes enhancements that enable many more companies running z/OS to improve on and completely replace NetView or NetMaster. WDS claims that for some customers, managing networks with ZEN has reduced their annual cost of ownership by as much as 50%. ZEN customers pay for only the functionality they need, which reduces annual costs compared with users of other products who pay for functionality that they don’t use.

ZEN V2’s new Automation component includes a full REXX function pack. This provides facilities for users to totally automate their management of z/OS network environments and create customized ZEN displays and alerts.

ZEN provides a browser interface that is intuitive and customizable to individual user’s needs. ZEN also provides “green screens”, which more traditional users continue to benefit from. You can find out more at www.willdata.com.

And if you want something that’s absolutely free… you can find a summary of my recent interview with Stephen Ibaraki from the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) at stephenibaraki.com/cips/v610/trevor_eddolls_2010.html. And if that whets your appetite, you can listen to the complete podcast at www.stephenibaraki.com/audio/Trevor_Eddolls_2010.mp3.