The Guide Share
Europe Conference was online again this year during the first two weeks of
November. The quality of the speakers was, as always, excellent. There was so
much information in the sessions, which is why the tag line for this year’s
conference was “Virtually the best way to learn about Z”.
Being online rather than everyone physically being in one place has both benefits and downsides. On the plus side, people can attend without needing to book time off work and getting cover for their absence etc – and convince management to pay for their conference experience. They can be in the office for most of the day and put meetings in their calendar for those sessions that they want to attend. The conference was also free, so anyone interested in mainframes could attend.
The downside, of course, is not having the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with vendors and colleagues from other sites. There’s no opportunity to stock up on pens and knick-knacks from the vendors in the exhibition hall. And you miss out on the horror stories that are shared later in the evening in the bar!
The nearly two weeks of presentations included all the usual streams: 101; 102; AIOPS, System Automation, Monitoring and Analytics; Application Development; Batch and Workload Scheduling; CICS; DB2; Enterprise Security; IMS; Large Systems; Linux on Z; Mainframe Skills & Learning; MQ; Network Management; New Technologies; Storage Management; Women in IT; and z/Capacity Management and zPerformance.
I started my conference experience on the first Tuesday with “CICS update from Hursley”, presented by Mark Cocker, IBM, CICS Transaction Server Product Manager. His presentation focused on CICS TS 5.6 and continuous delivery approach, CICS TS open beta, and Community resources. He explained that developers can create incredible mixed language applications, that include Jakarta® Enterprise Edition 8, Spring Boot, Eclipse, MicroProfile, and Node.js®, together with traditional complied languages like COBOL, C/C++, PL/I, and Assembler with first-class interoperability. These programs have access to APIs to access most data and messaging systems, and utilize the full power of the IBM Z and z/OS platform.
On Wednesday, I watched “What’s New in CICS Security”, presented by IBM’s Colin Penfold. This was similar to a presentation he gave to the Virtual CICS user group a few months ago, but it’s always very interesting.
Next, I enjoyed the “CICS Foundation Update” from IBM’s John Tilling. He was taking a more detailed look at what’s new in foundation for CICS TS Open Beta. He explained the changes in policies, managing Temporary Storage capacity, z/OS short on storage (SOS) extensions, enhanced Shared Data Tables, CICS-Db2 enhancements, and miscellaneous RFEs.
I then tuned in to an IMS session. That was “Nuts and Bolts of IMS Lock Management” given by IBM’s Kevin Stewart.
And then it was back to the CICS stream to see Rocket Software’s Ezriel Gross discuss “Debugging CICS Storage Violations Using IPCS”. Ezriel looked at CICS Storage Management, what a storage violation is, the causes of storage violations, protecting storage in CICS (including CICS provided facilities), Storage Manager internals, storage violation dump analysis (including useful domains for debugging storage violations and IPCS commands to view relevant domain summaries and data).
The last session I saw that day was “CICStart your mainframe with Zowe and open source” from IBM’s Joe Winchester. He explained: how to install the Zowe CICS Command Line Interface Plugin; how to use the Zowe Command Line Interface; obtaining and installing the Zowe CICS Explorer; and how to get access to a z/OS environment.
On Thursday, I started the day with “Is your IMS the best it can be?”, which was presented by IBM’s Dennis Eichelberger. He reminded us that IMS has been available for more than 50 years, does what two other subsystems do together; has many major businesses depending on it; and is reliable, stable, and scalable. And is often taken for granted or even neglected. He suggested that the ways to make it the best were by: monitoring; reporting; analysing; and changing.
I then saw “Lessons Learned: Streaming IMS Data to Modern Platforms” given by Precisely’s Scott Quillicy. Scott looked at the lessons learned over the last couple of years, and then recapped what he saw as best practice in streaming IMS data. He then reviewed methods for capturing IMS data, before discussing streaming platform architecture. Finally, he drew some conclusions.
I ended the first week with MainTegrity’s Al Saurette, who was looking at “Banking Resiliency for Financial Services – new requirements need defences”. He asked: “Realistically do we need more security rules?” He argued that when the top of the banking and insurance world mandates something, you pretty much have to comply with it. His session pointed out what mainframe sites can do to satisfy cyber resiliency, PCI, Zero Trust, GDPR, and other security best practices while eliminating redundant manual processes. He looked at real solutions to prevent an attack on a mainframe. He also explained how the teeth in IOSCO’s new resiliency guidelines can bite. And he described processes that make life easier and improve mainframe security, while ensuring new compliance and audit requirements can be passed.
All in all, it was a great first week.
Next week, I’ll publish my impressions of the second week at GSE.
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