It seems strange talking about business continuity planning for mainframe sites because most of them created their plan back in the days when BCP was called DR (Disaster Recovery). And although, for mainframe sites, things don’t seem to have changed to any great extent in perhaps as much as 30 years, the truth is, they have. And it’s a good idea to re-evaluate the Business Continuity Plan now.
In fact, it’s probably a good idea to start from the beginning, in terms of planning, and see what systems you have in place that needs to be available for the organization to continue in business, and how long you can be ‘down’ for. It was often a joke that non-mainframe sites had rooms full of servers running Linux and/or Windows servers and no-one knew what exactly ran on what hardware – and yet, something similar can be the case with mainframes. There is nowadays quite a disconnect between what an end user views as a single transaction and how the subsystems may see it. An end user may simply need to access some data – but, for that to happen, the transaction may start in CICS, access DB2 data, go back to CICS, involve IMS, go back to CICS, access some VSAM files, and finally end up in CICS again. So subsystem-level recovery can lead to confusion.
But let’s start at the beginning. What’s the first thing to do? Identify the business assets that need to be protected, then assess how business critical each process is and create a priority list. Next find the data and technology that’s needed for the business process to occur. Armed with that list, you can set objectives for their recovery, and design strategies and services that can be used to restore access to data for the applications and end users who need them. This is probably easier said than done because it also has to be achieved within time frames that mean your organization stays in business.
You need to be able to run the applications on probably new working processors, you need to get them talking to the latest version of the data, and you need to get your users connected to the applications. The options for how to do this range from cheap to hugely expensive. Like all insurance, you don’t want to have to make use of it, but when you do, you want it to cover everything. So what are your choices? You can do nothing – definitely the cheapest, until things go wrong and then it’s probably the end of the company staying in business. You can use a service bureau or another site. This again is bit like hoping nothing will go wrong, but if it does, you have some way of staying business until you can get your own hardware up and running. You need to ensure the other site is not in the same building or even city – earthquakes and other natural disasters do happen. You could have a cold standby site. This a dearer option, but once everything is powered up, you’re pretty much back in business. The dearest option is the hot standby site, where you basically copy everything to it as it happens on the main site. This hot site can continue running the business for you at a moment’s notice. If you’re a bank or similar, this is what you need. Your users just experience a small hiccough and they continue working. They connect to the new site without realizing anything has changed.
And that is your first big decision over with. The next step is to look at individual systems (such as IMS and CICS) and see how each of those can failover to the back-up site. Look into how you can ensure data is correct, and how in-flight tasks can have their data backed out and the whole task restarted. How quickly can communications be switched across to the back-up site? And what are the chances of both sites being hit by the same disaster?
And then you need to practice the BCP and see what you forgot in your plan. Which pieces of kit do you use that aren’t standard and can’t be replicated? There are so many things that can go wrong at each site because the set-up can be so different (while being superficially so similar). Who has access to the BCP? Who needs access to the BCP? What happens if a key person is doing a charity sleepover in some rundown part of town and hasn’t got a phone with them? What happens if your company is being attacked by terrorists of hacktivists or disgruntled ex-employees?
There’s lots to consider. But the first step is to re-visit your Business Continuity Plan – and do it soon.
Showing posts with label DB2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DB2. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 August 2014
Sunday, 27 April 2014
Tell me about NoSQL
NoSQL seems to be the buzzword of choice at the moment for people who want the flexibility to build and frequently alter their databases. But there are plenty of people who still aren’t quite sure what a NoSQL database is and why they should want to use it. So let’s take a brief overview of NoSQL.
The term, NoSQL, first saw the light of day in 1998 when Carlo Strozzi used it as the name of his lightweight, open-source, relational database because it didn’t expose the standard SQL interface. But the term gained its modern usage in 2009 when it was used as a generic label for non-relational, distributed, data stores. So, it refers to a whole family of databases, rather than a single type of database.
Developers like NoSQL because they can store and retrieve data without being locked into the tabular relationships used in relational databases. It makes scaling easier and they provide superior performance. They can store large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. They can handle agile sprints, quick iteration, and frequent code pushes. They use object-oriented programming that is easy to use and flexible. And they use efficient scale-out architecture instead of expensive monolithic architecture.
But, on the down side, NoSQL lacks ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction support. Atomicity means that each transaction is ‘all or nothing’, ie if one part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction fails, and the database state is left unchanged. Consistency ensures that any transaction brings the database from one valid state to another. Isolation means that the concurrent execution of transactions results in a system state that would be obtained if transactions were executed sequentially. Durability means that once a transaction has been committed, it will remain so, even in the event of power loss, crashes, or errors. And that’s the kind of reliability you want in a business-critical database.
NoSQL databases are typically used in Big Data and real-time Web applications. The different NoSQL database technologies were developed because of the increase in the volume of data that people needed to store, the frequency the data is accessed, and increased performance and processing needs.
There are estimated to be over 150 open source databases available. And there are many different types of NoSQL database, including some that allow the use of SQL-like languages – these are sometimes referred to as ‘Not only SQL’ databases. Classify NoSQL databases is quite a challenge, but they can be grouped, by the features they offer, into column, document, key-value, and graph types. Alternatively, they can be classified by data model into KV Cache, KV Store, KV Store - Eventually consistent, Data-structures server, KV Store – Ordered, Tuple Store, Object Database, Document Store, and Wide Columnar Store.
The good news for DB2 users is that IBM has provided a new API that supports multiple calls and a NoSQL software solution stack that ships with DB2. It’s free with DB2 on distributed platforms and with DB2 Connect. DB2 also offers a second type of NoSQL-like database – the XML data store. This can store the growing volume of Web-based data.
Rocket Software has a way of using MongoDB (an example of a NoSQL database) on a mainframe. Rocket can provide access to any System z database using any MongoDB client driver. DB2 supports MongoDB.
IBM recently announced Zdoop, Hadoop database software for Linux from Veristorm on System z mainframes, stating: “This will help clients to avoid staging and offloading mainframe data to maintain existing security and governance controls”.
Other NoSQL databases that you might want to look out for include Cassandra, CouchBase, Redis, and Riak.
Clearly, with the growth in Big Data, we’ll be hearing a lot more about NoSQL databases and how they can be integrated into mainframe technology. There are lots of them out there and they can be quite different from each other in terms of their features and data models used.
The term, NoSQL, first saw the light of day in 1998 when Carlo Strozzi used it as the name of his lightweight, open-source, relational database because it didn’t expose the standard SQL interface. But the term gained its modern usage in 2009 when it was used as a generic label for non-relational, distributed, data stores. So, it refers to a whole family of databases, rather than a single type of database.
Developers like NoSQL because they can store and retrieve data without being locked into the tabular relationships used in relational databases. It makes scaling easier and they provide superior performance. They can store large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. They can handle agile sprints, quick iteration, and frequent code pushes. They use object-oriented programming that is easy to use and flexible. And they use efficient scale-out architecture instead of expensive monolithic architecture.
But, on the down side, NoSQL lacks ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction support. Atomicity means that each transaction is ‘all or nothing’, ie if one part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction fails, and the database state is left unchanged. Consistency ensures that any transaction brings the database from one valid state to another. Isolation means that the concurrent execution of transactions results in a system state that would be obtained if transactions were executed sequentially. Durability means that once a transaction has been committed, it will remain so, even in the event of power loss, crashes, or errors. And that’s the kind of reliability you want in a business-critical database.
NoSQL databases are typically used in Big Data and real-time Web applications. The different NoSQL database technologies were developed because of the increase in the volume of data that people needed to store, the frequency the data is accessed, and increased performance and processing needs.
There are estimated to be over 150 open source databases available. And there are many different types of NoSQL database, including some that allow the use of SQL-like languages – these are sometimes referred to as ‘Not only SQL’ databases. Classify NoSQL databases is quite a challenge, but they can be grouped, by the features they offer, into column, document, key-value, and graph types. Alternatively, they can be classified by data model into KV Cache, KV Store, KV Store - Eventually consistent, Data-structures server, KV Store – Ordered, Tuple Store, Object Database, Document Store, and Wide Columnar Store.
The good news for DB2 users is that IBM has provided a new API that supports multiple calls and a NoSQL software solution stack that ships with DB2. It’s free with DB2 on distributed platforms and with DB2 Connect. DB2 also offers a second type of NoSQL-like database – the XML data store. This can store the growing volume of Web-based data.
Rocket Software has a way of using MongoDB (an example of a NoSQL database) on a mainframe. Rocket can provide access to any System z database using any MongoDB client driver. DB2 supports MongoDB.
IBM recently announced Zdoop, Hadoop database software for Linux from Veristorm on System z mainframes, stating: “This will help clients to avoid staging and offloading mainframe data to maintain existing security and governance controls”.
Other NoSQL databases that you might want to look out for include Cassandra, CouchBase, Redis, and Riak.
Clearly, with the growth in Big Data, we’ll be hearing a lot more about NoSQL databases and how they can be integrated into mainframe technology. There are lots of them out there and they can be quite different from each other in terms of their features and data models used.
Sunday, 17 November 2013
IOD - what you missed!
Well, that’s it – the exhibition stands have been taken down, the speakers have flown out, the attendees are all back home with their families, and the organizers have packed away their banners. #IBMIOD has come to an end for another year – but what an event it was!
Those people lucky enough to attend were able to find out the latest thinking from IBM and partners in terms of DB2, IMS, Big Data and Analytics, Tools and Utilities for DB2 and IMS, and Cross Platform sessions. In addition, there were client-led session, hands-on labs and workshops, expert panel sessions, and birds of a feather sessions. And there were even more relaxing sessions, such as the “Rock the Mainframe” System z reception.
This year’s theme for the event that ran from Sunday 3 November to Thursday 7 November was “Think Big. Deliver Big. WIN BIG” – and that was reflected in a number of the announcements from IBM that were made during the conference. Looking for correlations or anomalies in your Big Data – then you need IBM SmartCloud Analytics Predictive Insights. Looking to find the optimum place to put your data – in terms of speed versus cost – then you need IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center. Want the fastest Hadoop appliance around – then it’s the IBM PureData System for Hadoop that you need. Need to anonymize or mask data from various sources – try InfoSphere Data Privacy for Hadoop. Like to see what’s going on with your big data sets – then look out for InfoSphere Governance Dashboard.
8:15 Wednesday morning in “The Next Generation of Innovation” session, delegates were treated to tennis star Serena Williams as a featured speaker. There were also some very interesting keynote sessions with IBM executives sharing their thinking about Business Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, Information Management, and Business Leadership. Plenty of food for thought there for delegates to take back to their organizations.
The EXPO was a great place to visit to talk to all sorts of vendors and get a feel for what they thought was important and how their products and services might make a difference at individual sites. With so many vendors attending, it was the ideal place to really compare and contrast what was on offer.
And, of course, if you weren’t able to make the conference, there was Livestream, which broadcast some of the sessions, such as Monday’s opening general session, Win Big in the New Era of Computing. And there were a host of other sessions over the four days. Similarly, the Video Library allowed people to watch replays from general sessions, keynotes, selected elective sessions and sponsor interviews directly from the Livestream library. There was also an online photo gallery allowing non-attendees and attendees to see “the action each day”.
Let’s not forget the buzz about the conference in the Twittersphere. In a week that saw shares in Twitter not only go on sale but pretty much double in price, it was interesting to see how people were using Twitter to tell others what they were enjoying at the conference. And the IOD Web site kept everyone up-to-date with the #IBMIOD tweets.
So with tired delegates, speakers, vendors, and organizers having made their way home, and those people who followed events at Madalay Bay, Las Vegas from a distance, they can all be confident that Information On Demand 2013 was a hugely useful event to have attended in person or virtually. And the organizers are going to have to work amazingly hard to top this event next year.
On a completely different topic...
Please complete the mainframe users’ survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey14. And if you’re a vendor, get your free entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 by completing the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.
Those people lucky enough to attend were able to find out the latest thinking from IBM and partners in terms of DB2, IMS, Big Data and Analytics, Tools and Utilities for DB2 and IMS, and Cross Platform sessions. In addition, there were client-led session, hands-on labs and workshops, expert panel sessions, and birds of a feather sessions. And there were even more relaxing sessions, such as the “Rock the Mainframe” System z reception.
This year’s theme for the event that ran from Sunday 3 November to Thursday 7 November was “Think Big. Deliver Big. WIN BIG” – and that was reflected in a number of the announcements from IBM that were made during the conference. Looking for correlations or anomalies in your Big Data – then you need IBM SmartCloud Analytics Predictive Insights. Looking to find the optimum place to put your data – in terms of speed versus cost – then you need IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center. Want the fastest Hadoop appliance around – then it’s the IBM PureData System for Hadoop that you need. Need to anonymize or mask data from various sources – try InfoSphere Data Privacy for Hadoop. Like to see what’s going on with your big data sets – then look out for InfoSphere Governance Dashboard.
8:15 Wednesday morning in “The Next Generation of Innovation” session, delegates were treated to tennis star Serena Williams as a featured speaker. There were also some very interesting keynote sessions with IBM executives sharing their thinking about Business Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, Information Management, and Business Leadership. Plenty of food for thought there for delegates to take back to their organizations.
The EXPO was a great place to visit to talk to all sorts of vendors and get a feel for what they thought was important and how their products and services might make a difference at individual sites. With so many vendors attending, it was the ideal place to really compare and contrast what was on offer.
And, of course, if you weren’t able to make the conference, there was Livestream, which broadcast some of the sessions, such as Monday’s opening general session, Win Big in the New Era of Computing. And there were a host of other sessions over the four days. Similarly, the Video Library allowed people to watch replays from general sessions, keynotes, selected elective sessions and sponsor interviews directly from the Livestream library. There was also an online photo gallery allowing non-attendees and attendees to see “the action each day”.
Let’s not forget the buzz about the conference in the Twittersphere. In a week that saw shares in Twitter not only go on sale but pretty much double in price, it was interesting to see how people were using Twitter to tell others what they were enjoying at the conference. And the IOD Web site kept everyone up-to-date with the #IBMIOD tweets.
So with tired delegates, speakers, vendors, and organizers having made their way home, and those people who followed events at Madalay Bay, Las Vegas from a distance, they can all be confident that Information On Demand 2013 was a hugely useful event to have attended in person or virtually. And the organizers are going to have to work amazingly hard to top this event next year.
On a completely different topic...
Please complete the mainframe users’ survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey14. And if you’re a vendor, get your free entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014 by completing the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.
Sunday, 7 July 2013
IBM’s approach to Big Data
IBM has taken lots of the open source Big Data technologies – like Hadoop, MapReduce, HBase – and added its own technology – like Big Sheets, DB2, DataStage – to create something hugely more powerful.
IBM’s InfoSphere BigInsights builds on open source Hadoop capabilities for enterprise class deployments. The enterprise-level capabilities can be grouped together as: visualization and exploration, development tools, advanced engines, connectors, workload optimization, and administration and security.
IBM claims the business benefits are: quicker time-to-value because of IBM’s technology and support, reduced operational risk, enhanced business knowledge with a flexible analytical platform, and it leverages and complements existing software.
In terms of administration and security, the Web console can start and stop services, run and monitor jobs (applications), explore and modify the file system, and built-in apps make it easy to do common tasks.
The connectors link to databases like DB2, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata. And there’s integration with: InfoSphere Data Stage (data collection and integration), InfoSphere Streams (real-time streams processing), InfoSphere Guardium (security and monitoring), Cognos Business Intelligence (Business Intelligence capabilities), and IBM Platform Computing (cluster/grid infrastructure and management), and more. Big SQL is coming with BigInsights V2.1. This will provide SQL access to data stored in BigInsights through JDBC/ODBC and use rich standard SQL to leverage Map/Reduce parallelism or achieve low-latency.
Advanced engines include an advanced text analytics engine that can automatically identify and understand key information in text. Text Analytics is really useful because most of the world’s data is in unstructured or semi-structured text; social media is full of discussions about products and services; internal information in organizations is locked in blobs, description fields, and sometimes even discarded. It’s been suggested that over 80% of stored information is unstructured – such as e-medical records, hospital reports, case files, police records, emergency calls, tech notes, call logs, online media, insurance claims, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and forums.
In terms of development tools, there is an Eclipse-based development environment for building and deploying applications. There are developer tools and a set of analytic extractors for fast adoption that reduce coding and debugging time by up to 30% (IBM claims). There are also plug-ins for text analytics, MapReduce programming, Jaql development, Hive query, etc.
Visualization and exploration has Big Sheets, providing Web-based analysis and visualization for users with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface that can define and manage long-running data collection jobs.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has identified Hadoop users as a useful market to get into. Speaking recently at the Hadoop summit, Quentin Clark, corporate VP of data platforms said: “We believe Hadoop is the cornerstone of a sea change coming to all businesses”.
Microsoft is integrating Hadoop with its products and services. And, Clark says that Microsoft intends to stick to the principles of open source by contributing to the Hadoop project, rather than simply using it and adding its own stuff. Hortonworks recently announced management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager – both products for administering the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) distribution.
Apparently Microsoft is positioning itself as a big data player with a powerful set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. Data Explorer for Excel 2013 is a self-service BI add-in allowing users to import data from a variety of sources, including Hadoop. SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a massively parallel processing data warehousing appliance designed for Hadoop integration. Microsoft is also trying to bring Hadoop into the cloud using Windows Azure.
Businesses can’t ignore Hadoop, and the fact that major software vendors are getting behind it means it’s not going to be some flash-in-the-pan idea. Certainly, I can imagine major organizations looking to get a huge business advantage by embracing the technology now – to be ahead of their competitors. Smaller organizations will probably take a few years before they see a business case for it. By then the IBM products (and Microsoft’s) will be very mature and eminently suitable.
IBM’s InfoSphere BigInsights builds on open source Hadoop capabilities for enterprise class deployments. The enterprise-level capabilities can be grouped together as: visualization and exploration, development tools, advanced engines, connectors, workload optimization, and administration and security.
IBM claims the business benefits are: quicker time-to-value because of IBM’s technology and support, reduced operational risk, enhanced business knowledge with a flexible analytical platform, and it leverages and complements existing software.
In terms of administration and security, the Web console can start and stop services, run and monitor jobs (applications), explore and modify the file system, and built-in apps make it easy to do common tasks.
The connectors link to databases like DB2, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata. And there’s integration with: InfoSphere Data Stage (data collection and integration), InfoSphere Streams (real-time streams processing), InfoSphere Guardium (security and monitoring), Cognos Business Intelligence (Business Intelligence capabilities), and IBM Platform Computing (cluster/grid infrastructure and management), and more. Big SQL is coming with BigInsights V2.1. This will provide SQL access to data stored in BigInsights through JDBC/ODBC and use rich standard SQL to leverage Map/Reduce parallelism or achieve low-latency.
Advanced engines include an advanced text analytics engine that can automatically identify and understand key information in text. Text Analytics is really useful because most of the world’s data is in unstructured or semi-structured text; social media is full of discussions about products and services; internal information in organizations is locked in blobs, description fields, and sometimes even discarded. It’s been suggested that over 80% of stored information is unstructured – such as e-medical records, hospital reports, case files, police records, emergency calls, tech notes, call logs, online media, insurance claims, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and forums.
In terms of development tools, there is an Eclipse-based development environment for building and deploying applications. There are developer tools and a set of analytic extractors for fast adoption that reduce coding and debugging time by up to 30% (IBM claims). There are also plug-ins for text analytics, MapReduce programming, Jaql development, Hive query, etc.
Visualization and exploration has Big Sheets, providing Web-based analysis and visualization for users with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface that can define and manage long-running data collection jobs.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has identified Hadoop users as a useful market to get into. Speaking recently at the Hadoop summit, Quentin Clark, corporate VP of data platforms said: “We believe Hadoop is the cornerstone of a sea change coming to all businesses”.
Microsoft is integrating Hadoop with its products and services. And, Clark says that Microsoft intends to stick to the principles of open source by contributing to the Hadoop project, rather than simply using it and adding its own stuff. Hortonworks recently announced management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager – both products for administering the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) distribution.
Apparently Microsoft is positioning itself as a big data player with a powerful set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. Data Explorer for Excel 2013 is a self-service BI add-in allowing users to import data from a variety of sources, including Hadoop. SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a massively parallel processing data warehousing appliance designed for Hadoop integration. Microsoft is also trying to bring Hadoop into the cloud using Windows Azure.
Businesses can’t ignore Hadoop, and the fact that major software vendors are getting behind it means it’s not going to be some flash-in-the-pan idea. Certainly, I can imagine major organizations looking to get a huge business advantage by embracing the technology now – to be ahead of their competitors. Smaller organizations will probably take a few years before they see a business case for it. By then the IBM products (and Microsoft’s) will be very mature and eminently suitable.
Sunday, 23 June 2013
DB2 goes big and mobile
Let’s start at the big end. IBM announced DB2 Version 10.5
recently and included in it are a set of acceleration technologies code-named
BLU – apparently standing for Big data, Lightning fast, and Ultra easy! BLU is
a bundle of new techniques for columnar processing, data deduplication,
parallel vector processing, and data compression – everything you’d need if you
were working on Big Data in memory.
So, BLU enables databases to be “memory optimized” – which
means that they will run in memory, but not everything has to be put in memory.
BLU has also removed the need for hand-tuning SQL queries to optimize
performance.
IBM is saying that this new version of DB2 can speed up data
analysis by over 25 times. That means databases don’t need to be sized so they
everything fits in memory, and there’s no need to purchase separate in-memory
databases for fast data analysis and transaction processing jobs. IBM has been
showing an example of a 32-core system using BLU technology executing a query
against a 10TB data set in less than a second.
This kind of processing ability makes DB2 a better choice in
some cases than using Hadoop. The data is compressed in the order in which it
is stored, allowing predicate operations to be executed without decompressing
the data set. The software also keeps a metadata table that lists the high and
low key values for each data page or column of data. The advantage of this is
that when a query is executed, the database can check whether any of the
required values are on the data page.
IBM is using BLU in its DB2 SmartCloud IaaS (Infrastructure
as a Service) to add power for data analysis and data reporting jobs.
Meanwhile, DB2 and MongoDB are getting together to announce
a new standard to make it easier for organizations to implement data-intensive
apps for the Web and mobile devices. MongoDB, you say, what’s that? MongoDB is
owned by 10gen and utilizes NoSQL database technology. It’s used for lots of mobile
and Web apps.
Developers will be able to use Eclipse tools with IBM
Worklight Studio to integrate MongoDB APIs using the MongoDB query language.
That allows developers to more easily query JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
documents in DB2. JSON documents are frequently used for storing Web-based
data. A NoSQL database allows data to be added without a predefined schema and
allows a wider range of choices when scaling up.
The plan is that later this year developers will be able to
combine the WebSphere eXtreme Scale data grid platform with MongoDB, and
they’ll be able to run MongoDB apps directly on DB2. Developers will be able to
write apps using MongoDB’s query language to interact with data stored in DB2
and WebSphere, making the vast amount of data in IBM data stores available to
modern application environments. IBM hopes to broaden the API and is already
working on open source code for security, extended transaction support, and
extended join support, among others.
So DB2 is growing at the big end of the database world and
the little (mobile) end. Interesting!
Saturday, 9 June 2012
300 blogs
This is my 300th blog. I thought it was a high enough number to deserve some sort of recognition. And I thought it would be an opportunity to look back on all the things that have happened since that very first blog back in June 2006.
In those days, I was doing a lot of work for Xephon – I was producing and editing the Update journals. You probably remember MVS (later z/OS) Update, CICS Update (the very first one), DB2 Update, SNA (later TCP/SNA) Update, RACF Update, and WebSphereMQ Update. My very first blog on the Mainframe Weekly blog site and was called “What’s going on with CICS?”. The first paragraph read:
What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there were lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.
And over the months that followed, I talked about AJAX, Web 2.0, Project ECLipz, Aglets (DB2 agent applets), social networking, back-ups and archives, new versions of CICS, DB2, and IMS, and significant birthdays for software. I blogged about mash-ups using IMS, I gave a number of CSS tips, I wrote about BPEL, I even discussed PST files and the arrival of the Chrome browser. And back in November 2008 I first looked at cloud computing.
In 2009 I talked about CICS Explorer, Twitter, cloud computing, specialty processors, zPrime, mainframe apprentices, that year’s GSE conference, IBM’s London Analytics Solution Centre, more anniversaries and software updates, and much more.
2010 saw more blogs about the recession, IBM versus Oracle, social media, Linux, clouds, performance, the zEnterprise, some thoughts about SharePoint, Android, and connecting to your mainframe from a phone, SyslogD, GSE Conference, and lots of other thoughts on the events of the year.
2011 had a lot of blogs about cloud computing and virtual user groups, as well as more about SharePoint. The SharePoint blogs were also published on the Medium Sized Business Blog part of TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mediumbusiness/). I also had a serious look at tablets. And wrote the “What’s a mainframe, Daddy?” blog. I had a look at IMS costs, mainframe maintenance, and Web 3.0 and Facebook (with the use of OpenGraph). I also examined gamification and augmented reality and what they meant for the future of software.
So far in 2012 I’ve mentioned IBM Docs, how to create an e-book, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), operating systems on a memory stick, cloud wars, and using the Dojo Toolkit to make the end user experience of CICS nicer, and more friendly (of course).
Over the years there have been frequent blogs about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and in particular its user survey results.
I’ve also written guest blogs for other people, and I’ve published guest blogs by others. You can find a number of blogs I’ve written on the Destination z Web site at http://destinationz.org/. I’ve even written a fair few blogs (for a fee) that have been published and attributed to other people!
Are the blogs any good? Should you be reading them? Well, I have an IT Toolbox gold award for blogging – for over 100 blogs. Perhaps more importantly, I was a finalist in the Individual IT Professional Male category of the Computer Weekly IT blog awards in 2009. I was a finalist in the IT Professional (male) category in 2010. And last year I was ‘shortlisted’ in the Computer Weekly IT Professional blogger category. As well as being shortlisted for awards, these blogs are regularly referred to by other bloggers and journalists.
You can read my blogs at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com, it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/, and www.mainframecobol.info/. You can follow on Twitter at twitter.com/t_eddolls, or on Facebook at fb.com/iTechEd.
What about the future? The blogs continue – I’ll mainly be following what’s happening with the mainframe industry, but I’ll also take a wider view and keep abreast of new technologies and ideas as they happen and try to put them in context and give my evaluation of them.
If you have read all 300 – thank you. If this is the first one you’ve read, then hopefully you’ll be back again next week for more!
Trevor Eddolls
IBM Champion
In those days, I was doing a lot of work for Xephon – I was producing and editing the Update journals. You probably remember MVS (later z/OS) Update, CICS Update (the very first one), DB2 Update, SNA (later TCP/SNA) Update, RACF Update, and WebSphereMQ Update. My very first blog on the Mainframe Weekly blog site and was called “What’s going on with CICS?”. The first paragraph read:
What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there were lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.
And over the months that followed, I talked about AJAX, Web 2.0, Project ECLipz, Aglets (DB2 agent applets), social networking, back-ups and archives, new versions of CICS, DB2, and IMS, and significant birthdays for software. I blogged about mash-ups using IMS, I gave a number of CSS tips, I wrote about BPEL, I even discussed PST files and the arrival of the Chrome browser. And back in November 2008 I first looked at cloud computing.
In 2009 I talked about CICS Explorer, Twitter, cloud computing, specialty processors, zPrime, mainframe apprentices, that year’s GSE conference, IBM’s London Analytics Solution Centre, more anniversaries and software updates, and much more.
2010 saw more blogs about the recession, IBM versus Oracle, social media, Linux, clouds, performance, the zEnterprise, some thoughts about SharePoint, Android, and connecting to your mainframe from a phone, SyslogD, GSE Conference, and lots of other thoughts on the events of the year.
2011 had a lot of blogs about cloud computing and virtual user groups, as well as more about SharePoint. The SharePoint blogs were also published on the Medium Sized Business Blog part of TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mediumbusiness/). I also had a serious look at tablets. And wrote the “What’s a mainframe, Daddy?” blog. I had a look at IMS costs, mainframe maintenance, and Web 3.0 and Facebook (with the use of OpenGraph). I also examined gamification and augmented reality and what they meant for the future of software.
So far in 2012 I’ve mentioned IBM Docs, how to create an e-book, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), operating systems on a memory stick, cloud wars, and using the Dojo Toolkit to make the end user experience of CICS nicer, and more friendly (of course).
Over the years there have been frequent blogs about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and in particular its user survey results.
I’ve also written guest blogs for other people, and I’ve published guest blogs by others. You can find a number of blogs I’ve written on the Destination z Web site at http://destinationz.org/. I’ve even written a fair few blogs (for a fee) that have been published and attributed to other people!
Are the blogs any good? Should you be reading them? Well, I have an IT Toolbox gold award for blogging – for over 100 blogs. Perhaps more importantly, I was a finalist in the Individual IT Professional Male category of the Computer Weekly IT blog awards in 2009. I was a finalist in the IT Professional (male) category in 2010. And last year I was ‘shortlisted’ in the Computer Weekly IT Professional blogger category. As well as being shortlisted for awards, these blogs are regularly referred to by other bloggers and journalists.
You can read my blogs at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com, it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/, and www.mainframecobol.info/. You can follow on Twitter at twitter.com/t_eddolls, or on Facebook at fb.com/iTechEd.
What about the future? The blogs continue – I’ll mainly be following what’s happening with the mainframe industry, but I’ll also take a wider view and keep abreast of new technologies and ideas as they happen and try to put them in context and give my evaluation of them.
If you have read all 300 – thank you. If this is the first one you’ve read, then hopefully you’ll be back again next week for more!
Trevor Eddolls
IBM Champion
Sunday, 15 April 2012
Storage and expertise – the PureSystems box
On Wednesday 11 April, IBM introduced to the world the PureSystems family of data centre infrastructure products. The idea behind them is that they will simplify the management, automation, and running of enterprise applications on a range of virtualization technologies.
This new line of integrated systems has the ability to automatically handle everyday tasks such as configuration and updates, which reduced the amount of time needed to get applications up and running and also reduces the management overhead. Therefore, IT staff are freed up to get on with other work. Users gain the expertise of 125 independent software vendors (such as VMware, SugarCRM, Infor, and Juniper Networks) who developed what IBM calls “patterns of expertise” that automate many common IT and industry tasks such as deployment, configuration, and upgrading of applications onto the appliances. “For example, a customer relationship management program that used to take three days to deploy can now be deployed in under one hour”, claims IBM. In addition, companies can scale their operations very quickly, allowing them to go from a small number of computer systems in one site to service on the cloud, with systems that can be accessed around the world.
IBM proudly described its PureSystems family as one of the most significant announcements of the last 20 years, and said it is the result of $2bn research and development spend over many years.
The announcement might be viewed as a way for IBM to match competitors Oracle, HP, and Cisco Systems, who have all been promoting converged infrastructure – integrating server, storage, networking, and other technologies into a single managed architecture. As a sweetener, IBM says it will buy back servers, ie those sourced from HP and Oracle, from clients who migrate to PureSystems.
As mentioned above, each PureSystems package combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization technologies into a single appliance, with additional services from IBM. The PureSystems initially come in two versions – PureFlex System (which is a basic infrastructure platform for self-service private clouds), and PureApplication System (which includes IBM’s WebSphere middleware and DB2 database and can be used for Web and database applications). The systems support the Hyper-V, KVM, Power-V, and ESX hypervisors from Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM and VMware, respectively, and are based on either Intel or IBM Power processors. Storage is provided by IBM’s Storwize V7000 appliances, and networking can be a choice of either Brocade, Cisco, or Juniper kit.
IBM has included a cloud self-service and provisioning interface in the PureSystems, based on the same technology used in IBM’s public SmartCloud services, giving customers a ready-to-go cloud computing system in a box, they said.
Customers are able to define the PureFlex configuration, while the PureApplication System is available in four configurations ranging from 96 CPU cores and 1.5TB of memory, up to 608 cores and 9.7TB of memory.
IT departments will be pleased to know that IBM is offering a single support hotline for the entire system, whether an issue is with the hardware or software, while there is also just a single procurement process for the entire system.
“You can order just one box with one pin number, and it has on it all you need to get an out-of-box experience straight away with the software, the middleware, the hardware, storage, the network fabric”, claimed Graham Spittle, chief technology officer for IBM in Europe.
There is also just a single management console, according to IBM, although they can also integrate with IBM’s Tivoli platform for customers who’ve standardized on that for management.
Pricing for the PureSystem family starts at about $100,000.
This new line of integrated systems has the ability to automatically handle everyday tasks such as configuration and updates, which reduced the amount of time needed to get applications up and running and also reduces the management overhead. Therefore, IT staff are freed up to get on with other work. Users gain the expertise of 125 independent software vendors (such as VMware, SugarCRM, Infor, and Juniper Networks) who developed what IBM calls “patterns of expertise” that automate many common IT and industry tasks such as deployment, configuration, and upgrading of applications onto the appliances. “For example, a customer relationship management program that used to take three days to deploy can now be deployed in under one hour”, claims IBM. In addition, companies can scale their operations very quickly, allowing them to go from a small number of computer systems in one site to service on the cloud, with systems that can be accessed around the world.
IBM proudly described its PureSystems family as one of the most significant announcements of the last 20 years, and said it is the result of $2bn research and development spend over many years.
The announcement might be viewed as a way for IBM to match competitors Oracle, HP, and Cisco Systems, who have all been promoting converged infrastructure – integrating server, storage, networking, and other technologies into a single managed architecture. As a sweetener, IBM says it will buy back servers, ie those sourced from HP and Oracle, from clients who migrate to PureSystems.
As mentioned above, each PureSystems package combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization technologies into a single appliance, with additional services from IBM. The PureSystems initially come in two versions – PureFlex System (which is a basic infrastructure platform for self-service private clouds), and PureApplication System (which includes IBM’s WebSphere middleware and DB2 database and can be used for Web and database applications). The systems support the Hyper-V, KVM, Power-V, and ESX hypervisors from Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM and VMware, respectively, and are based on either Intel or IBM Power processors. Storage is provided by IBM’s Storwize V7000 appliances, and networking can be a choice of either Brocade, Cisco, or Juniper kit.
IBM has included a cloud self-service and provisioning interface in the PureSystems, based on the same technology used in IBM’s public SmartCloud services, giving customers a ready-to-go cloud computing system in a box, they said.
Customers are able to define the PureFlex configuration, while the PureApplication System is available in four configurations ranging from 96 CPU cores and 1.5TB of memory, up to 608 cores and 9.7TB of memory.
IT departments will be pleased to know that IBM is offering a single support hotline for the entire system, whether an issue is with the hardware or software, while there is also just a single procurement process for the entire system.
“You can order just one box with one pin number, and it has on it all you need to get an out-of-box experience straight away with the software, the middleware, the hardware, storage, the network fabric”, claimed Graham Spittle, chief technology officer for IBM in Europe.
There is also just a single management console, according to IBM, although they can also integrate with IBM’s Tivoli platform for customers who’ve standardized on that for management.
Pricing for the PureSystem family starts at about $100,000.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Continuous availability – no longer a dream?
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:
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
What’s a mainframe, Daddy?
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.
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.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
IBM’s Transactional Analysis Workbench
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.
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.
Sunday, 6 February 2011
The importance of mainframe performance
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.
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.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
2010 mainframe review
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.
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.
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Should you refrain from using Chorus?
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, 7 November 2010
2010 Guide Share Europe Conference success
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.
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.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
DB2 – faster than a speeding bullet?
Last week, IBM sent out press releases saying that it has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute. And in case you don't realise just how fast that is, the press releases goes on to inform us that it beats HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35%!
We're told that: "The results place IBM in a unique position as the undeniable leader. With these new clustered results (and with the long-standing single system result), IBM has demonstrated its ability to scale up to handle higher transaction loads and to scale out to optimize more types of workloads than the competition."
This result is the largest ever TPC-C result published (dated 17 August 2010) and was obtained on a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers featuring a storage subsystem with 116TB of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and running DB2 9.7.
Just to rub in the fact that it beats the Old rival, Oracle, the press releases goes on to inform us that: "The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction. IBM's performance is also more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result, 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance."
The new TPC-C benchmark result uses standard IBM software. DB2 9.7 has been around since June 2009, and AIX 6.1 was released in November 2007. IBM says that the selection of software versions reflected levels currently in use by a large number of their clients.
IBM highlights the fact that the IBM TPC-C results on POWER7 technology shows off IBM Storage technology in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs), which enable higher throughput and lower response times. SSDs also provide reliability, lower energy usage, less cooling requirements, and the ability to reduce data centre footprints. The total storage used was over 800TB while the Oracle/Sun configuration had 686.6TB of total storage.
The Oracle/Sun cluster is 71% more expensive based on published price/performance relative to the IBM Power 780 cluster result. The total system cost of the Sun cluster is 26% greater than the total system cost of the IBM cluster. Because of different discount structures, care should be taken in comparing individual price components.
As a result of these differences, the TPC does not allow comparisons using TPC price information on anything other than the total configuration. The IBM Power 780 with DB2 9.7 result yields greater than 10 million tpmC for IBM (a feat Oracle hasn't accomplished) and significantly better price/performance for the IBM solution.
The configuration for this benchmark achieves an estimated consumption of 65.1 kWatts or 6.3 kWatts per million tpmC, 35% better than the Sun cluster energy consumption estimate of 73.9kWatts or 9.7 kWatts per million tpmC.
You get the idea anyway – there's more of the same in the press release. The bottom line is that IBM can now claim to provide performance in excess of double-digits (10 Million Transactions Per Minute), which, they say, no-one else can do.
We're told that: "The results place IBM in a unique position as the undeniable leader. With these new clustered results (and with the long-standing single system result), IBM has demonstrated its ability to scale up to handle higher transaction loads and to scale out to optimize more types of workloads than the competition."
This result is the largest ever TPC-C result published (dated 17 August 2010) and was obtained on a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers featuring a storage subsystem with 116TB of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and running DB2 9.7.
Just to rub in the fact that it beats the Old rival, Oracle, the press releases goes on to inform us that: "The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction. IBM's performance is also more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result, 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance."
The new TPC-C benchmark result uses standard IBM software. DB2 9.7 has been around since June 2009, and AIX 6.1 was released in November 2007. IBM says that the selection of software versions reflected levels currently in use by a large number of their clients.
IBM highlights the fact that the IBM TPC-C results on POWER7 technology shows off IBM Storage technology in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs), which enable higher throughput and lower response times. SSDs also provide reliability, lower energy usage, less cooling requirements, and the ability to reduce data centre footprints. The total storage used was over 800TB while the Oracle/Sun configuration had 686.6TB of total storage.
The Oracle/Sun cluster is 71% more expensive based on published price/performance relative to the IBM Power 780 cluster result. The total system cost of the Sun cluster is 26% greater than the total system cost of the IBM cluster. Because of different discount structures, care should be taken in comparing individual price components.
As a result of these differences, the TPC does not allow comparisons using TPC price information on anything other than the total configuration. The IBM Power 780 with DB2 9.7 result yields greater than 10 million tpmC for IBM (a feat Oracle hasn't accomplished) and significantly better price/performance for the IBM solution.
The configuration for this benchmark achieves an estimated consumption of 65.1 kWatts or 6.3 kWatts per million tpmC, 35% better than the Sun cluster energy consumption estimate of 73.9kWatts or 9.7 kWatts per million tpmC.
You get the idea anyway – there's more of the same in the press release. The bottom line is that IBM can now claim to provide performance in excess of double-digits (10 Million Transactions Per Minute), which, they say, no-one else can do.
Friday, 23 July 2010
zEnterprise - three into one does go!
On Thursday 22 July 2010, IBM announced not just their latest mainframe – the zEnterprise – but also a roadmap of how data centres should be – unified, in a single box, and controlled by the best equipped platform in that box. Once code-named Gryphon (you know, the mythical creature with an eagle’s head and lion’s body), IBM’s new hybrid machine (although in the UK you might hear it referred to as a coalition!) 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. You might like to think of this new mainframe as a virtualization hub that manages other workloads in the data centre. Three platforms in one box.
IBM’s view is that data centres are running more than one lot of hardware, and sites are experiencing problems with space for the hardware, keeping control of these different systems, and even communicating between them – so integrating them seems like the obvious answer. And that’s what they’ve done.
But more has come out of the $1.5 billion spent on research and development. The zEnterprise 196 (IBM's name for the two-rack mainframe) includes 96 5.2GHz (up from 4.4GHz on the z10) quad processors (80 of which are used by the client, and the rest are used by the machine itself) and up to 3TB of memory (double the z10s). The new microprocessors offer 100 new mainframe machine code instructions.
In terms of performance, the zEnterprise can handle 50 billion instructions per second, providing a 40-60% performance increase over the z10 without using any more power. A water cooling option, could help reduce energy consumption by up to 12 percent by removing air heat. It also includes the first implementation of RAID memory, which is like RAID for disks, and could be used to increase uptime to beyond the 99.999 availability of current mainframe technology.
The zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) operates as a tightly-coupled extension to the mainframe through a high-performance private network. The users then add POWER7 or System x blades to four racks. IBM says that POWER7 blades will be available by the end of this year, with System x blades scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011. The new Unified Resource Manager will allow users to install, monitor, manage, optimize, diagnose, and service resources and workloads from a single console across the entire infrastructure.
The new machine includes a DB2 accelerator, called the Smart Analytics Optimzer, which is able to routes database queries either to the mainframe DB2 system or a specialist blade server optimized for smart analytics. IBM estimates that complex database queries can experience up to a ten-fold performance improvement in this environment.
Can you afford it? IBM suggests using zEnterprise will reduce cost of ownership by 55% – but didn’t disclose the actual price. They did say that its price relative to capacity would be lower than for the z10!
IBM’s view is that data centres are running more than one lot of hardware, and sites are experiencing problems with space for the hardware, keeping control of these different systems, and even communicating between them – so integrating them seems like the obvious answer. And that’s what they’ve done.
But more has come out of the $1.5 billion spent on research and development. The zEnterprise 196 (IBM's name for the two-rack mainframe) includes 96 5.2GHz (up from 4.4GHz on the z10) quad processors (80 of which are used by the client, and the rest are used by the machine itself) and up to 3TB of memory (double the z10s). The new microprocessors offer 100 new mainframe machine code instructions.
In terms of performance, the zEnterprise can handle 50 billion instructions per second, providing a 40-60% performance increase over the z10 without using any more power. A water cooling option, could help reduce energy consumption by up to 12 percent by removing air heat. It also includes the first implementation of RAID memory, which is like RAID for disks, and could be used to increase uptime to beyond the 99.999 availability of current mainframe technology.
The zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) operates as a tightly-coupled extension to the mainframe through a high-performance private network. The users then add POWER7 or System x blades to four racks. IBM says that POWER7 blades will be available by the end of this year, with System x blades scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011. The new Unified Resource Manager will allow users to install, monitor, manage, optimize, diagnose, and service resources and workloads from a single console across the entire infrastructure.
The new machine includes a DB2 accelerator, called the Smart Analytics Optimzer, which is able to routes database queries either to the mainframe DB2 system or a specialist blade server optimized for smart analytics. IBM estimates that complex database queries can experience up to a ten-fold performance improvement in this environment.
Can you afford it? IBM suggests using zEnterprise will reduce cost of ownership by 55% – but didn’t disclose the actual price. They did say that its price relative to capacity would be lower than for the z10!
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Change is the only constant!
“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.” So said Arnold Bennett the novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist, who lived from 1867 to 1931. Winston Churchill’s take on the subject was: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”. And Harold Wilson, who was also a British Prime Minister said: “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.”
This week I want to talk a little bit about change – or, more particularly, change management. We’re all so use to change these days we perhaps forget that there are ways of carrying out change in an organization that work – and, of course, ways of performing change that lead simply to chaos! There’s hardly a new leader, whether in government or within an organization that doesn’t feel making a few changes will stamp his or her mark on that organization (or country or whatever).
So what is change management? Well, Wikipedia informs us that: “change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. Change management (or change control) is the process during which the changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner by following a pre-defined framework/model with, to some extent, reasonable modifications.”
In terms of mainframes, you might be looking at products such as the CA Endevor or ChangeMan. The CA Web site tells us: “CA Endevor Software Change Manager automates your entire development process, adapting to specific business requirements while ensuring consistency and complete control, protecting your software assets, and maintaining application integrity”. Integration with IBM Rational Developer for System z improves productivity, accelerates time-to-delivery, and ensures the auditability of all programmer activities. Serena’s Web site says: “Serena ChangeMan ZMF, Change Management for Mainframe Systems, protects your corporate assets – and in the process, lets your programmers get more done in less time. Serena ChangeMan ZMF controls every code change in your mainframe environment. It guarantees source-to-load integrity and ensures that only successfully tested programs make it into production. ChangeMan ZMF reduces maintenance costs and regression errors by moving code through an automated mainframe life-cycle with strict accountability and quality assurance at every step. It can support developer communication and perform regression analyses as part of the most thorough concurrent development available. With ChangeMan ZMF, application code is easier to find, modify, and deploy.”
Many of the change management products that Google can find claim to adopt ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) models. ITIL, as I’m sure you know, provides a source of best practice for a range of IT tasks. It claims on its Web site to be: “the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. Used by thousands of organizations around the world, a whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books and the supporting professional qualification scheme.”
But suppose you’re looking for a Software Change Management (SCM) product, a version and release management tool for the enterprise, and an application deployment tool not just for the mainframe but also for your distributed platforms. The choice is usually to buy three pieces of software. Interestingly, ISPW – the organization, www.ispw.com – has a product called ISPW that does just that.
On their Web site, they inform us that: “ISPW is a DB2-based all-in-one SCM solution that manages z/OS and distributed applications in one seamless solution. It has a z/OS based server and three thin-client interfaces:
This week I want to talk a little bit about change – or, more particularly, change management. We’re all so use to change these days we perhaps forget that there are ways of carrying out change in an organization that work – and, of course, ways of performing change that lead simply to chaos! There’s hardly a new leader, whether in government or within an organization that doesn’t feel making a few changes will stamp his or her mark on that organization (or country or whatever).
So what is change management? Well, Wikipedia informs us that: “change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. Change management (or change control) is the process during which the changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner by following a pre-defined framework/model with, to some extent, reasonable modifications.”
In terms of mainframes, you might be looking at products such as the CA Endevor or ChangeMan. The CA Web site tells us: “CA Endevor Software Change Manager automates your entire development process, adapting to specific business requirements while ensuring consistency and complete control, protecting your software assets, and maintaining application integrity”. Integration with IBM Rational Developer for System z improves productivity, accelerates time-to-delivery, and ensures the auditability of all programmer activities. Serena’s Web site says: “Serena ChangeMan ZMF, Change Management for Mainframe Systems, protects your corporate assets – and in the process, lets your programmers get more done in less time. Serena ChangeMan ZMF controls every code change in your mainframe environment. It guarantees source-to-load integrity and ensures that only successfully tested programs make it into production. ChangeMan ZMF reduces maintenance costs and regression errors by moving code through an automated mainframe life-cycle with strict accountability and quality assurance at every step. It can support developer communication and perform regression analyses as part of the most thorough concurrent development available. With ChangeMan ZMF, application code is easier to find, modify, and deploy.”
Many of the change management products that Google can find claim to adopt ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) models. ITIL, as I’m sure you know, provides a source of best practice for a range of IT tasks. It claims on its Web site to be: “the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. Used by thousands of organizations around the world, a whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books and the supporting professional qualification scheme.”
But suppose you’re looking for a Software Change Management (SCM) product, a version and release management tool for the enterprise, and an application deployment tool not just for the mainframe but also for your distributed platforms. The choice is usually to buy three pieces of software. Interestingly, ISPW – the organization, www.ispw.com – has a product called ISPW that does just that.
On their Web site, they inform us that: “ISPW is a DB2-based all-in-one SCM solution that manages z/OS and distributed applications in one seamless solution. It has a z/OS based server and three thin-client interfaces:
- A traditional 3270 interface for mainframe developers
- A browser for supervisors and approvers
- An Eclipse-based client for mainframe and distributed users.
User friendliness and productivity are ISPW strengths, along with a unique tools integration capability.”
I also discovered at the beginning of the month that ISPW has partnered with RSM to market and support the product in the UK. The press release also says about ISPW (the product that is): “ISPW allows programmers to work from their platform of choice and eliminate many common sources of error in the process. Advantages for complex IT installations include:
I also discovered at the beginning of the month that ISPW has partnered with RSM to market and support the product in the UK. The press release also says about ISPW (the product that is): “ISPW allows programmers to work from their platform of choice and eliminate many common sources of error in the process. Advantages for complex IT installations include:
- Exposing ALL change components to standard audit and approval processes
- Expedited traceable implementation and roll-back procedures
- Automatic inclusion in corporate disaster recovery processes
- Improved project management through early conflict resolution and comprehensive visibility
- Reduced cost, via time and effort savings, without the need to retrain or modify procedures.”
Which all seems to make ISPW an interesting product, and well worth a second look.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Mainframe performance
Suppose you wanted your transaction processing environments to work faster – and come to think about it, who wouldn’t? – what are your choices? Well, one solution is available from Ottawa-based DataKinetics (www.dkl.com) – who, you may recall, sponsored this year’s Arcati Mainframe Yearbook (www.arcati.com/newyearbook10).
DataKinetics produce tableBASE, which they describe as a “real-time in-memory table management solution that reduces mainframe resource usage”. They go on to say that its usage can lower costs and mainframe TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), and it also optimizes MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) usage, and all this results in performance benefits and “more powerful and efficient applications”.
The product, they claim, provides huge performance increases over existing I/O intensive DB2 systems and buffered DB2 or cached DB2 systems. At sites using tableBASE, the DB2 database populates in-memory tables once. Application I/O calls are substituted with calls to memory-based tables, resulting in these improvements in application performance. Instead of fetching data at I/O speeds, or buffered I/O speeds, applications are able to fetch data at memory speeds – without buffering or using extra hardware. By optimizing existing IT resources, expensive and large-scale upgrade projects or even complete IT infrastructure swap-out projects can be avoided.
DataKinetics has recently decided to enter into partnerships with resellers around the world to make its products more easily available to mainframe customers. So, in South America it’s through Sun Software (www.sunsoftware.com.br). In Australia and Asia it’s through Serus Software (SSZ) (www.ssz.com.au). And in the United Kingdom it’s through our old friends at RSM Partners (www.rsmpartners.com).
DataKinetics CEO Allan Zander said: “This is a very important opportunity for us to tap into the mainframe market in the UK. RSM Partners is a significant player in mainframe and IT support for financial services organizations and insurers within the UK, and this agreement will provide us [with] the opportunity to penetrate a key market in which we currently have a very limited presence. We’re very excited about this agreement, as it gives us immediate access to a market that has seen very little of the type of mainframe cost control capabilities that DataKinetics’ products can offer.”
Mark Wilson, Technical Director at RSM Partners commented: “We enter partnerships with only those companies with a demonstrated track record of providing value to their customers. With DataKinetics’ 30-plus years of delivering optimization and performance solutions, and their unparalleled client list, we’re confident that their technology will make a difference to our mainframe customers.”
So, some good news for UK-based mainframe users.
DataKinetics produce tableBASE, which they describe as a “real-time in-memory table management solution that reduces mainframe resource usage”. They go on to say that its usage can lower costs and mainframe TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), and it also optimizes MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) usage, and all this results in performance benefits and “more powerful and efficient applications”.
The product, they claim, provides huge performance increases over existing I/O intensive DB2 systems and buffered DB2 or cached DB2 systems. At sites using tableBASE, the DB2 database populates in-memory tables once. Application I/O calls are substituted with calls to memory-based tables, resulting in these improvements in application performance. Instead of fetching data at I/O speeds, or buffered I/O speeds, applications are able to fetch data at memory speeds – without buffering or using extra hardware. By optimizing existing IT resources, expensive and large-scale upgrade projects or even complete IT infrastructure swap-out projects can be avoided.
DataKinetics has recently decided to enter into partnerships with resellers around the world to make its products more easily available to mainframe customers. So, in South America it’s through Sun Software (www.sunsoftware.com.br). In Australia and Asia it’s through Serus Software (SSZ) (www.ssz.com.au). And in the United Kingdom it’s through our old friends at RSM Partners (www.rsmpartners.com).
DataKinetics CEO Allan Zander said: “This is a very important opportunity for us to tap into the mainframe market in the UK. RSM Partners is a significant player in mainframe and IT support for financial services organizations and insurers within the UK, and this agreement will provide us [with] the opportunity to penetrate a key market in which we currently have a very limited presence. We’re very excited about this agreement, as it gives us immediate access to a market that has seen very little of the type of mainframe cost control capabilities that DataKinetics’ products can offer.”
Mark Wilson, Technical Director at RSM Partners commented: “We enter partnerships with only those companies with a demonstrated track record of providing value to their customers. With DataKinetics’ 30-plus years of delivering optimization and performance solutions, and their unparalleled client list, we’re confident that their technology will make a difference to our mainframe customers.”
So, some good news for UK-based mainframe users.
Sunday, 18 April 2010
IBM-Oracle face-off
Having upset the open source community by legal action against TurboHercules, and worried its own customers and made life very interesting for third-party software vendors by counter-suing NEON Enterprise Software, IBM has now taken a swipe at the Oracle-Sun alliance by more the more conventional method of offering its own hardware and software to compete with their product.
IBM recently announced a new range of integrated systems for large-scale data analysis, which is clearly an attack on Oracle’s Exadata platform. Exadata first appeared in 2008, when Oracle partnered with Hewlett-Packard for the hardware. The 2009 V2 was meant to run on Sun servers. Exadata is an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) database machine that Oracle claims is the world’s fastest machine for data warehousing and OLTP. By “world’s fastest” they, of course, mean faster than any IBM offering! As well as Oracle’s database and storage server software, it used Sun servers and FlashFire solid-state technology.
IBM’s response includes the pureScale application system plus Smart Analytics for System z and x86 machines. IBM is saying things like “deep compression” to reduce storage needs and an ability to handle “enormous amounts” of data. The pureScale application system comprises Power7 servers, WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and DB2 pureScale software. The Smart Analytics offering integrates Cognos BI and InfoSphere data warehousing software to handle business intelligence needs.
The mainframe Smart Analytics System 9600 is based on a System z10 Business Class (BC) mainframe with two logical partitions in a base configuration. There are six versions – the base 9600 has z/VM to manage the partitions and runs z/OS in one partition and Linux in another. The z/OS partition comes with DB2 and DB2 Utilities Suite for managing and tuning the database. The Linux part has Cognos 8 analytics and InfoSphere Warehouse.
Now in my opinion, this is a much better way of doing business – competition rather than litigation. Ordinary people – you and me, I mean – can then choose which they’d prefer, and go out and buy it (or rent it, or any of the other business models). With litigation, customers might be afraid that the products they have bought may become unlawful, or the company they bought from may be forced to cease trading, or they get so locked up in the court case that no further development of the product takes place. Now the cynical amongst you might suggest that that’s exactly what IBM hoped to get out of bringing in the lawyers. Maybe we really are returning to a climate of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Let’s hope not!
IBM recently announced a new range of integrated systems for large-scale data analysis, which is clearly an attack on Oracle’s Exadata platform. Exadata first appeared in 2008, when Oracle partnered with Hewlett-Packard for the hardware. The 2009 V2 was meant to run on Sun servers. Exadata is an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) database machine that Oracle claims is the world’s fastest machine for data warehousing and OLTP. By “world’s fastest” they, of course, mean faster than any IBM offering! As well as Oracle’s database and storage server software, it used Sun servers and FlashFire solid-state technology.
IBM’s response includes the pureScale application system plus Smart Analytics for System z and x86 machines. IBM is saying things like “deep compression” to reduce storage needs and an ability to handle “enormous amounts” of data. The pureScale application system comprises Power7 servers, WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and DB2 pureScale software. The Smart Analytics offering integrates Cognos BI and InfoSphere data warehousing software to handle business intelligence needs.
The mainframe Smart Analytics System 9600 is based on a System z10 Business Class (BC) mainframe with two logical partitions in a base configuration. There are six versions – the base 9600 has z/VM to manage the partitions and runs z/OS in one partition and Linux in another. The z/OS partition comes with DB2 and DB2 Utilities Suite for managing and tuning the database. The Linux part has Cognos 8 analytics and InfoSphere Warehouse.
Now in my opinion, this is a much better way of doing business – competition rather than litigation. Ordinary people – you and me, I mean – can then choose which they’d prefer, and go out and buy it (or rent it, or any of the other business models). With litigation, customers might be afraid that the products they have bought may become unlawful, or the company they bought from may be forced to cease trading, or they get so locked up in the court case that no further development of the product takes place. Now the cynical amongst you might suggest that that’s exactly what IBM hoped to get out of bringing in the lawyers. Maybe we really are returning to a climate of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Let’s hope not!
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
DB2 V10 for z/OS beta
IBM has recently announced a beta of DB2 Version 10. It's claimed to provide savings through operational efficiencies, resiliency for business critical information, rapid application and warehouse deployment for growth, and enhanced query and reporting facilities.
IBM claims that compared to previous DB2 versions, some customers can achieve a 5% to 10% out-of-the-box CPU savings for traditional workloads and up to 20% out-of-the-box CPU savings for non-traditional workloads. IBM also suggests that productivity improvements in DB2 10 for database and system administrators can drive additional operational efficiencies and cost savings. Synergy with other System z platform components reduces CPU use by leveraging the latest processor improvements, larger amounts of memory, solid-state disk and z/OS enhancements.
In terms of scalability, DB2 10 delivers the ability to handle up to 20,000 concurrent active users on a single DB2 subsystem, many more than in previous versions. SQL and pureXML enhancements in DB2 10 help extend usability, improve performance, and ease application portability to DB2 for z/OS.
IBM goes on to say that built-in data visualizations and graphical page-based reports extend Query Management Facility (QMF) 10's usage from the traditional technical user to a broader community of business end users. QMF's new metadata layer, they say, simplifies the underlying data model, empowering non-technical users with self-service reporting and extends access to DB2 for z/OS across the enterprise.
Find out more at www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/db2-10/.
Or check out Willie Favero's interesting blog at it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2zos/db2-10-for-zos-beta-announced-today-36790.
IBM claims that compared to previous DB2 versions, some customers can achieve a 5% to 10% out-of-the-box CPU savings for traditional workloads and up to 20% out-of-the-box CPU savings for non-traditional workloads. IBM also suggests that productivity improvements in DB2 10 for database and system administrators can drive additional operational efficiencies and cost savings. Synergy with other System z platform components reduces CPU use by leveraging the latest processor improvements, larger amounts of memory, solid-state disk and z/OS enhancements.
In terms of scalability, DB2 10 delivers the ability to handle up to 20,000 concurrent active users on a single DB2 subsystem, many more than in previous versions. SQL and pureXML enhancements in DB2 10 help extend usability, improve performance, and ease application portability to DB2 for z/OS.
IBM goes on to say that built-in data visualizations and graphical page-based reports extend Query Management Facility (QMF) 10's usage from the traditional technical user to a broader community of business end users. QMF's new metadata layer, they say, simplifies the underlying data model, empowering non-technical users with self-service reporting and extends access to DB2 for z/OS across the enterprise.
Find out more at www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/db2-10/.
Or check out Willie Favero's interesting blog at it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2zos/db2-10-for-zos-beta-announced-today-36790.
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