Guide Share Europe 2013

The Guide Share Europe Conference at Whittlebury Manor was as excellent this year as in previous years. I was only able to make Day 1 on 5 November, but I had a great day. Apart from the 5 star presentations, it’s always fun to catch up with old friends and people I’ve spoken to at webinars, but never actually seen. Plus there’s an opportunity to catch up with a number of vendors and find out what’s happening with them and business in general.

The day started with a couple of keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about Technology the retailers battlefield – zSeries reports for duty!”, and the University of Bedfordshire’s Dr Herbert Daly talking about “Re-framing the mainframe: new generations and regenerations on System z”.

I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so my time is always split between the CICS and IMS sessions. This year, I started with IBM’s Kyle Milner’s “z/OS Explorer and CICS Explorer (5.1.1)”. Kyle started by saying that z/OS Explorer is really called IBM Explorer for z/OS, and V2.1 is separate from CICS Explorer, which integrates with it. Z/OS Explorer is a desktop tool that integrates with MQ Explore, Data Studio, Rational tools (RTC), Rational Developer for z (RDz), IMS Enterprise Suite Explorer, and other tools. It allows users to view, delete, and create files on z/OS and Linux; work on SPOOL files; and much more. It’s installed using Installation Manager in a process that’s much like getting apps from the apps store. CICS Explorer lets users create new program definitions, clone resources, and other life-cycle operations. It’s built on the Eclipse framework V4.2.2.

IBM’s Greg Vance spoke about “GDPS Active-Active and IMS replication”. He described how recovery involved two concepts: the Recovery Point Objective and the Recovery Time Objective. He looked at how recovery had evolved to the point where people wanted almost immediate recovery with almost no lost data. Active-Active replication involves stopping sending transactions to one database, waiting for the last transaction to replicate across, and then sending transactions to the second database. The transactions caught before the switch over just appear a bit slow to the user. For this to work with IMS, you need InfoSphere Data Replication for IMS for z/OS V1.11. Because it uses asynchronous replication, there are no restrictions on the distance between databases. There’s low latency because of the use of parallelism. And there’s transaction consistency.

Back at the CICS stream, I saw IBM’s David Harris talk about “Eliminating the batch window with modern batch”. David starting by explaining that batch jobs often had to run when online services were down because they needed exclusive access to resources. However, there are many drivers to keep the online system available the whole time leaving little or no time for traditional batch applications to run. The solution he proposed involved running batch at the same time as the online system – and this batch system relied on Java. It comes with a big plus in that it can run in a zAAP coprocessor. Using the Batch Data Stream Framework (BDSF), it allows checkpointing, and business objects can be re-used. The batch container is a long-running CICS job, and WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is used to schedule the jobs into CICS.

Informatica’s John Boyle spoke about “IMS test data management”. He explained that we needed only a subset of data to work on in testing, and we need to hide sensitive data – particularly in light of data privacy legislation and to reduce the risk of sensitive data loss. John also stressed the need for the test data to be kept current and internally consistent. Data masking is the technique that hides personal data and it must be consistent across the data. Test software must allow policies to be applied and maintain referential integrity. It first has to establish what to mask and how to mask.

IBM’s Paul Fletcher spoke about “IMS 13 Native SQL for COBOL”. A pre-req for this COBOL V5.1, which has only just been released. COBOL programs supply SQL keywords and support static and dynamic SQL. At the moment, IMS supports only dynamic SQL. Users need to declare tables, define an SQL Communication Area (SQLCA), which is like a PCB, possibly define an SQL Descriptor Area (SQLDA), declare data items for passing data between IMS and host languages, code SQL statements to access IMS, check the SQLCA to verify the execution of the SQL statements, and handle any SQL error codes. Paul told the group that there are three types of dynamic SQL. Firstly, where the whole SQL is known when the program is written. Secondly, where the SQL is known but the value can vary. And, thirdly, where none of the SQL is known – it’s read from a file. Users need to fully qualify all tables and columns; use a WHERE clause for key fields; and use PREPARE.

The exhibition hall was packed and lively, giving people a chance to find out about various products and services. An excellent day of learning and networking was rounded off by fireworks and a barbecue dinner. I’m sorry I couldn’t make the second day. If you didn’t make GSE this year, I recommend that you go next year.

Guide Share Europe annual conference 2013

The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 5-6 November at its regular home in Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.

Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, EMC2, Attachmate Suse, PKWARE, Blenheim Software International Ltd, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Compuware, IntelliMagic, Optica, Oracle, RSM Partners, and Sett. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.

There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Automation), Automation & Monitoring, New Technologies, 101, Application Development, MQ, Workshop: IBM z/OS Explorer, UKCMG, and Workshop: Linux Installation.

There are also keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about “Technology the retailers battlefield - z series reports for duty!”, Dr Herbert Daly (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire) talking about “Re-framing the Mainframe: New Generations and Regenerations on System z”, and Trident Service’s Bob Rogers talking about “A Perspective on System z Capacity Delivery - Past and Future”.

At this year’s conference there will be well over 160 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 17 streams, many with 11 sessions, plus three keynotes.

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

The popular 101 sessions give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of that mainframe technology and how it works.

You can find out more details about the conference at http://tyc.gse.org.uk/.

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

GSE UK 2012

You’re probably wondering why I’m talking about an event that happened last year – and one that I blogged about last November anyway. Well, the exciting news is that the video of last year’s event is now available. You can stream it from YouTube from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNalXiM_4QI. And you can download a copy from http://www.gse.org.uk/tyc/video/GSE_UK_Conference_2012_HD.mp4.

The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference ran 16 streams, had 32 vendors, 326 attendees on day 1 and 314 on day 2, with 260 dinner reservations at the end of day 1. It took place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.

If you were there, watch the video to bring back happy memories. And if you weren’t there, watch the video to see what you missed! The people who organize GSE UK are happy for you to share the link with your colleagues and post it on your own Web site and tweet it, and whatever other social media you’d like to use.

And if you like wallowing in nostalgia, the 2011 conference video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfT9km93V0U.

So, if all that has whetted your appetite, this year’s conference will be on 5 and 6 November at Whittlebury Hall. Put the dates in your diary – don’t miss it.

Guide Share Europe - my impression

Yet again, I could only get to the first day of this year’s Guide Share Europe conference on the 13 and 14 November – which was shame. I hoped I could arrange my meetings to take place at the conference, but there we are. So, I thought that, for those people who were unable to make even the first day, I’d give you a flavour of what you missed.

As usual, the conference was at Whittlebury Hall – which is near Silverstone, but just into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning, so a walk outside to get a breath of air is always worthwhile.
 
The exhibition hall is big, and busy, and its where lunch and coffees are served, making it easy to chat to the vendors and other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to put faces to people I usually talk to by e-mail, to catch up with old colleagues, and make new friends. The quality of the food is always good, particularly the conference dinner.
 
 With 14 streams and pretty much 10 sessions in each stream, it can be hard to decide which sessions to attend. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I split my time between the CICS and IMS streams. 

The first session I went to, I saw IBM’s Steve Foley and the new CICS Director, Danny Mace, talk about CICS TS Version 5.1. They highlighted improvements in CICS capacity and scalability suggesting users could have two or three times more workloads per region. They spoke about new autonomic policy-based management, and increased availability including being able to refresh SSL certificates without a CICS restart. They also spent some time clarifying the concepts of what an ‘application’ is and what a ‘platform’ is. You may think you already know, but this way, it becomes easier to move an application to a different platform. Steve also ran over some of the portfolio updates too. And the session ended with an interesting conversation about pricing.

Next I headed for a presentation about IMS 13 by Paul Fletcher (also from IBM). He said that the new version came with improvements in performance, reductions in storage usage, and reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). The HALDB ALTER and the DEDB ALTER commands allow changes to be made without needing a database outage. You can have multiple views of a physical database in the IMS catalog. And he talked about IMS Connect enhancements.

After lunch it was back to the CICS stream to see IBM’s Inderpal Singh talk about CICS and cloud computing. He said that an ‘application’ contained a collection of CICS bundles. It seemed that no-one in the room was using CICS bundles at this time. He also spoke about the life-cycle of an application – install, enable, disable, and discard. It’s that final stage that doesn’t seem to happen at most installations, where things are left in-place, just in case they’re needed in the future. You can create a CICS bundle in CICS Explorer using the new-look Cloud Explorer interface for CICS.

Next up in the IMS stream was IBM’s Dougie Lawson. Dougie is another fantastically knowledgeable IBMer, who you may have come across when you’ve had an IMS problem. He talked about DRD and the IMS repository – and tried to break the record for the most slides you can show in an hour!. He explained that the repository is a data store of resource information and the repository catalog is points to repository and is quite different from the IMS Catalog.

The final technical session of the afternoon was an old friend of the Virtual IMS user group, GT Software’s Dusty Rivers, talking about IMS modernization. The main thrust of his presentation was about making data and applications available on other platforms. He suggested that mainframe modernization means different things to different people and he grouped these into adding a Web look-and-feel, getting access to mainframe data, getting to mainframe business logic, the need to consolidate logic, the need to reduce MIPS, and the need to integrate with new technologies (such as cloud and smartphones). 

After a day full of so many technical presentations, you might think people would give an extra session a miss. But it was standing room only for the always-excellent Resli Costabell, who talked about dealing with ‘difficult’ people. Her definition of difficult people, is that they are just people that you’ve run out of skills to deal with! And she said that the power in such a situation is with the person being difficult – so we should accept them as they are and stay calm. She even gave us a strategy. You talk as if you’re talking to a friend and say: “I know you’re only [insert positive intention], and [insert negative effect], so [and here you ask for what you want them to do]”. She also suggested that whatever someone does, they do with the best intentions, and they are doing the best that they know how. Resli explained to the group that some people look for similarities between what you’re telling them and their experience, and some look for differences. In the latter case, again she had a strategy. Tell them that they won’t like what you have to say and that there are only a few situations where they can use it. Your difficult person will immediately find lots of ways that they can use it (which is really what you wanted all along!). A really great session – and I haven’t even mentioned Mark Wilson’s contribution!!

Over drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Vanguard, Attachmate, and Suse, and an excellent dinner sponsored by Computacenter and PKWARE, I chatted more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. As usual, I was encouraging vendors to complete their entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and explaining the benefits of sponsoring it. And I was asking mainframe users to complete the user survey.

My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) and his colleagues made sure everything worked well. I picked up loads of information, and had a really good day.

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

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.

GSE conference

I was lucky enough to attend the Guide Share Europe National Conference on 4th and 5th November at Whittlebury Hall. This pulled together lots of mainframers, who were very interesting to talk to – including three young lads who are mainframe apprentices! – plus numerous excellent speakers. There were also a number of vendors there in the exhibition area who were keen to chat and pass on information about their new products – which was also very informative.

I managed to have a long chat with NEON’s Tony Lubrano who gave a presentation in the New technologies stream on zPrime. He explained how zPrime 1.2 now includes an Enablement Console, making it easier for users to select the applications they want to move from the central processor to the zIIPs or zAAPs. There’s also an LE (Language Environment) Initialization Exit feature that automates the task of enabling LE-compliant applications to migrate to the specialty engines. Tony explained how these requirements had come from users and had been delivered in the new release.

The people from Innovation Data Processing were keen to talk about their core FDR products, plus the newer FDRERASE, and FDRERASE/OPEN, and FDRVIEWS, FDRMOVE, FDRMOVE, and FDRPAS.

I had an enjoyable catch-up with the team from Compute (Bridgend) who demonstrated their new SELCOPY/i, which is part of SELCOPY or CBLVCAT and provides multiple windows for user action and produces what they call a “mainframe desktop”. It’s worth checking the huge number of facilities on the Web site (www.cbl.com).

I was surprised to find mainframe companies I didn’t know. There was Thesaurus (www.i-tcs.com), which offers products, consultancy, and managed services, and have expertise with mainframe Linux. There was EZLegacy (www.ezlegacy.com), who had EZSource, their application-oriented configuration management database. There were two EPV (www.epvtech.com) products: EPV for z/OS and EPV for DB2. Olga Henning represented Blue Sea Technology (www.blueseasoft.com). Stephen Golliker represented Higobi (www.higobi.com).

There were many other exhibitors who were friendly and helpful discussing their products

But I didn’t really go for the exhibitors, I wanted to see some of the presentations. There were streams for CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise security, zLinux, Large systems working group, Network management working group, Software asset management, and New technologies.

I was particularly interested in the IMS stream – because of my work with the Virtual IMS Connection user group (www.virtualims.com), and managed to see an excellent presentation by IBM’s Alan Cooper on “Rock solid security in the post-SMU era”. I also sat in on the “Birds-of-a-feather” session to see how real IMS users are finding the product and particularly what difficulties they have to overcome in their environments.

It was an excellent event. It was well-organized and run. It was in a lovely location. And everyone I spoke to was friendly and helpful, and keen to talk mainframe technical talk. Many thanks to the organizers for setting up such an excellent event, and to Mark Wilson who was conference manager for this year’s conference.

BTW: if you like this blog, go to http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/11/03/238190/vote-in-the-computer-weekly-it-blog-awards-2009.htm. Look for Individual IT professional male, then use the drop-down menu to find Mainframe update and select it. Then go down the page and press "Done" - and you will have voted for my blog. Tell all your friends!