SDLC Blog » Mainframe

The Mainframe Guru

ferdy — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:28:14 +0000

Via Mainframe Watch Belgium, I discover The Mainframe Guru, a little quiz from CA that lets you know your mainframe knowledge.

BTW, on November 5, I will attend the Amsterdam GSE European Working Group: European Enterprise Modernization for zOS, so if you are a reader of this blog and you will also attend to this meeting, stop by and say hello.

IMS Tools Knowledge Base Teleconference

ferdy — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:01:19 +0000

IBM seems to continue to enhance IMS tooling set, this time with an autonomic management tool. IMS Tools Knowledge Base is a tool to assist DBAs to store, manage, and access reports generated from some selected IMS tools.

If you are interested in this tool, join the The IMS Tools Knowledge Base: The foundation of IBM’s autonomic direction for IMS Tools teleconference on June 26, 2007 to discuss with Joe Sacco, IMS Tools Project Manager, and Ronald Defalco, IMS Tools Senior Software Engineer, how to improve problem determination and resolution, consolidate islands of IMS tools data into one repository and build a foundation for better decision-making.

(Via Mainframe Watch Belgium)

Gameframe: IBM Mainframe for Virtual Worlds

ferdy — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:02:19 +0000

Didn’t have time to post about all the buzz generated by the “Gameframe” announce by IBM:

IBM today disclosed a cross-company project to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) with the IBM mainframe for the purpose of creating a hybrid that is blazingly fast and powerful, with security features designed to handle a new generation of “virtual world” applications, such as the 3D Internet.

The other company involved in the project is Hoplon Infotainment, who runs its massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Taikodom on an IBM zSeries Server. But the news is not that IBM is getting involved in the game industry nor the virtual worlds. As reported by the eightbar team, this is not the first time that IBM tries to run MMOG in its hardware, as back in 2005, IBM Blade Servers were being used to host Eve-Online.

The real innovation is that IBM is going to integrate CELL engines within IBM mainframes. Previous integrations were zIIP and zAAP specialty engines, but this time, CELL will be the first specialty engine to actually feature different hardware. The combination of the power of the CELL chips with the high-performance mainframes will result in a single system that can can run complex online games and virtual worlds.

BTW, last day, I was exploring the IBM SOA Hub in Second Life when I found an ATM connected to a real mainframe. Kareltje Krasher, one of the IBM guys, told me that this ATM is connected to the Smartbank zSeries infrastructure, a live banking operating environment running CICS and DB2:

Nice to see how IBM is reinventing mainframes. Long Life The Mainframe!

Unix System Services roll-out history

ferdy — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:09:57 +0000

Mark Cathcart has posted a nice article about the Unix System Services roll-out process. He provides a historical overview of the decisions involved in the revitalization of the mainframe back in the early 90’s.

Personally, I remember when we introduced USS at my company about 8 years ago. It was a hard but also a funny work. Lots of mainframe guys dealing with a subsystem under OS/390 that has a strange behaviour and terminology.

What the hell is a “sticky bit“?
Oh, I see, it’s an executable that resides on LPA or LNKLST.
Why this guys doesn’t speak more clear!

Can I manage the user access rights via TSS?
Yes but not. Do you know what are the file mode permissions bits?
Ehhhhhh?

I also remember when I personally had to deal with Rexx and USS. We needed to implement a change control system to manage the production environment changes. Executing OpenEdition (USS former name) services through the “Address Syscall” Rexx instruction under a TSO/ISPF environment on a OS/390 mainframe was very very funny (and painful!).

I remember specially when one of our sysprogs executed the “rm” instruction on the development root filesystem using the change control user, which was, logically, a superuser. Just imagine his face when he realized what he has done! After this destructive action, we created an “rm” alias to prevent these kind of incidents.

Snif, I miss these great moments.

CICS/DB2 debugging and WAS for z/OS Perfomance

ferdy — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:51:50 +0000

A couple of useful links:

A new WebSphere Technical Exchange Webcast, by Dan Zachary, will take place on 08 March 2007 at 11 AM EST (GMT-5) about CICS/DB2 Debugging Techniques:

This presentation discusses ways to approach various types of problems involving the CICS/DB2 interface. Problems include transaction hangs and loops, transaction abends (e.g. abendAD2U), and connection/disconnection failures. Debugging approaches will primarily involve using dumps.
A whitepaper about “IBM WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Version 6: A performance report, white paper“:

The information in this white paper is designed to provide a balance that can suit users of both System z mainframes, and J2EE technology-based WebSphere systems. Although the only accurate method of determining how a server might perform under a particular workload is to test the server within an environment suitable for that workload, this can be a very difficult and expensive proposition. IBM has documented a combination of primitive component tests, simple end-to-end tests, client proof-of-concept benchmarks and complex operational performance tests to assist you in planning for introducing WebSphere Application Server for z/OS workloads into your existing environments. Use this information to help you make an informed decision, but keep in mind that it is not a substitute for a detailed performance and capacity planning process.

z/OS Hot Topics Newsletter and z/Journal new issues

ferdy — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:33:11 +0000

New issues of two excellent journals focused on IBM z/OS.

z/OS Hot Topics Newsletter has published its 16th issue (February 2007 ), covering topics as “Perform amazing new data processing tricks with DFSORT“, by DFSORT specialist Frank Yaeger, and “IMS DLIModel utility“, a tool to assist IMS DBAs and application programmers in eliminating the need to manually create the Java metadata class required by the IMS JDBC connector.

z/Journal has published its February/March 2007 edition where there are some interesting articles, as “Mainframe Transactions in a SOA“, where Joerg Rehr explains how to deal ACID with WS-*.

IBM software for System z

ferdy — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:54:39 +0000

Two links only for System z developers:

Daniel Moul, Product Line Manager for IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer, will conduct a webcast on February 21, 2007 about Unleash the power of your existing mainframe assets into the SOA world.
Reginaldo Barosa, Senior Certified Application Development Specialist, will answer your questions about replacing the traditional TSO/ISPF development, connecting to z/OS, editing COBOL, PL1, or C/C++, and building, testing, and debugging batch or online programs and checking the results using IBM WebSphere Developer for System z. Submit your questions at the Meet the experts: Question submission form. Updated 03/07/2007: Here are the answers.

BTW, I will never understand why System z tools pertains to the WebSphere brand and are not integrated in the Rational brand. They aren’t development tools?

WDz vs. Traditional Mainframe Development Tools Productivity Study

ferdy — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:36:39 +0000

During a Debug tool for z/OS presentation, the IBM folks gave us a study, written by Branham Group, focused on comparing various productivity efficiencies and techniques between the IBM WebSphere Developer for z/Series (WDz) and traditional IBM mainframe development tools based on the z/OS platform.

The target was to build a useful working application for the mainframe in Cobol, CICS and DB2. Conclusion of the study is that IBM WDz tools are more productive for building robust mainframe and web based apps. Great!

But …hmmmm… , why I don’t feel as excited as Timothy Sipples and his “Friendly Application Development”? Perhaps is because “web based apps” was not in the title. Oh! I see, “while is possible to do this development [Web Service, Service Flow, web based interface] by hand, this is not realistic and as such was deemed as an unsupported feature of the tradicional IBM mainframe development tools”.

You can drawn your own conclusions reading this study at “WDz vs. Traditional Mainframe Development Tools Productivity Study”.

PD: But if you think you’re going to increase the productivity in terms of the number lines of code per developer per unit of time, the number of bugs per tester per unit of time, etc, you’re wrong, remember the unproductiveness factor.