Published: December 17 2008, 10:34 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Reg Harbeck

One thing I always get a kick out of is browsing through old PDSes and finding members that were created or last updated in the 1970's. It's kind of like digging through your grandparents' attic, except that what you find may still be in use.

In fact, that's one of the cool things about the mainframe: when IBM announced it on April 7, 1964, they promised that whatever was developed for it would continue to be usable into the future, and they've pretty much kept that promise.

However, there's a downside to this: we get used to something that works so well that the old adage kicks in, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Which would be fine if the world never changed. But it does, and the organization your work for changes, and the business realities, opportunities and challenges you're facing change as well.

Too often, in the mainframe world, when faced with this change, we've either said that we weren't able to respond to it, or we had to write a work-around to deal with it, or it would be very expensive and time-consuming at the least.

This is why I'm excited about a new insight that's making its rounds: today's mainframe software already has untapped features that are ready to respond to today's new business realities. All you have to do is find out about them and implement them.

The problem, of course, is: how do you find out about these hidden treasures?

I'm fortunate enough to work for an organization that asked this question and came up with an answer: document them from a business perspective!

So, that's what we've been doing, and plan to continue doing for the foreseeable future. We've created a series of documents currently named "Releasing Latent Value" which start with specific business needs you're likely experiencing today, then talk about their cause, how to respond to them, and how you can use the CA software you already have to do this.

We've already made a number of them available at http://www.ca.com/us/content/campaign.aspx?cid=187624#section4, and we'll be adding more.

Let me know what you think of them - do they hit the target? Are there other ways they could be more beneficial to you?

While the idea of finding hidden treasures is as old as history, these documents are completely new, so your responses will help us develop them to be more responsive to your business needs.

I look forward to your feedback!

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Published: December 11 2008, 02:54 PM | no comments
by Reg Harbeck

One of the "new" things that mainframers have begun to use over the past decade or two is Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs. I guess that would make someone who employs them a "Graphical User" or "GU".

The question, then, is, what would incline a mainframer to become a GU? After all, 3270 has served us all quite well over the past 44 or so years. Then again, we've pretty much all gotten used to the web and video games, so in a sense, we're all GUs. And, of course, there are the great graphical interfaces that organizations such as CA have introduced to the mainframe that can make each of us a GU for the mainframe too.

But what about if you're a mainframe expert using a graphical interface to test your knowledge - would that make you a GURU or just a guru - or maybe a GUru?

This may all seem a bit whimsical, until I tell you where I'm going with this:

CA has commissioned some mainframe "Guru Games" that are available online - one for web browsers and one for PDA cell phones - that allow mainframers to test their knowledge, and even submit their high scores for comparison with other mainframers!

After all, we mainframers know how to have fun as well as how to work hard. And, for that matter, we can take everything we've learned over years of hard work and use it to have even more fun.

So, I thought it might be worth taking a moment to tell you about these two games. If you'd like to find out more, check out the online sites. The browser-based version is available at http://www.themainframeguru.com/ and the mobile device version is at http://www.caguru.mobi/.

Feel free to respond to this blog with your thoughts about these games, too!

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Published: December 11 2008, 05:15 PM | 2 Comment(s)
by Reg Harbeck

G’day Mainframers,

Don't you just love xmas? Well I will if my better half finds me a more interesting present than 15 pairs of Holeproof socks, 10 pairs of Reg Grundies and a copy of the second-hand book 'The Stray Shopping Carts of North America: A Guide to Field Identification.' Who ever thought 'shopping trolley spotting' could be so much fun...especially when you’re 8853.59 miles away!? Having said that, I do have a nice early xmas present that is actually worth the read..thanks to a great question from Graham in Sydney. So strap yourself in…

Being a guy for whom the verbal discussion has sometimes taken a life of its own, somewhere today I was not only going to create, but also automate – a ‘DB2 Cloning’ process. Firstly, I would have to escape the blather in the back office of that ASP (unnamed to protect the guilty), surely enough to make Alexander Graham Bell cry and my ears throb from the cacophony of abuse the phone was taking. The monologue of a heated twenty minute argument of a self proclaimed systems expert with their spouse was the norm. Why focus on the customers needs when you could publicly air your own issues. To escape the barrage of verbal abuse - I departed to the sanctuary of the customer site - safe from others who feared this domain of business logic and cost justification.

Cloning a DB2 Subsystem – how difficult could it be? Understanding the application specific requirements and incorporate these into the methodology. Take this method, automate it so that a simple change request could initiate this process and complete in a timely manner with little if any customer interaction. 

Starting with the high-level steps required to enable ‘Cloning of DB2 Subsystems’

1. DB2 Security – keep it out of the DB2 subsystem!

2. HIGHLY SENSITIVE DATA - User Data

Resource Monitoring

Event management

Command and Response

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Published: December 09 2008, 05:32 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Reg Harbeck

It turns out that we mainframers apparently have a casual side to ourselves - and maybe even a sense of humor!

I've just been checking out TREXXers.com, an easy-going mainframe website of which CA is a sponsor, and I was reminded that it's possible to have fun and be a mainframer at the same time.

You know, over the past few years or even decades, as we mainframers have put our noses to the grindstone and worked harder and harder, it's been easy to forget the human side of our profession. And yet, as mentioned in a very informal posting at http://www.trexxers.com/uploads/pdf/Reg-limericks..pdf, the mainframe is too important to be taken seriously (apologies to Oscar Wilde).

That's why I like what might be called "cultural" mainframe times and places.

That also includes the SHARE sing-along.

Now, for the uninitiated, every Thursday night at SHARE (the semi-annual mainframe user group educational meeting) there's a unique session that begins at 10:00pm. It involves singing a selection of familiar tunes with mainframe lyrics. It's a wonderfully eccentric experience, and one which naturally de-selects anyone who isn't a major mainframe nerd.

If you search around the web, you can discover some other casual/cultural sites as well - in fact, TREXXers.com can be a good starting place to link to such places.

Personally, I think these are very important, even though they're intrinsically whimsical, because they bring out the human side of what we do. After all, when you spend a very substantial amount of your time every week for most or all of your working life doing something, it had better have relevance to the fact that you're a human being!

So, yes, we mainframers have a culture that includes the ability to have fun, and I, for one, am all for affirming and building on that!

What about you? Feel free to reply to this blog entry with your own thoughts, or even better, post them at TREXXers.com where they'll be part of the ongoing journey of developing the human side of mainframe culture!

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Published: December 01 2008, 07:16 AM | no comments
by Reg Harbeck

A Practical Illusion. That's how I describe virtually anything virtual. And I think it's time we faced this reality in order to get used to the implications of virtualization, cloud computing and all of these other wonderful fictions.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying there's anything undesirable about this - we all need our illusions. And in the case of virtualization, which had its first seriously practical manifestation on the mainframe, it's a dynamic perspective that simplifies the architecting, running and managing of a complex environment.

But let us never forget that there's an underlying reality here: your programs and data are always stored somewhere, and whether they be moved between memory and DASD or have their addresses dynamically translated, there is no moment when they cease to exist anywhere in a real, discrete, concrete computing environment.

That means a lot of important things, the first of which is: you can't virtualize beyond the physical capacity available. Sure, you can add disks and run more work if you don't mind having most of it swapped out most of the time. And you can add servers to run more work in parallel, as long as you don't expect to lift the ceiling of performance beyond the capacity of the largest individual server.

Which brings us back to the origin of serious virtualization: the mainframe, with the highest ceiling and the broadest capacity for multiple concurrent workloads, enabling fast sharing of data, the ability for the valleys of some workloads to match the peaks of others, and the ability to run at up to 100% capacity without degrading performance.

In other words, as I look to the cloudy skies and the future of virtualization, while others see so much abstraction that they can't tell which platform their workloads are actually running on, I see a natural selection of the one platform that has proven it can weather such precipitous advances.

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