May, 2008
by Dan Schwarz, retiring Secretary
Dan has 30 years in IS, almost all with various agencies of the University of Wisconsin. About half of those years were in applications programming. The other half has been in operations and systems. Currently he supervises the systems programming staff in the IS department of the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. He has been attending MCMG meetings for 14 years and has been a member of the National CMG since '97.
About the Author
Dan Schwarz, University of Wisconsin Hospital
The Midwest Region of CMG met on April 23 in Chicago. It was a very well attended meeting with more than 40 present. The program was excellent with two presentations on I/O systems, one on zAAP performance and the Mullen Award-winning presentation "Death to Dashboards" by Peg McMahon. Below is the meeting summary. Take a look to see what you missed if you weren't there.
In accordance with the bylaws of MCMG, elections were held to fill two-year terms for two Director positions, Treasurer and Secretary. The Director positions were filled once again by Janet Bishop and Sue Rohr. The Treasurer, Gary Schneier was returned to his position, and we welcome the new Secretary, Jane Fiala, replacing Dan Schwarz who is stepping aside after six years in that position.
Peg McMahon, Sprint Nextel
When does the light on the executive dashboard turn from yellow to red? When do you order new hardware? Traditionally, these decisions are handled by setting thresholds - picking some number to use as an upper or lower limit. Thresholds might have worked well in the days of a handful of beloved systems. But for today's complex environments, thresholding is not only painful to manage but conceptually bankrupt. Let's talk about the problems with thresholds and dashboards and work to identify some practical alternatives. Vendors, put on your iron underwear and attend this session.
John Baker, Intellimagic
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. This phrase is no more true than in the world of mainframe I/O performance. Despite impressive breakthroughs in disk subsystem technology, there remains a substantial disconnect (pun intended) between the logical and physical view of our I/O infrastructure. We will discuss how architectural changes have shifted the most likely bottlenecks from the host system down to the Disk Subsystem components and why new levels of visibility and automation are required to avoid painful service level issues. This session will discuss the challenges involved in managing enterprise disk subsystems in a mainframe environment, how RMF metrics may actually mislead us into believing that things are running just fine, and how the old rules of thumb no longer apply. A new methodology and complementary new metrics will be introduced and discussed.
Jonathan Gladstone, Bank of Montreal
In 2004, IBM introduced zSeries Application Assist Processors, or zAAPs, to their zSeries line of mainframe computers. These new specialty engines run Java workloads on the mainframe at greatly reduced cost. In 2005, after testing and technical and business case analysis, the BMO Financial Group (a.k.a. the Bank of Montreal) started using zAAPs. This presentation describes some of the high-level issues and benefits of using zAAPs in a mid-sized mainframe shop with significant Java workloads. It also touches on BMO's use of System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), the newest mainframe specialty engines from IBM, which handle a subset of DB2 workloads.
Russ Prokuski, EMC
EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) is a new solution from EMC that offers IBM zSeries mainframes customers the ability to eliminate the need for mainframe tape libraries from the data center completely.
From shortened batch processing windows to improved data retrieval to lower operating costs, the benefits of the DLm are considerable. In addition to classic backup and recovery, mainframe environments use tape for extended online storage of information such as billing records and call center data. With DLm the retrieval of information is reduced from the minutes it would take to retrieve it from tape to seconds it would take to retrieve it from disk.
DLm combines low-cost ATA-protected drives, hot stand-by disks with tape emulation and hardware compression and the functionality necessary to provide enterprises with a high-capacity mainframe tape replacement solution for delivering increased application availability.