We know what COBOL stands for
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, January 14, 2012 - 300 views
Every year, about this time, mainframe users are excited to get their hands on the latest edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. What makes the Yearbook stand out is that it’s an excellent reference work for all IBM mainframe professionals – no matter how many years of experience they have.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, December 11, 2011 - 332 views
There was a time when using the trace facility was really the final strategy. You’d perhaps have tried everything else to find what was going wrong first. And when nothing seemed to have worked, you’d equip yourself with all the necessary manuals – and that could be quite a few – and run the trace and start the hard job of interpreting the results. And then try to fix the problem. Those days are long gone thanks to more modern software tools, but, to many people, the memories linger on!
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Monday, December 5, 2011 - 377 views
I remember many years ago saying to my children that one day, when they walked around London or any capital city, they’d be able to hold up their phone in front of a statue or building and information would appear on screen explaining what the statue commemorated, etc.
But how about if you could hold up your phone in front of the mainframe or some x86 server, and on screen would appear statistics about usage and performance? You could then take appropriate action to resolve hot spots and capacity issues. All just a dream? Apparently not.
Posted by Mike on Sunday, October 16, 2011 - 264 views
High obsolescence is a hallmark of information technology. By industry standards, 18 months, at best, is the longevity of a product or technology. But the IT space’s longest survivor, one that is there from the beginning, is the most unlikeliest of them all, the mainframe.
Its epitaph was written long ago. Universities rusticated mainframe from their curriculum decades back, thinking that skinny personal computers will drive out the bulky box that needs almost a whole room and all the paraphernalia, not to speak of a dedicated team of eternally confounded operators, to run it. But now, the storied PCs are on their way out, but the ‘big iron’ is firmly stay put, though a lot slimmer and trimmer.
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Monday, September 19, 2011 - 301 views
For many organizations, we’re beginning to a see a model of how IT customer support can be organized – and the model is coming from management who are completely platform-agnostic. To them, IT is IT – it doesn’t matter whether something runs on a mainframe or a distributed platform. And this new way of working brings with it new challenges.
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 342 views
There’s an accurate, but much-overused, metaphor for life as a journey. Well, coming soon, this metaphor has been taken a stage further by giving us a destination – Destination z. According to the Web site at www.destinationz.org, Destination z is a community where all things mainframe converge to keep you informed. The new destinationz.org site becomes live in summer 2011, and when it launches, members will be connected to a new global community of peers – mainframe users, business partners, academia, consultants, and others.
An inaugural enewsletter (tentatively called zNEWS) will be sent out in June, formally announcing the destinationz.org community.
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, March 27, 2011 - 558 views
How many times have you come away from a conference or a presentation and thought wow, that was really useful? Perhaps one small nugget of information from the speaker has opened a door for further development of work at your site. And most technical presentations are full of gems of information – both for the novice user and those more technically experienced.
Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Sunday, February 27, 2011 - 1,050 views
I don’t know whether you’re going to be at the SHARE conference in Anaheim (California) from 27 February to 4 March, but one of the interesting things to see is the William Data Systems stand (booth 211).
They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.
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