SPARTA News September 2004

September 2004

SPARTA Chapter President’s Corner

- by Brad Carson

September is here and so is fall. After surviving a lot of wet weather, it feels good to have these cool mornings and clear sunny afternoons again. I hope that our members in the western part of the state came through Frances and Ivan OK. With these hurricanes it makes me remember all the mess I had to deal with when Floyd came through Greenville in 1999 (has it been 5 years already?).

At DHTS we had our quarterly IPL this past weekend and had a lot of changes that were being made. I managed to get the updated BMC MainView suite into production, but had to back out moving the DASD UCB's above the line due to a %$^%#$ old assembler program that was chasing down UCB's to locate key system volumes. A scan of our production load library found this program linked into over 400 other programs. I guess we'll work on changing this on a LPAR by LPAR basis so that the developers can test the routine when they get around to updating it (I'm not going to hold my breath on this one).

Over at DDA I've been busy working on their FLEX box to merge the VM and VSE systems together and free up some space so that I can assign more volumes to z/OS (to hold client data sets). I enjoyed working with VM again (z/VM 4.3), but had to look way back in my memory to remember the joys ;-) of working with VSE (and ICCF). There was a little cursing at the beginning, but as I remembered more and more I got comfortable with VSE again. I guess working with VSE means that someone will probably want me to work on a DEC PDP-11 again sometime!

This month our speaker will be the SPARTA members (Ed Webb of SAS, Duane Reaugh of DTS, and Tom Schwartz of STK) that attended SHARE in August. I look forward to seeing you all there on the 28th at SAS Institute (see directions at end of this newsletter). Be sure to ask for Ed Webb. Deli tray, drinks, and dessert will be provided.

2004-2005 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
Duke Health Technology Services 919-286-6392
2200 West Main Street, Suite 450
Durham, NC 27705

Duane Reaugh - Vice President
DTS Software 919-833-8426
2913 Wake Forest Road
Raleigh, NC 27609-7841

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St. 336-227-2021 (Home)
Greensboro, NC 27401

Tommy Thomas - Treasurer
LabCorp 336-436-4178
231 Maple Ave, Koury Ctr 3rd Fl. 919-361-7267
Burlington, NC 27215

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-531-4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513

Meetings

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:15 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.

These monthly meetings usually are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Tommy Thomas. Tommy will escort you to the conference room.

Call for Articles

If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation, PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.

Newsletter Mailings

The SPARTA chapter policy is to mail a copy of the monthly chapter newsletter to each SPARTA member, NaSPA national, each advertiser, persons who have requested a copy, and to other chapters who send us a copy of their newsletter. The newsletter is mailed about the 20th of each month so you can prepare for the meeting. The mailing list is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 412-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your newsletter, call Mike.

July 2004 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V466 (dated July 25, 2004) are available from www.cbttape.org.

If you need help obtaining one or more files, contact Brad Carson at Duke Health or Ed Webb at SAS (see Board of Director’s list for contact info).

Minutes of the August 31st, 2004 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Brad Carson, the Chapter President.

•Twenty one (21) people were present; twelve (12) were members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job function.

•The minutes of July 2004 meeting were accepted as published in the August 2004 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's report. As of August 31, 2004, the balance is $1531.74. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report.

OLD BUSINESS

•Articles are needed for this newsletter. If you would like to write an article for this newsletter, please contact Ed Webb. Keep in mind that you don't really need to write the article, it can be an article that you read that you would like to share with the membership.

•The SPARTA Web page is available. To access the SPARTA Web page, point your Web browser to this site: http://www.spartanc.org. Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web page to Mike Lockey. Be sure to check the Web page every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

•Brad reminded everyone to continue keeping the conference room clean.


NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:
(subject to change)

Sept. 2004 SHARE Conference Reports
Oct. 2004 To be announced

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Duane Reaugh.

•Thanks to Tommy Thomas of LabCorp for hosting the July meeting.

•The September 28th SPARTA meeting will be held at SAS in Cary, courtesy of Ed Webb.

•Food for the September meeting will be deli tray, drinks and dessert.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:35PM.

•Todd Rief of StorageTek talked about STK technology futures. Todd is the lead STK corporate strategist He now lives in Louisville, Colorado, but is all ACC with degrees from UVA and UNC.

Some of the topics that Todd discussed were:

•STK was started in 1969 and now has over 7,000 employees in 32 countries.
•STK means tape, storage, SVAs, software, backup archival and high customer touch.
•STK is a trustworthy partner that provides choices and professional services.
•Revenue has increased for the last 14 quarters which was made possible because they are committed to their business - managing storage.

•STK Industry:
1) Data protection (backup and recovery)
2) Archive
3) Primary storage productivity

1) Data protection: Takes a lot of people, needs to be made simpler, current software sucks (as to productivity), needs systemized view, needs higher rate of success
- sees cost reduction opportunities

2) Archive: Needs to be able to retrieve 20 year old records, needs content search capability, indexing and searchability

3) Primary Productivity: storage is a $9.4B business summarized as:
20% or $1.9B unspecified/unformatted
30% or $2.8B unused
20% or $1.9B parked in the wrong tier
30% or $2.8B efficiently deployed

•$50 per GB disk market needs to be migrated towards the $1.25 per GB market
How:
Take the migration complexity out
Decrease inefficient use of $50 disk space
Data Archive (SOX, HIPAA)
Look at total cost of ownership

•Storage Management
Better tools - Mainframe (good tools) versus Open Systems (needs tools)
Do more backups with the same amount of people
Keep important data on expensive drives - classify, manage, move
Need to setup enterprise life cycle management of data
Need software to manage without complexity

•Storage Classes (Cost per GB):
$47-$67 - Disk - high speed
$18-$26 - Disk - modular
$ 4-$10 - SATA JBOD
$ 2-$ 4 - Access Tape (Archive)
$1.25-$2 - Capacity tape (Archive)

•Customers Wants:
1) not 5 nines, they want 100% uptime and accessibility
2) their production environment is not the vendor's test lab
3) Virtual Tape
4) Better use of tape drives
5) Archive unused or infrequently used DB2 rows and columns (or to lower tier storage)
6) Easy migration between tiers (tier structure, layers of applications involved)

•STK contacts for more information:
Todd Rief 303-661-5430
Tom Schwartz 919-465-5914
Paul Massengill 919-340-1503
Ed Beavers 919-656-5917
Theresa Ruggieri 888-473-3082
Steve Martin 336-813-6444

The meeting ended at 8:45 p.m.

Treasurer’s Report for August 2004

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $ 1465.81 as of September 15, 2004.

Financial Report
2/01/2004 through 09/15/2004

Items of Interest

SPARTA Food Menu for 2004

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Sept. - Deli Tray
Oct. - BarBQ
Nov. - Pizza


SHARE Teaser for Sept. Meeting

contributed by Ed Webb

CSVRENTSP252 If you want RENT programs truly reentrant, try this TRAPS parameter in DIAGxx in SYS1.PARMLIB or your logical PARMLIB concatenation. Why? No unwarranted authorization of load libraries just to prove reentrancy.

Be at the September SPARTA meeting and hear the details along with other Hints and Tips gleaned from the August 2004 SHARE Conference in New York City (see www.share.org). Ed Webb of SAS, Duane Reaugh of DTS Software, and Tom Schwartz of STK will report. The September meeting is planned for SAS in Cary instead of our usual RTP location.

Humor

You Know You’re Living in 2004 When ...

Contributed by Chris Blackshire

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You go home after a long day at work you still answer the phone in a business manner.

7. You make phone calls from home, you accidentally dial "9" to get an outside line.

8. You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies.

10. You learn about your redundancy on the 11 o'clock news.

11. Your boss doesn't have the ability to do your job.

12. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.

13. Every commercial on television has a website at the bottom of the screen.

14. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

15. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

16. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)

17. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

18. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

19. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

20. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list AND NOW YOU'RE LAUGHING at yourself.


Thirteen Thoughts to Ponder

Contributed by Chris Blackshire

13. Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway...

12. Life is sexually transmitted...

11. Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die...

10. Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection make him a sandwich...

9. Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks...

8. Old people are like Slinkies . . . not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs...

7. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing...

6. Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again...

5. All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism...

4. Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

3. In the 60's people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal...

2. Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first...

AND THE # 1 THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

You read about all these Terrorists most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and those people are all over you. I think we should put Blockbuster in charge of Immigration & Homeland Security.

Words to Live By

Contributed by Chris Blackshire

Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.

Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.

Eat a live toad in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.

If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

Never buy a car you can't push.

Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you don't have a leg to stand on.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

The early worm gets eaten by the bird, so sleep late.

When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

Birthdays are good for you; the more you have, the longer you live.

You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.

Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened.

We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors but they all have to learn to live in the same box.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Happiness comes through doors you didn't even know you left open.

Have an awesome day, and know that someone has thought about you today....

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Special Location: SAS in Cary

Take I-40 to Exit 287 Harrison Avenue Cary and go south (left over I-40 from Raleigh or right off I-40 from Durham). Turn left onto SAS Campus Drive at first traffic light. At the gate, tell the guard you are attending the SPARTA meeting. Go about a quarter mile or so. Then turn right into the Building F drive and park along curb. Go in the rightmost entrance to see Ed Webb. Here’s a map http://www.sas.com/events/execconf/invite/mar04/images/campus_map2.pdf

Free Food: Deli Tray, Drinks, Dessert

Program :

SHARE Conference Reports

Speaker:

Duane Reaugh of DTS Software
Ed Webb of SAS
Tom Schwartz of StorageTek

SPARTA News
P.O. Box 13194
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194








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