SPARTA News July 2008

July 2008

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

It's July and summer is here, with all the heat, haze and humidity (the triple threat). At least this year it hasn't been so dry. I actually have a green lawn at the house! I was unable to attend the June meeting since it was my birthday and my wife had other plans for that evening. I must apologize for not having a full President's Corner in last month's newsletter. Other things going on kept me tied up and I just couldn't get enough time to get the article out.

I am very pleased to say that we now have DB2 V8 running on all of our DB2 subsystems. The production DB2's are in compatibility mode and all DB2's on QAAD are in new function mode. We have targeted our August outage for converting the production DB2's to new function mode. So far there have been very few issues with CICS and batch use of DB2 V8, but some minor issues with DFSort and DDF connection drops had us chasing down some more maintenance that was migrated to production this month. Now for the last week plus we haven't seen any issues with our DB2 applications. The web apps still have to complete some upgrades in their DB2 Connect clients, but that's not going to impact our August date for new function mode on production.

We have finally managed to get our z/OS 1.9 order straightened out with Shopz. It was received the beginning of this month and we now have it running in our DEVL lpar on the Burlington system. We still have to get all our usermods installed and complete all the product validations before we move it to the TECH lpar on the RTP system. So far it's looking very good. We going to have to work with Omegamon and INFOMAN for the updates that they need, but the other software seems to be validating with no major issues.

Looks like August is going to be a busy time for us. I will be attending SHARE in San Jose, we have a production DR test, our DB2 V8 work, and a planned trip to Poughkeepsie for a hardware briefing. We're running out of steam on the RTP system and our new management wants to look at the z10 possibilities. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one.

This month we are going to do something non-technical, go to a Durham Bulls ball game. Like our winter visit to the RBC Center to watch the Hurricanes play, a nice diversion from the day to day technical issues. I look forward to seeing you at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park on the 29th.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


July 29 Durham Bulls baseball
Aug. 26 TBA

We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Presentations don’t have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or 10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact Ron Pimblett by phone as noted below.

2008-2009 SPARTA
Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President
LabCorp 336-436-8294
3060 S. Church St.
Burlington, NC 27215

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
Dignus, LLC 919-676-0847
8354 Six Forks Road
Raleigh, NC 27615

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235
201 N. Eugene St.
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
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 e-Mailings

The SPARTA policy is to e-mail a monthly notice to our SPARTA-L Group. The newsletter is posted to the website about five (5) days before each meeting so you can prepare. The SPARTA-L Group is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 641-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Mike.

February 2006 CBT Tape Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V471 (dated February 28, 2006) are available from www.cbttape.org.

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

Minutes of the June 24, 2008 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00PM by Ron Pimblett, the Chapter Vice-President (Brad was on vacation).

•The meeting was held at LabCorp in RTP, NC

•Fourteen (14) people were present; Nine (9) were members.

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

•The minutes of May 2008 meeting were not available for publication in the June 2008 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer gave the Treasurer's Report. As of June 16, 2008, the balance is $1283.84; motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report as published in the June 2008 newsletter.

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 site to Mike Lockey. Be sure to check the Web site every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

- Future Speakers and Topics:
(subject to change)

July Ballgame at Durham Bulls
August IBM z10 processor
September SHARE Reports

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Ron Pimblett.

•The July SPARTA meeting will be July 29 at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP).

NEW BUSINESS

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

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 8:00 P.M.

•Mike Fitzgerald of UBS Hainer discussed their DB2 Productivity Tools: BCV for DB2 and BPA4DB2. Mike's intro included a history of UBS Hainer, a geography lesson and a visual tour of Ireland.

BCV for DB2 - Extraordinarily Fast DB2 Database Migration
Overview of BCV4, BCV5 and BCV6
BCV5 Features
Extraordinarily FAST Copy/Migration and unparalleled Performance
Fully Automated System
GUI Interface - Standard ISPF environment
Standard Technology - Compatible with all DASD Hardware and Software
Compatible with all DB2 releases - uses standard IBM interfaces
Copy/Migrate databases, tablespaces or tables including Runstats and Object-Ids
Avoid REORG of source
Support of incremental image copies
Unique for test development
Anonymisation of data
Reduction in data copied
Retain target security authorities
Alter identity columns

BPA4DB2 - Bufferpool Analyzer for DB2
Features
Immediate detection of tuning opportunities
Unique analysis of Re-Reads and Distinct GetPage values
Measurement analysis clearly presented
Measurement analysis with improvement or redesign recommendations
Selectable tuning rules for SAP as well as your standard workloads
Alter statement generation
PDF reports - Details, Summary and real recommendations

•Meeting ended at 9:00 P.M.

Treasurer’s Report for July 2008

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $1205.77 as of July 13, 2008.

Financial Report
3/01/2008 through 07/13/2008

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2008

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

July 29 - Ballpark food - your choice
Aug. 26 - BarBQ
Sept. 30 - Pizza
Oct. 28 - Chicken
Nov. 18 - Subs (Nov. 25 = Thanksgiving week)


New Look for SHARE website

August Schedule Online

contributed by Ed Webb

SHARE, the major IBM user group, has updated its website with a new look. Check it out at www.share.org

The session schedule for SHARE in San Jose during the week of August 10-15, 2008, is now online. Check out this webpage at share.org: http://shareew.prod.web.sba.com/displaymod/SingleConf.cfm?conference_id=19. Online Registration and Housing Requests for the summer SHARE are also available now at http://www.share.org/Events/CurrentConference/Registration/tabid/130/Default.aspx.

Online registration for SHARE in San Jose ends Wednesday, August 6, 2008.


Green Data Center Redpaper in the Works

contributed by Ed Webb

The Green Data Center: Steps for the Journey is a Redpaper being readied for publication by IBM. Check out the nearly complete draft at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4413.html. Here’s the Table of Contents:

Chapter 1. The benefits of a green data center
Chapter 2. Developing a strategy
Chapter 3. Energy optimization with IT equipment
Chapter 4. Site and facilities
Chapter 5. Who can help: IBM Services and Business Partners
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Green is a journey, act now
Appendix A. Commitment to green from IBM: The past, present, and future


South Dakota Migrates Off the Mainframe; Chaos Ensues

contributed by Chris Blackshire

July 2nd, 2008 by Mark Fontecchio
http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/author/mfontecchio/

Dakota's two largest counties had hours-long lines at their administration buildings this week due to glitches in a new statewide computer system after migrating off the mainframe.

A story in the South Dakota Argus Leader detailed how people waited in lines for hours yesterday waiting to renew their license plates http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080702/NEWS/807020316/1001. According to the story, the system changed from a "mainframe system to a Web-based system." It's not clear what the "Web-based system" is, but it's likely to be an x86 infrastructure.

"When a transaction is done on the computer, the computer boots them out, or the system doesn't do it the way it is supposed to," Minnehaha County Treasurer Pam Nelson said, according to the Argus Leader. "It doesn't calculate fees accurately, and they are having to do them manually."

Oops.

The director of the state's division of motor vehicles defended the change, saying the first day wasn't "as bad as (she) thought it could have been," although Nelson said the new computer system is slower. One last quote: “Over the weekend, the state's Division of Motor Vehicles changed its old system to the new South Dakota Customized Automated Registration System.”

If you didn't catch it, the new system, Customized Automated Registration System, can be abbreviated as CARS. Well hey, the new computer system might not work, but at least they were able to implement that cute little acronym...


Thinking outside the case: Running naked servers

contributed by Chris Blackshire

<http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/07/01/thinking-outside-the-case-running-naked-servers/>
July 1st, 2008 by cgoolsbee

When it comes to data center metrics the one most often talked about is square footage. Nobody ever announces that they've built a facility with Y-tons of cooling, or Z-Megawatts. The first metric quoted is X-square feet. Talk to any data center manager however and they'll tell you that floor space is completely irrelevant these days. It only matters to the real estate people. All that matters to the rest of us is power and cooling - Watts per square foot. How much space you have available is nowhere near as important as what you can actually do with it.

If you look at your data center with a fresh eye, where is the waste really happening?

Since liquid-cooled servers are at the far right-hand side of the bell curve, achieving electrical density for the majority of us is usually a matter of effectively moving air. So what is REALLY preventing the air from moving in your data center? I won't rehash the raised floor vs. solid floor debate <http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/07/10/data-center-raised-floor-vs-solid-debate/> (since we all know that solid floors are better) but even I know that the perforated tiles, or the overhead duct work is not the REAL constraint. A lot of folks have focused a lot of energy on containment; hot aisle containment systems, cold aisle containment systems, and even in-row supplemental cooling systems.

In reality however, all of these solutions are addressing the environment around the servers, not the servers themselves which are after all, the source of all the heat. Why attack symptoms? Let's go after the problem directly: The server.

First of all, the whole concept of a "rack unit" needs to be discarded. I've ranted before on the absurdity of 1U servers, and how they actually decrease data center density <http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/09/17/a-myth-busted-1u-servers-do-not-provide-greater-density/> when deployed as they are currently built. I'd like to take this a step further and just get rid of the whole idea of a server case. Wrapping a computer in a steel and plastic box, a constrained space, a bottleneck for efficient airflow is a patently absurd thing. It was a good idea in the day of 66 Mhz CPUs and hard drives that were bigger than your head, but in today's reality of multi-core power hogs burning like magnesium flares it is just asking for trouble. Trouble is what we've got right now. Trouble in the form of hot little boxes, be they 1U or blade servers. They are just too much heat in too constrained spaces.

Virtualization won't solve this problem <http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1310600,00.html>. If anything it will just make it worse by increasing the efficiency of the individual CPUs making them run hotter more of the time. Virtualization might lower the power bills of the users inside the server, but it won't really change anything for the facility that surrounds the servers in question. The watts per square foot impact won't be as big as we hoped and we'll still be faced with cooling a hot box within a constrained space.

So here is my challenge to the server manufactures: Think outside of the case.

This isn't a new idea really, nor is it mine. We've all seen how Google has abandoned cases for their servers. Conventional wisdom says that only a monolithic deployment such as a Google data center can really make use of this innovation. Baloney. How often does anyone deploy single servers anymore? Hardly ever. If server manufacturers would think outside of the case, they could design and sell servers in 10 or 20 rack unit scale enclosures. They could even sell entire racks. By shedding cases altogether, both server cases and blade chassis, they could create dense, electrically simple, easy to maintain, and most importantly easy to cool servers. The front could be made of I/O ports, fans, and drives. Big fans for quiet efficiency. The backs could be left open, with electrical down one side and network connections down the other. Minimize the case itself to as little as possible... think of Colin Chapman’s <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Chapman> famous directive about building a better race car: "Just add lightness." The case of a server should serve one purpose only: To anchor it to the rack. Everything else is a superfluous obstruction of airflow. No need for steel, as plenty of lighter weight materials exist that can do the job with less mass. Go look in your data center with this new eye and envision all those server cases and chassis removed. No more artificial restriction of airflow. Your racks also weigh less than half of what they do today. You could pack twice the computing horsepower into the same amount of space and cool it more effectively than what you have installed.

Ten years from now we'll look back at servers of this era and ask ourselves "what were we thinking??" The case as we know it will vanish
from the data center, much like the horse and buggy a century before. We'll be so much better without them.


Humor


Facts You May Not Know (part II)

contributed by Chris Blackshire

More facts you may not know

1. Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.

2. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp (marijuana) paper.

3. The dot over the letter 'i' is called a 'tittle'.

4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

5. Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller. (Ed. note: Not true - See Susan Lucci and Phyllis Diller in wikipedia).

6. 40% of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

7. 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

8. The 'spot' on 7UP comes from its inventor, who had red eyes. He was albino.

9. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents, daily.

10. Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.

11. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system; a few ounces will kill a small sized dog.

12. Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.

13. Most lipstick contains fish scales (eeww).

14. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

15. Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as medicine.

16. Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower' because in the time when all original print had to be set with individual letters, the upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters.

17. Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time (hence, multi-tasking was invented).

18. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.

19. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

20. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan; there was never a recorded Wendy before!

21. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and silver!

22. Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.

23. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

24. The mask used by Michael Myers in the original 'Halloween' was a Captain Kirk's mask painted white.

25. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19 You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar (good to know.)

26. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand (and you thought this list was completely useless.)

27. The phrase 'rule of thumb' is derived from an old English law, which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

28. The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was the Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.

29. Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with. It's the same with apples.

30. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying!

31. The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

32. Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.

33. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a space suit damages it. (I need to remember this).

34. George Carlin said it best about Martha Stewart. 'Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she's behind bars. O.J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her fanny off to jail.


One Little Bug

contributed by Duane Reaugh

This should bring back memories.

But you’re out of your mind
They said with a shrug
The customer is happy
What's one little bug?
But he was determined
The others went home
He spread out the program
Deserted, alone

The cleaning men came
The whole room was cluttered
With program listings
I'm close, he muttered.

The mumbling got louder
Simple deduction
I've got it, it's right
Just change one instruction.
It still wasn't perfect
As year followed year
And strangers would comment
Is that guy still here?
He died at his 'puter
Of hunger and thirst
Next day he was buried
Face down, nine edge first.
And the last bug in sight
An ant passing by
Saluted his tombstone
And whispered - Nice try!

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2008
7 p.m.

Special Location: Durham Bulls Athletic Park

Check out this link for directions: http://www.dbulls.com/stadium/directions.html

Fee Food: Whatever You Buy

Program:

Baseball

Speaker:

Durham Bulls vs. Buffalo Bisons

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



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