SPARTA News May 2013

May 2013

SPARTA President’s Corner

by Brad Carson

My calendar says that it is May, but the weather feels a lot more like March. Here we are with another month of roller-coaster weather. Between that and tree pollen, it's been one heck of a month on my sinuses. The good thing is that we should be seeing more summer like weather by the time you read this newsletter.

Last month I was unable to attend our meeting due to having a 5 day stay at Duke University Medical Center. The stones in my gall bladder decided they wanted some attention. They let me know about that with some serious abdominal pain. So I had Martha drive me to the DUMC ER and spent the next 24 hours there being tested, poked, and prodded. With nothing to eat I managed to get quite dehydrated and had to have that taken care of. Once they managed to put me in a room, things went much better. The biggest was that they did not remove my gall bladder but gave me enough fluids, antibiotics and pain killers so I was able to pass two gall stones (whew). They didn't want to do surgery because of my Carcinoid Tumor, so this made for the change in treatment.

During our monthly outage on May 12th, we were FINALLY able to convert our last and biggest DB2 subsystem to V10 New Function Mode. The full conversion, which rewrites most of the DB2 catalog (DSNDB06) and directory (DSNDB01) completed without errors. We then had the UAT groups get on and validate all the production DB2 based applications (WEB and CICS). So far everybody is happy with this. We are monitoring the system and wearing the change target this week. So any little error that might remotely involve this DB2 subsystem must be due to the New Function Mode conversion until we can prove otherwise. When we complete our month end processing without issue, I'll be able to close this 2 year old project. Of course I'm still waiting for our DBA/App staff to use some functions from DB2 V7.

Our next big item on the radar is a 12 hour production data center outage so that the network infrastructure can be upgraded to 10 Gig. This is going to affect everything in the RTP data center. All the server and middleware folks are having so much fun planning for this. For our mainframes we will be just shutting down some tasks that don't take network bounces well and leaving the systems up. I'll let you know how all this goes in next month's newsletter.

This month our speaker will be Jim Ott from Triangle Systems to talk about the latest and greatest that is going on with IOF. With the Memorial Day holiday this month our meeting will be one week earlier, I look forward to seeing you all on the 21st at LabCorp in RTP.


Future Speakers
(subject to change)


May 21 (Special Date) IOF Updates by Jim Ott of Triangle Systems
June 25 TBD

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.

2012-2013 SPARTA
Board of Directors

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

Ron Pimblett - Vice President
DTS Software 919-833-8426
4350 Lassiter at North Hills Ave, Suite 235
Raleigh, NC 27609

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

Tommy Thomas - Treasurer
LabCorp 336-436-4178
3060 S. Church St. 919-361-7267
Burlington, NC 27215

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute Inc. 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 Brad Carson; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Brad at 336-436-8294.

April 2013 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V486 (dated April 2, 2013) 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 April 30, 2013 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Tommy Thomas (Treasurer) standing in for Brad Carson, the Chapter President.
•The meeting was held at LabCorp in RTP, N.C.
•Fourteen (14) people were present of which ten (10) were members.
•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions.
•The minutes of the March 26, 2013 meeting was approved as published in the April 2013 newsletter.
•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's Report. As of April 11, 2013, the balance is $1,045.63. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report as published in the April 2013 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 page to Mike Lockey. Be sure to check the Web page every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

•Tommy Thomas reminded everyone to leave the LabCorp conference room clean.

•Future Speakers and Topics (subject to change based on internal politics, budget, the weather):

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact Ron Pimblett (919-833-8426).

•The next monthly SPARTA meeting will be May 21 at LabCorp in RTP (Please note this meeting is a week early because of Memorial Day the following week).

•Food for the May 2013 meeting will be Chicken.

NEW BUSINESS

•Thanks to LabCorp and Brad and Tommy for hosting the April meeting.

•Send any e-mail address changes to Brad Carson so he can update the SPARTA Listserv.

•Although a nomination committee and chairperson have not been formed, officer elections will be held next month. See Brad Carson to volunteer for an office.

•The 2013 dues are due ($30). Please see Tommy Thomas.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:42 p.m.

PRESENTATION

•Presentation given by Laura Knapp from Applied Expert Systems (AES) about Performance Factors in Cloud Computing and the Mobile Workforce.

• Agenda
- Background
- Performance Challenges
- Impact of a Mobile Workforce
- Maintaining Mainframe Network Performance in a Cloud.

Background

• Cloud is a Computing Model
- 1960 Mainframe
- 1980 Minicomputer
- 1990 Client Server
- 2000 Web
- 2010 Cloud

• Why Cloud
BENEFIT COMMENT
Cost Savings Organizations can reduce or eliminate IT capital expenditures and reduce ongoing operating expenditures by paying only for the services they use and, potentially, by reducing the size of their IT staffs.
Flexibility Cloud computing offers more flexibility (often called “elasticity”) in matching IT resources to business functions than past computing methods.
Scalability Organizations using cloud computing need not scramble to secure additional hardware and software when user loads increase, but can instead add and subtract capacity as the network load dictates.
Access to Top-End IT Capabilities Particularly for smaller organizations, cloud computing can allow access to hardware, software, and IT staff of a caliber far beyond that which they can attract and/or afford for themselves.
Redeployment of IT Staff By reducing or doing away with constant server updates and other computing issues, and eliminating expenditures of time and money on application development, organizations may be able to concentrate at least some of their IT staff on higher-value tasks.
Focusing on Core Competencies Arguably, the ability to run data centers and to develop and manage software applications is not necessarily a core competency of most organizations.
Sustainability The poor energy efficiency of most existing data centers, due to substandard design or inefficient asset utilization, is now understood to be environmentally and economically unsustainable.

• Cloud Types
PRIVATE CLOUD Operated solely for an organization
COMMUNITY CLOUD Shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns
PUBLIC CLOUD Made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services
HYBRID CLOUD Composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together

• Typical Private Cloud Infrastructure
- Core Cloud Services
- Software as a Service (SaaS) / Applications
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Cloud Service Delivery Capabilities
- Service Mgmt. & Provisioning
- Security & Data Privacy
- Data Center Facilities

• Core Business Services
- User Access
-Web-based Joint
- Collaboration Real-time voice, text, video, application
- Discovery Locate specific information and services
- Messaging Real-time updates & alert notifications versus data change
- Metadata Discovery Ability to discover, develop & reuse data semantics
- Content Delivery Responsive
- Security Ability to operate in a secure environment
- Enterprise Service Management - Monitors services availability, performance & reliability
- Mediation Exchange data with unanticipated users & formats

• Managing Cloud Data Center
- Fundamentals of management apply FCAPS (monitor, analyze, diagnose, remediate, report
- Fault
- Configuration
- Availability
- Performance
- Security
- Leading to
- Service level achievement
- Optimum resource utilization
- Highly available systems
- High performing systems

Performance Challenges

• Approaches
- Top Down or bottom Up - Doesn’t matter - Consistency does
- Applications
- Middleware
- Guest OS
- VM

• Management Lifecycle
- Monitoring Performance Baselining
- Gather Configuration and Traffic Information
- Observe Statistics
- Collect Capacity Data
- Analyze Traffic
- What-if Analysis
- Solve Problems
- Plan Changes
- Evaluate
- Implement Changes

• Cloud Performance Risks
- Challenge Consideration Impact
- Provisioning Multitude of options Application or service slow down or failure
- Performance Understand Topology Significant increase in time to remediate
- Workload Arrival Seasonal-time dependent Provisioning could speed up or down

• Public Cloud Performance Risks
- Challenge Consideration Impact
- Isolation Performance Tools Blocked Rely on vendor data
- Distance Greater distance latency Degradation of response time
- Skinny Straws Smaller network pipe Application timeouts-failures

• Public Cloud Performance Risks
- Challenge Consideration Impact
- Application chars Resource Chars Trade Offs: performance vs costs
- I/O, memory, Pricing is based How does cloud provisioning software take
CPU, VM usage on usage of resources all the resources into account?
- I/O bound Require high performance Use of commodity may impede
Applications infrastructure Response time

• Steps to Effective Performance Management
- Monitor
- Establish Baselines
- Review and Remediate
- Analyze

Impact of a Mobile Workforce

• Why Define a Mobile Strategy?
- Service
- Expand Boundaries
- Increase Workforce Productivity and Responsiveness
- Better Business Decisions
- Mobile Strategy

• Tomorrow’s Workforce -- Tomorrow’s Employee
- Telework
- Hoteling Cloud
- Virtual Desktop
- Collaboration
- Unified
- Mobile
- Choice

• Challenges
- Validate business decision
- Evaluate technologies and impacts
- Are there regulatory requirements
- Resource and operational support
- Performance impact while preserving inherent availability, reliability, capability and performance
- Mitigate risks (loss of mobile device and sensitive date)
- Define business policies

Maintaining Mainframe Network Performance in a Cloud

• IP Resource Bottlenecks
- CPU, memory, buffering, queuing, and latency, Interface and pipe sizes, network capacity,
speed and distance, application characteristics
- Results in: Network capacity problems, utilization overload, application slowdown or failure

• Information to Collect
- Link/segment utilization
- CPU Utilization
- Memory utilization
- Response Time
- Round Trip Time
- Queue/buffer drops
- Broadcast volumes
- Traffic shaping parameters
- RMON statistics
- Packet/frame drop/loss
- Environment specific

• CPU Utilization
- In Virtualized systems CPU utilization can be misleading
- Running low on CPU any system can cause
- Immediate application failure
- System slowdown impacting all applications
- Need to restart system
- Running low on CPU can
- Cause immediate application failure
- Domino effect on related resources and applications
- Intermittent application oddities

• Response Time
- No one is ever happy with what they get
- External customers may go elsewhere
- Where is the problem?
- Network?
- Router has long queues?
- Is the LAN to slow?
- Is the route long?
- Operating system?
- Too long to queue for transmit?
- Application?
- Protocol?
- Window size improperly set?
- MTU size improperly set?

• System Utilization
- Since you cannot over-provision your system (add as much memory as you want, as much DASD, etc.) you need to optimize
- Determining what is currently being used on the system will assist in determining how much you can grow the system
- An application behaving poorly may be due to improper design, improper setting of system resources to use, or application configuration
- Sluggishness of a system may be due to not enough CPU, I/O overloads, or queue latencies

• MTU Size
- Optimizing MTU size can provide optimum performance improvements
- Set the maximum size supported by all hops between the source and destination
- Traceroute can provide details on the MTU size but some router administrators block traceroute
- If you application sends
- frames <= 1400 bytes use an MTU size of 1492
- Jumbo frames use and MTU size of 8992
- TCP uses MTU size for window size calculation
- For VSWITCH an MTU of 8992 is recommended

• Murphy’s Law (as pertains to Computers, CPU and Memory Usage, and Response Times)
- If anything can go wrong, it will
- If anything just cannot go wrong it will
- Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse
- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something

• AES SHARE Sessions For More Details
Session Title
12152 IPv6 Basics
12777 Network Problem Diagnosis with Packet Traces
12778 Performance Factors in Cloud Computing
12150 I’m Running IPv6 How Do I Access?
12158 Managing an IPv6 Network
12149 Kick Start your IPv6 Skills using your home network
12153 IPv6 Deep Dive

• Contact Information
- Laura Knapp - Email: Laurak@aesclever.com

• The presentation and discussions ended about 8:55 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for May 2013

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $968.53 as of May 10, 2013.

Financial Report
3/01/2013 through 05/10/2013

Items of Interest


SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2013

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

May 21 - Chicken
June 25 - Subs
July 30 - BarBQ
Aug. 27 - DBAP Buy Your Own
Sept. 24 - Pizza
Oct. 29 - Chicken
Nov. 19 - Subs
Dec. 31 - No Meeting, Happy Holidays


Freeware PDS Command Now Supports EAV

contributed by Ed Webb

Thanks to the contributions of John Hamlet of SAS, and the efforts of John Kalinich who helps maintain the Shareware PDS command at CBTTape.org, the free PDS program now fully supports data sets on Extended Address Volumes (EAVs) in Cylinder-managed space as well as in traditional Track-managed space.

The updated PDS (release 8.6.14.4) is available in File #182 on the CBT V487 pre-release Updates page here.


Online Registration Now Available for SHARE 2013 in Boston in August

contributed by Ed Webb

Online registration for SHARE in Boston August 11-16, 2013 is now available as well. Early Bird rates end June 28, 2013. Just click here for the best education a z/OS expert or novice can get!

And it’s not too early to make your room reservations for SHARE. Spread across two hotels, the Sheraton and the Marriott, near the Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay district of Boston, SHARE in August will be focused on the upcoming next release of z/OS, Version 2.1. Book now before the rooms at Conference rates are all taken.


Redpaper Offers Ideas to Rethink Your Mainframe Applications

contributed by Ed Webb

IBM has published a new Redpaper (Rethink Your Mainframe Applications REDP-4938-00) to help customers use their existing mainframe applications in the changing ways that users exploit computer systems.

Here’s the paper’s Abstract:

“Today there are new and exciting possibilities available to you for creating a robust IT landscape. Such possibilities include those that can move current IT assets into the twenty-first century, while supporting state-of-the-art new applications. With advancements in software, hardware and networks, old and new applications can be integrated into a seamless IT landscape.

Mobile devices are growing at exponential rates and will require access to data across the current and new application suites through new channels. Cloud computing is the new paradigm, featuring anything from SaaS to full server deployment. And although some environments are trying to virtualize and secure themselves, others such as IBM® zEnterprise® have been at the forefront even before cloud computing entered the scene.

This IBM Redpaper™ publication discusses how transformation and extensibility can let you keep core business logic in IBM IMS™ and IBM CICS®, and extend BPM, Business Rules and Portal in IBM WebSphere® on IBM z/OS® or Linux on IBM System z® to meet new business requirements. The audience for this paper includes mainframe architects and consultants.”


Can IBM’s zAware Solve Your Performance Challenges?

contributed by Ed Webb

“The performance challenges of systems experiencing soft failures—also referred to as “sick but not dead systems”—have been difficult to resolve. Irregular operational situations tend to possess many unknowns that can be a challenge to systems administrators who either have limited experience or highly focused experience in a single specialty. Performance degradation, for example, may be irregular and unpredictable.

Intermittent soft failures can be caused by configuration flaws, middleware elements or any element in the IP stack. Since a soft failure can have one or more causes, it’s sometimes difficult to identify the root of the problem. In large, multiprocessing systems that have evolved over time, such problems can become a significant irritant because it’s not unusual for a soft failure to take weeks to identify.”

Find out more about how IBM’s zAware product on the new zEC12 servers might help you solve these challenges in the rest of this Enterprise Media article from April 2013 titled “IBM’s zAware Provides Clarity into Ambiguous Performance Challenge”.


Humor


Being Green

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
 
The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."
 
The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."
 
She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.
 
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.
 
But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
 
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.
 
But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.
 
We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.
 
But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.
 
Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
 
But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
 
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
 
But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.
 
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
 
But we didn't have the green thing back then.
 
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
 
But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were.

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 (Special Date)

7 p.m.

LabCorp in the RTP

Free Food: Chicken, Drink, Dessert

Program:

IOF Updates

Speaker:

Jim Ott of Triangle Systems

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

First Class Postage

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors: