SPARTA News

May 2014

SPARTA President’s Corner

contributed by Ron Pimblett

Our SPARTA meeting is May 20th this month and our Speaker is Garth Godfrey, IBM development manager for zAware which provides advanced Analytics for your z/OS System. The zAware overview was recommended by Mark Brooks who presented the “Resilient Sysplex” last month. Mark was asked how to manage all the related variables in running a z/OS system when there were issues with the Sysplex.

It seems prudent to discuss the Cloud solution that IBM is promoting. Apple, IBM, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Carbonite and many other organizations have adopted the methodology to capture huge audiences of users. I think IBM sees the possibility of retaining Mainframe workloads in a similar fashion.

Grasping the Cloud

My experience so far has been that Mainframers are leery to offload anything that might lighten the load on the mainframe; for fear that “down the road” no load means “no need” to have staff supporting the mainframe.

I would support this argument but see an opportunity for growth.

What if the Mainframe group owns the cloud service expertise and provides new enterprise users with services that are unique to their experience.

Systems people have a deep knowledge of what Data and Applications reside on the mainframe and who they belong to.  Are we missing an opportunity to expand our footprint by not embracing the cloud?  IBM is leading the way !

The latest announcement this week by IBM that by the end of 2014, IBM is investing over $1.2B to have [40 Cloud centers across five continents] for SoftLayer.

This week, Tom Rosamilia, IBM Senior Vice President IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain made two announcements at Pulse. First, in additional to x86-based servers, SoftLayer will also offer POWER-based servers to run AIX, IBM i and [Linux on POWER] applications.

New York, New York - 08 Apr 2014: IBM today announced a series of new enterprise cloud offerings for the mainframe which will help clients and service providers reduce the cost of operations and rapidly deploy trusted cloud services with mainframe technology. This announcement includes the first System z-based integrated system offering, the IBM Enterprise Cloud System.

The new IBM Enterprise Cloud System provides an integrated platform, built upon open standards, for clients and service providers looking to rapidly build out a trusted cloud environment capable of supporting mission-critical workloads.  Additionally, a new flexible utility pricing model was announced and will provide service providers with the ability to pay for Linux based mainframe cloud infrastructure over time based on compute consumption, rather than system capacity.

Thanks to higher system efficiency and greater scalability, the total cost of some Linux on System z cloud deployments can by up to 55 percent less than comparable x86-based cloud infrastructure.

As with everything in this world, the computing experience is driven by marketing and this drives the proposition.  Remember “Distributed computing” Well the big word is Cloud today and so it is being driven by IBM Marketing and the concept is being accepted by senior executives in many companies. System z provides that Cloud platform in a cost-effective, secure and robust fashion. In comparison to Linux on a distributed environment, running your Linux workloads on System z provides exceptional resilience, maximized utilization, and optimum security, all at significantly reduced costs.

Why not grasp this one and start a “Proof of Concept “in your mainframe shop.

All the best, Ron

Looking forward to hear Garth Godfrey of IBM talk about zAware on Tuesday, May 20^th at LabCorp in RTP. See you there.

Future Speakers

(subject to change)

May 20 (Special Date) zAware by Garth Godfrey of IBM
June 24 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.

2013-2014 SPARTA

Board of Directors

Brad Carson - President

LabCorp

3060 S. Church St.

Burlington, NC 27215

Ron Pimblett - Vice President

MDI Data Systems 919-426-6518

866-634-3282

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.

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 1912 T.W. 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-RTP Group. The newsletter is posted to the website about five (5) days before each meeting so you can prepare. The SPARTA-RTP Group is maintained by Chris Blackshire; if you have corrections or problems receiving your meeting notice, contact Chris at chrisbl@nc.rr.com.

October 2013 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V487 (dated October 27, 2013) are available from www.cbttape.org.

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

Minutes of the April 29, 2014 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:10 PM by Ron Pimblett, the Chapter Vice President.

•The meeting was held at LabCorp in RTP, N.C.

•Seventeen (17) people were present of which Fourteen (14) were 2014 members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions or their job hunting challenges.
•The web presentation was delivered between 7:30 p.m. and 8:40 p.m. (details below).

•The minutes of the March 2014 meeting were approved as published in the April 2014 newsletter.

•Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, gave the Treasurer's Report. As of April 15, 2014, the balance is $1020.95. Motion was made and approved to accept the Treasurer's Report as published in the April 2014 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 at 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.

•Ron Pimblett 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 SPARTA monthly meeting will be May 20 (special date) at LabCorp in RTP.

•Food for the May meeting will be Pizza.

•The 2014 dues are due ($30) starting in March 2014. Please see Tommy Thomas.

NEW BUSINESS

•Thanks to LabCorp (Tommy Thomas) for hosting the meeting.

•There are currently 41 people on the SPARTA-RTP e-mailing list. There are no new additions since last month.

•Send any e-mail address changes to Chris Blackshire so he can update the SPARTA-RTP Listserv. You will be added by the moderator (Chris) sending you an invitation to Join the list. (ChrisBl@nc.rr.com)

•President’s Corner submissions are wanted. Please assist Ron Pimblett and Ed Webb with ideas or try actually writing a President’s Corner article. If your shop is installing software or an OS process like Brad wrote about, please write about it.

•Tommy Thomas, our Treasurer, has completed moving the SPARTA outstanding balance to Fidelity Bank for their free checking for non-profit organizations.

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 8:50 p.m.

PRESENTATION

• Presentation was given remotely by Mark Brooks of IBM.
Topic: IBM Parallel Sysplex Resiliency

• Agenda
 - Resilient Definition
 - Terminology
 - The Goal of a Sysplex
 - Achieving High Availability
 - Focus on Reducing Recovery Time
 - Parallel Sysplex Philosophy
 - Sysplex HA Recommendations

• Definition: re·sil·ient – adjective
 - 1. springing back; rebounding.
 - 2. returning to the original form or position after being bent, compressed, or stretched.
 - 3. recovering readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyant.
 - Resilient does not equal error free. Single component failures will
    occur. Given this fact, our goal is to prevent a single component failure
    from becoming a sysplex impacting event.
 - A resilient sysplex is one that is configured to achieve desired availability, scales to
   meet the needs of an enterprise, adheres to best practice operational procedures,
   and leverages all available technology to recover from issues quickly.

• Terminology
 - High Availability (HA) - The attribute of a system to provide service during defined periods, at
   acceptable or agreed upon levels. Masks unplanned outages from end users.
 - Continuous Operations (CO) - The attribute of a system to continuously operate.
   Masks planned outages from end users.
   - Employs Non-disruptive hardware, software, and configuration changes
 - Continuous Availability (CA) - The attribute of a system to deliver non-disruptive service to the
    end user 7 X 24. Masks both planned and unplanned outages from end users.
 - IT Resilience - Attribute of IT systems and applications to ensure high service availability through
   monitoring and automatic adjustment of redundant or virtualized infrastructure components.
   - Arises from the implementation and management of an IT resiliency plan.
 - Business Resilience (BR) - The ability of the business to rapidly adapt and respond to
opportunities, regulations, and risks in order to enable business growth

Summary: High Availability is not some number nor is it about component availability; it’s a concept
focused on the availability of the service being delivered to the business.

• The Goal Is To Improve Availability of Business Services
 - The business needs to avoid service outages
 - We are often asked:
   - “How can you guarantee there won't be a failure?”
   - Answer: I can't. There will be failures.
 - The correct question to ask:
   - “How can we mask failures so that critical business services appear to be highly available?”
   - What is critical, what is the availability objective, what is the cost of an outage,
     what are the risks, what is the cost to mitigate the risk, ...
 - Not a one time project, needs continuous improvement
   - As well as periodic evaluation of business needs and risks

• Achieving HA - Minimize Chance of Failures
 - An obvious way to prevent service impacts is to eliminate problems
   - Many IT shops attempt to take this approach.
   - Defect analysis of the triggering problem is often pursued and considered the ‘root cause’.
 - Elimination of all problems is improbable. To expect such is not realistic.
 - Striving for zero defects is commendable and beneficial,
    but realistically we must expect and plan for failures
 - However, the number of problems can be minimized.
   - Regular maintenance.
   - Effective Problem Management ensuring thorough defect analysis and timely correction
   - True root cause analysis to understand the underlying causes of problems and complete
      preventive actions
   - Effective Change Management
   - Comprehensive testing
   - Quality techniques

HA Best Practice: Correct and Prevent Defects

• Achieving HA: Minimize Chance of Service Outage
 - Prevent service disruptions whenever possible.
   - Requires a robust technology architecture and an implementation that provides fault tolerance
 - Fault Tolerance is the capability of a system to experience failures without impacting business
   - Fault Tolerance depends on:
     - Immediate failure detection
     - Component bypass and reconfiguration
     - Transparent recovery
     - Failure injection and recovery testing.
 - Employ techniques such as redundancy and clustering (no SPoFs), capacity, monitoring,
   automatic recovery, and rapid failover
 - While fault tolerance may be built into each product (component), it’s imperative that the
   end-to-end integrated system employ fault tolerance at every layer, INCLUDING
   APPLICATIONS (after all, there is no service without applications).
 - If the technology is architected adequately for fault tolerance and service is not
   disrupted by a failure, problems would not be a service availability consideration.
   - Problems would be a financial consideration - costs versus business impact
 - If the technology is architected for fault tolerance and yet service is impacted when
   a failure occurs, then it must be assumed that redundancy and recovery failed.
   - The cause of the impact to service must be pursued as a secondary problem.
   - Perform true root cause analysis of the secondary recovery problem to understand the
     underlying cause.
   - Take appropriate corrective actions that address the underlying root causes so that we
     can better avoid the problem or mitigate its impact in the future

HA Best Practice: Build in Fault Tolerance at every layer

• Achieving HA: Minimize Scope and Duration of Outage
 - Provide fast service restoration when the inevitable service disruption does occur.
   - Demands a robust technology solution and Service Management processes that
     provides and supports fast recovery.
   - Fast recovery depends on:
     - Comprehensive monitoring
     - Automated recovery
     - Failure injection and recovery testing
     - Documented and rehearsed procedures
     - Current skills
 - Understand potential failure points and scenarios
 - Develop, test, and practice recovery procedures
 - Employ effective Incident Management

HA Best Practice: Plan and Prepare for Failures

• Installations can significantly improve service availability by focusing on reducing recovery time
 - Service disruptions result from a combination of three factors:
   - n = number of incidents (component reliability affects frequency of failures – MTBF)
   - d = duration of incidents (recoverability of service affects length of down time – MTTR)
   - s = scope of impact (restrictability of number of users, transactions, services impacted).

     Service Availability = 100% - ((n*d*s)/base)

 - Getting to 100% service availability requires only that any one factor be zero.
   - Despite all we do to reduce the likelihood of component failures, components will still fail.
   - In large, highly shared environments, scope of impact can be difficult to control
   - By masking business services from component failures through fast recovery, we have a good
     chance of moving the duration of service down-time to near zero.
 - Getting to 100% service availability requires only that any one factor be zero.
 - Minimizing MTTR provides the greatest benefit to service availability and is the
   one factor where IT has the most influence.

Recoverability has the most influence on service availability
“If you plan for no failures, you will fail!”

• Parallel Sysplex Philosophy
 - Sysplex is about eliminating “single points of failure” by providing redundancy for all sysplex
   components, which can be used to effectively mask failures of individual components
  - Servers/CECs, z/OS systems, middleware regions, application regions, DASD controllers, etc.
 - Parallel Sysplex is NOT about preventing or avoiding component failures.
   These failures can and will occur.
 - Parallel Sysplex is about masking and quickly recovering from these component failures,
   by making effective use of the redundant elements in the sysplex to continue processing
   the business workload.
 - In order to effectively mask failures of elements in a sysplex:
   - These redundant components must be “clones” of one another
   - The work/transactions must be able to flow freely to active instances that have not failed
   - The data used by the work/transactions processed in these instances must be shared
 - A sysplex infrastructure (including an application environment) needs to be such that any
   work can run anywhere in the sysplex, on any active system, on any active middleware
   instance, and in any active application region:
   - Minimize the potential for service disruptions
   - No one can ever guarantee they won't occur
 - If a sysplex has redundant components which are not “clones” of one another (whether due
   to affinities, lack of workload routing capabilities, etc.), then that redundant infrastructure
   will be ineffective in providing sysplex HA
    Service disruptions will occur without redundancy

• A Resilient Sysplex
 - Redundant Hardware components (Processors, CFs, Links, IO, Storage)
 - Redundant Software components (Including middleware and application components)
 - No single points of failure (Find and eliminate SPOFs)
 - Dynamic routing capabilities for all workload (No static routing affinities)
 - Data sharing for all critical data (No data-related affinities)
 - Automated Recovery / Restart (Aggressive sysplex automation and alerting)
 - Production-like Volume Testing (Separate from production sysplexes)
 - Good operational processes and procedures, especially around sysplex problem
   determination and recovery (Take advantage of latest tools and technology)
 - Simplification/cloning of the environment (symmetry and “anything runs anywhere”)
 - Sufficient failover capacity for recovery (Processors, memory, I/O, z/OS capacity)
 - Maintenance strategy (Stay up to date, avoid defect rediscoveries)
 - Health Checks with follow-up

• Sysplex HA Recommendations
1. Eliminate workload affinities so that any work can run on any of the multiple subsystem instances
2. Eliminate workload routing affinities that prevent workload from being routed to subsystem instance
3. Eliminate partitioning of data using DB2, IMS DB, or VSAM RLS data sharing
4. Ensure that all critical sysplex messages are monitored by automation and acted upon directly
5. Ensure that operational procedures are in place and understood to take quick actions
6. Modify recovery operations procedures to attempt recovery at the most granular level possible
7. Implement automated same-system and cross-system restart procedures for critical subsystems
8. Implement Metro Mirror synchronous replication and Hyperswap for all critical DASD volumes
9. Implement BCPii services, including Status Detection (SSD) partitioning protocol

SPOFs will still exist: Will need to determine resolution cost versus business cost impact

There are many more slides in the deck and Mark would be happy to return for a part 2.
Ron will follow up.

• Contact Information
- Mark Brooks of IBM - z/OS Sysplex design and development - Poughkeepsie, NY
- Work: 845-435-5149 - Email: Mabrook@us.ibm.com

• The presentation and meeting ended about 8:50 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for May 2014

contributed by Tommy Thomas

The balance in the account is $1030.28 as of May 9, 2014.

Financial Report

3/01/2013 through 05/09/2014

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2014

contributed by Tommy Thomas and Chris Blackshire

May 20 - Chicken

June 24 - Subs

July 29 - BarBQ

Aug 25 - DBAP Buy Your Own (Monday night)

Sept 30 - Pizza

Oct 28 - Chicken

Dec 2 - Subs

Dec. 31 - No Meeting, Happy Holidays

Shifting the Brain Chemistry of Data Protection

contributed by Ed Webb

One of the Best Sessions that I saw at SHARE in Anaheim in March 2014 was John Sileo’s Keynote. Here’s a brief summary:

http://www.share.org/p/bl/et/blogid=2&blogaid=278

SHARE Housing and Registration Now Open for August 2014

contributed by Ed Webb

The city of Pittsburgh is prepared to welcome SHARE attendees and has provided multiple housing opportunities. Choose from the below options then head to our site to reserve your room.

Courtyard by Marriott Pittsburgh Downtown

945 Penn Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15222

800.321.2211

$179 per night for a single/double

Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh

1000 Penn Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15222

412.281.3700

$169 per night for a single/double

Registration is now open for SHARE in Pittsburgh, August 3-8, 2014. With over 500 user-focused sessions, unmatched networking opportunities, and hardware and software product highlights that will help you stay at the forefront of the industry, you won't want to miss this event. Register by June 20, 2014 to secure early savings.

The Mainframe is 50

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S_360 and its legacy at 50

contributed by Chris Blackshire

IBM's System 360 mainframe, celebrating its 50th anniversary on Monday [April 7, 2014], was more than a just another computer.

The S/360 changed IBM just as it changed computing and the technology industry.

The digital computers that were to become known as mainframes were already being sold by companies during the 1950s and 1960s - so the S/360 wasn't a first.

Where the S/360 was different was that it introduced a brand-new way of thinking about how computers could and should be built and used.

The S/360 made computing affordable and practical - relatively speaking. We're not talking the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, but it was a step.

The secret was a modern system: a new architecture and design that allowed the manufacturer - IBM - to churn out S/360s at relatively low cost.

This had the more important effect of turning mainframes into a scalable and profitable business for IBM, thereby creating a mass market.

The S/360 democratised computing, taking it out of the hands of government and universities and putting its power in the hands of many ordinary businesses.

The birth of IBM's mainframe was made all the more remarkable given making the machine required not just a new way of thinking but a new way of manufacturing. The S/360 produced a corporate and a mental restructuring of IBM, turning it into the computing giant we have today.

The S/360 also introduced new technologies, such as IBM's Solid Logic Technology (SLT) in 1964 that meant a faster and a much smaller machine than what was coming from the competition of the time.

Big Blue introduced new concepts and de facto standards with us now: virtualisation - the toast of cloud computing on the PC and distributed x86 server that succeeded the mainframe - and the 8-bit byte over the 6-bit byte.

The S/360 helped IBM see off a rising tide of competitors such that by the 1970s, rivals were dismissively known as "the BUNCH" or the dwarves. Success was a mixed blessing for IBM, which got in trouble with US regulators for being "too" successful and spent a decade fighting a government anti-trust law suit over the mainframe business.

The legacy of the S/360 is with us today, outside of IBM and the technology sector.

Read here for more:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/07/ibm_s_360_50_anniversary/

Demystifying the Myth of Multitasking

contributed by Ed Webb

Third in my “how-not-to” series looks at the myth of multitasking and is based on my more than 35 years of work in mainframe IT, reviewing mistakes I’ve seen or participated in and helping others to avoid them. It’s also my second consecutive “Demystifying the Myth” article. My first article, “End Users: A Programmer’s Best Friend and Worst Enemy,” can be found here. The second article, “Demystifying The Myth Of Measuring Programmers With Metrics” can be found here.

Multitasking is defined as the ability to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. For computers, a more specific definition is the ability of a single CPU to execute two or more jobs concurrently. On the surface, it seems like a great idea, and as for computers, multitasking was a great breakthrough. Multitasking—in this case regarding humans—can be detrimental when used improperly.

http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/mainframe/tipstechniques/applicationdevelopment/multitasking_myth/

Humor

Mother's Day Quips

contributed by Chris Blackshire

PAUL REVERE'S MOTHER:
"I don't care where you think you have to go, young man. Midnight is past your curfew!"

MONA LISA'S MOTHER:
"After all that money your father and I spent on braces, Mona, that's the biggest smile you can give us?"

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S MOTHER:
"Humpty, if I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times not to sit on that wall.
But would you listen to me? Noooo!"

COLUMBUS' MOTHER:
"I don't care what you've discovered, Christopher. You still could have written!"

MICHELANGELO'S MOTHER:
"Mike, can't you paint on walls like other children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that stuff off the ceiling?"

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S MOTHER:
"Again with the stovepipe hat, Abe? Can't you just wear a baseball cap like the other kids?"

MARY'S MOTHER:
"I'm not upset that your lamb followed you to school, Mary, but I would like to know how he got a better grade than you."

BATMAN'S MOTHER:
"It's a nice car, Bruce, but do you realize how much the insurance is going to be?"

GOLDILOCKS' MOTHER:
"I've got a bill here for a busted chair from the Bear family. You know anything about this, Goldie?"

ALBERT EINSTEIN'S MOTHER:
"But, Albert, it's your senior picture. Can't you do something about your hair? Styling gel, mousse, something...?"

JONAH'S MOTHER:
"That's a nice story, but now tell me where you've really been for the last three days."

SUPERMAN'S MOTHER:
"Clark, your father and I have discussed it, and we've decided you can have your own telephone line.
Now will you quit spending so much time in all those phone booths?"

THOMAS EDISON'S MOTHER:
"Of course I'm proud that you invented the electric light bulb, Thomas. Now turn off that light and get to bed!"

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, May 20, 2014 (Special Date)

7 p.m.

LabCorp in the RTP

Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto 1912 T.W. 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.

Free Food: Chicken, Drink, Dessert

Program:

zAware

Speaker:

Garth Godfrey of IBM

SPARTA News

P.O. Box 13194

Research Triangle Park, NC  27709-3194

First Class Postage

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors: