Future Speakers

(subject to change)

June 2, 2015 - Innovation Software Updates by Thomas Meehan

July 7, 2015 - IOF Updates by Jim Ott

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.

2015-2016 SPARTA

Board of Directors

Randy Springs - President

BB&T                  (919) 745-5241

3200 Beechleaf Court, Suite 300

Raleigh, NC 27604

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 first Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in January), 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.

November 2014 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V489 (dated November 12, 2014) 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 May 5, 2015 Meeting

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Ron Pimblett, Vice President.

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

•Twenty (20) people were present of which Twelve (12) are 2015 members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions or their job hunting challenges.

•The minutes of the February and March 2015 meetings were approved as published in the March and April newsletters.

•The reading of the Treasurer's Report was given by Tommy Thomas, the Chapter Treasurer, but not yet published by the meeting date. The current balance of $814.15 was approved as read.

•The April and May minutes and Treasurer's reports will be approved in the June meeting.

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 site 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 site every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

•Tommy 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 June 2, 2015 at LabCorp in the RTP.

•Food for the June 2 meeting will be Pizza.

NEW BUSINESS

•The 2015 dues are due ($30) starting in March 2015. Please pay Tommy Thomas.

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

•There are currently 57 people on the SPARTA-RTP emailing list.

•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 = SPARTA-RTP-owner@yahoogroups.com) sending you an invitation to Join the list.

•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.

•Election of the 2015-2016 Officers (motion made, seconded, and voted for each) as follows:
- President - Randy Springs of BB&T
- Vice President - Ron Pimblett of MDI Data Systems
- Secretary - Mike Lockey of Guilford County Information Services
- Communications Director - Ed Webb of SAS Institute
- Treasurer - Tommy Thomas of LabCorp

•The business portion of the meeting ended about 7:55 p.m.

PRESENTATION

IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS by Joe Winterton of IBM.

• Agenda

- Introduction
- IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS
- Automation
- Network Management
- Performance Monitoring
- Asset Discovery
- Value Through Integration
- What‘s New
- Summary
- Demo

• Introduction

• Rapid growth of next generation technologies supported seamlessly on zEnterprise

• System z scaling model and security to manage and optimize both
<- Social, Mobile, Analytics ->
• Systems of Record <- Smarter Infrastructure -> • Systems of Engagement
- Business Transactions - Mobile and Social
- Quality of Service - Dynamic
- Command & Control - Interactions and Collaboration
- Facts and data “source of truth” - Insight, trends, analytics
- z/OS - Linux on System z

• IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS

• Mainframe customers require ability to quickly correlate and fix problems across applications
- Islands of monitoring and automation lead to potentially more outages and higher costs
- - Low automation degree
- - Problems crossing monitors hard to diagnose due to lack of correlation or drill down
- - Higher education, installation and maintenance costs
- - Less flexible sysprog and operations specialists
- Customer challenges
- - Performance number values – what is good versus bad
- - How to find correct thresholds
- - Problems detected in time versus flooded with exceptions
- - Identify problems before they cause an outage
- - Quickly finding root cause

• Automation

• Lack of automation can increase costs and risks
- Many shops only automate IPL, messages, and shutdown
- Recovery automated only for single resources without dependencies
- Complex recovery or moves done by operators leads to higher effort and recovery time
- Operators not alerted about monitor or automation exceptions
- Performance problems not solved by automation

• High automation degree can decrease costs and risks
- Complex recovery or moves done by automation – fast and reliably
- Operators alerted about monitor or automation exceptions
- Pro-active automation using monitoring can resolve performance problems before they cause outages
- Operators and SMEs can solve problems faster by using automation to manage applications

• Network Management

• IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS combines monitoring and automation for integrated capability
- MEGAMON and System Automation work together to provide simplified operations and reduced risk
- Exploit Tivoli Asset Discovery to better understand application usage and save license charges and address audits
- IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS
- - Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS
- - System Automation for z/OS
- - OMEGAMON Performance Management Suite for z/OS
- - NetView

• Performance Monitoring

• Service Management Suite for z/OS V1.2

- Provides comprehensive service management capabilities for IBM zEnterprise
- Simple Pricing metric (One Time Charge PID) to deploy infrastructure and middleware solutions as needed
System Automation for z/OS NetView for z/OS Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS
OMEGAMON Performance Management Suite for z/OS
z/OS DB2 CICS IMS MQ Storage Networks WAS
- Single offering that contains capabilities to manage z/OS and all key subsystems
- High Availability & Automated Operations to improve Service Levels and reduce system downtime
- Ability to visualize and automate your mainframe environment as a single system
- Eliminates boundaries between system and application components
- Network & Performance Management to increase efficiency of resources and personnel
- Tools tightly integrated providing pro-active automation, which helps on problem resolution even before an alarm goes off

• Asset Discovery

• zEnterprise management

- Service Management Suite for z/OS
- - 3270 and graphical user interfaces
- - Integration
- - Pro-active automation
- - Disaster recovery platform
- Items Managed
- - z/VM Linux LPAR CEC zBX I/O zAware
- - z/OS DB2 CICS IMS MQ Storage Networks WAS

- NetView for z/OS
- - Network Management
- - Automation platform CANZlog
- System Automation for z/OS
- - High availability
- - Automated operations
- OMEGAMON Performance Management Suite
- - Enterprise monitoring
- - Exceptions
- - Analysis
- - Expert advice
- - History
- Asset Discovery for z/OS
- - License compliance
- - Software license cost optimization
- - Financial accountability
- - Usage trends

• Value Through Integration

• Service Management Suite for z/OS V1.2

• HIGHLIGHTS
- Increased efficiency - Enhanced OMEGAMON functions with OM Performance Management Suite V5.3 updates (e.g. 3270 UI Near Term Historical capability).
- Improved time to value - Improvement customer experience with a 80% decrease in time of System Automation base installation and configuration.
- Reduced risk of application downtime with pro-active automation enhancements (out of the box policy-based management of looping address spaces to help SMEs execute various recovery actions without the need for programming.)
- Increased visibility and improved application availability – Support of ITM pure events helps System Administrators to get situations reported immediately for selected automation resources to allow for corresponsive actions.
- Pro-active outage prevention through analytics - New Monitoring and Automation integration capabilities enable customers to pro-actively avoid outages through predictive insights analytics and zAware hardware automation support
- Improved SME productivity – Multiple users are able to customize and browse an automation policy while a configuration built process runs in parallel.

• What‘s New

• zService Mgmt Integration Dashboard Strategy
- Management Dashboards
- - Operations
- - Performance
- - Analytics Usage
- - Automation Scheduling

• IBM’s zSystems Service Management Dashboards (Beta - now)
- Web Browser
- - Reduce problem determination time, even while on the go
- - Provide safe and easy access to mainframe
- - Optimize time with integrated, consolidated views
- - Uses your existing environment – runs on z!

• Using and adopting IBM Design Thinking Principles
- Stated project objective
- Targeted personas
- Followed Design Thinking Principles
- - User Interviews and Key Insights
- - Hills
- - ponsored Users
- Wireframes/Demo

• SOD for zSystems Service Mgmt Dashboards
- IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS
- - IBM intends to release a new version of Service Management Suite for z/OS with a new customizable user interface. The offering will help IT users simplify the automation and monitoring of heterogeneous and complex workloads from one operations console.
- IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS (Beta)
- - Service Management Suite for z/OS will create custom dashboards with suite product integrations, allowing for enterprise level visibility and controls for automation and monitoring

• Summary

• Project Objective:
- Deliver a compelling single point of control for modernized service management to help clients mitigate the issue of ongoing skill losses
- Enable clients to quickly diagnose problems and restore service faster by providing assistance and guidance to fixing the problem.

• Design Thinking User Process - It is all about User needs
- Product Management, Architects and UX create draft hills
- Conducted user research via client interviews
- Gleaned key insights from each client interview
- - Empathy Mapping and Affinity Diagram
- Updated draft hills based on common insights from user interviews
- Recruited sponsored users and started playbacks
- Iterative designing and prototyping with regular design, review and feedback sessions with internal stakeholders and sponsored users.

• User Research
- Conducted User Interviews
- What are your sites local problems?
- Customers Involved To Date
- - 3 Banking customers
- - 2 Insurance customers
- - 2 Manufacturing customers
- - 1 Government customer

• Sponsored Users
- 5 signed up
- Looking for a few more
- Direct feedback often on product
- Hills - Wireframes
- Beta/Hosted Beta – all can join

• Demo
- zSMS Web UI Demonstrated


• Speaker Contact Information:
Joe Winterton
Release Manager, IBM z Systems Software, Systems Group
Email: josephw@us.ibm.com
Work 919-224-1328
Cell: 914-954-0483

• The presentation and meeting ended about 8:55 P.M.