SPARTA News

March 2017

SPARTA President’s Corner

contributed by Randy Springs

March has come in like a lion, and more 80 degree days in the Triangle region. Maybe we will get by without any more snow events, but the early blossoms worry me for the strawberries and peaches. I’m sure we will get more frosty mornings.

This month we will hear from Duane Reaugh, formerly of DTS Software and Apple. He will be giving an interesting talk on the development of the DTS iPhone/iPad app. I’m sure we will have a good turnout for this presentation.

Some of our members will be at SHARE (March 5-10 in San Jose). If you are planning to attend, maybe you could present some of your favorite session content at our April meeting.

Plan to join us at 6:15 for subs and dessert on Tuesday, March 7 at our usual LabCorp meeting location.

Randy Springs
BB&T

Future Speakers

(subject to change)

March 7, 2017 - DTS Mobile App by Duane Reaugh of SPARTA

April 4, 2017 - SHARE San Jose Report by Ed Webb of SAS

May 2, 2017 - DFSMS by Glenn Wilcock of IBM

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.

2016-2017 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

Land line 613 599 6970

Mobile 613 981 6919

190 Guelph Private

Kanata, ON K2T 0J7

Mike Lockey - Secretary

Guilford Co. Information Services 336-641-6235

201 N. Eugene St.

Greensboro, NC 27401

Pam Tant - Treasurer

DTS Software Inc. 919-833-8426 x124

4350 Lassiter at N. Hills Avenue

Suite 230

Raleigh, NC 27609

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 T.W. Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building (1912 T.W. Alexander Drive). In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Bill Johnson. Bill 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.

February 2017 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V493 (dated February 9, 2017) 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 February 7, 2017 Meeting

• The meeting was called to order at 7:02 PM by Randy Springs, the SPARTA President.

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

• Seventeen (17) people were present of which Fourteen (14) are 2016/2017 members.

• The presentation was given first to meet the presenter's schedule - see the presentation below.

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

• The minutes for the December meeting as published in the February newsletter will be approved at the March meeting.

• The reading of the February 2017 Treasurer's report was approved as read by Pam. The balance was $247.50. (See details below)

OLD BUSINESS

• Call For Articles: 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.

• Randy reminded everyone to leave the LabCorp conference room clean.

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

Date	Company	Speaker	Topic
March 7, 2017	SPARTA	Duane Reaugh	iPhone App for Mainframes
April 4, 2017	SAS	Ed Webb	SHARE San Jose Conference Report
May 2, 2017	IBM	Glenn Wilcock	DFSMS
June 6, 2017	EMC	Brian Kithcart	Virtual tape update
July 11, 2017	NC State	Mainframe Group	Data Center Update
August 29, 2017	Tommy's Spitball	SPARTA and Friends	Fun at the DBAP
September 12, 2017	NC State	Mainframe Group	Data Center Update
October 3, 2017	SAS	Ed Webb	SHARE Providence Update
November 7, 2017	BMC Software	Wayne Wilson	Mainview
December 5, 2017	Watson & Walker	Cheryl Watson	z/OS Performance

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

• The next SPARTA monthly meeting will be on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 at LabCorp in RTP.

• Food for the March 7 meeting will be Subs from Subway.

• Thanks to LabCorp and Bill Johnson for hosting the meeting.

• There are currently 65 people on the SPARTA-RTP email 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.

NEW BUSINESS

• The 2017 dues are due ($30) starting in February 2017. Please pay Pam Tant.

The Business portion and meeting ended about 9:25 PM.

PRESENTATION (Started at 7:05 and ended at 8:45 PM)

• IBM DevOps by Rosalind Radcliffe of IBM

• Agenda

• Emerging technologies drive business transformation

- Big Data: Analytics 2.5 billion gigabytes of moving to real time data generated every day
- Cloud: 60% of banks process most transactions in cloud by 2016
- Intelligent/Connected Systems: 7.9 million in U.S. adopted NFC e-Wallets
- Security: $5.65 million – average cost of a security breach in the US
- Collaboration: 60 million US households conducting P2P payments
- Mobile: 35% transaction growth driven through mobile annually through 2017
- Analytics: Moving to real time +7.6% in customer lifetime value for firms using engagement

• What is DevOps?

- Enterprise capability for continuous software delivery and management that enables organizations to innovate rapidly to capitalize on new market opportunities, and reduce the cycle time to collect and react to customer feedback
- Process: Accelerate software delivery
- Culture: Balance speed, cost, quality and risk – for increased capacity to innovate
- Technology: Reduce time to customer feedback – for improved customer experience

• What does the Line of Business want from IT?

- Line-of-business > Agility - Velocity – Innovation – Cost - Quality > IT Customer
- App Development, Orchestration, Integration, Security, Management, Governance

• DevOps

- Culture: Foundational values and principles
- Think: Conceptualization, refinement, and prioritization of capabilities
- Code: Generation, enhancement, optimization and testing of features
- Deliver: Automated production and delivery of offerings
- Run: Services, options, and capabilities required to run in the Cloud
- Manage: Ongoing monitoring, support, and recovery of offerings
- Learn: Continuously learn based on outcomes from experiments

To learn more visit: https://www.ibm.com/devops/method

• Delivering Business Capability: Hybrid Applications, Hybrid Platforms, Hybrid Teams
- Chart Not Copied

• Standardization of Tools and Practices drives Scalability across the Enterprise.

#NoSilos #NoIslands (Taiichi Ohno)

• Multi-Speed IT: Five Touch Points (Systems of Engagement)

- Planning and Architecture
- APIs
- Deployment Automation and Orchestration
- Service and Test Environment and Virtualization
- Release Management

• "Everyone is responsible for delivery to Production"

• Significant Architecture Decisions

- Application Type
- Delivery pipeline
- End-to-End Tool chains
- Delivery platform

• Eight Key DevOps Practices

- 1. Minimum Viable Product
- 2. Dedicated Teams
- 3. Loosely Coupled Architecture
- 4. Minimizing Hand-offs, Maximizing Flow "
- 5. Deliver in Small Batches
- 6. Transparency
- 7. Eliminate Overhead
- 8. Automate Testing using APIs

• APIs power the modern, digital supply chain
- Chart Not Copied

• Modern Tools for Multi platform development and operation

- Collaborative Development & Application Understanding
- Full Development Environment
- Operations Interface – Access to Files & Jobs
- Problem Determination Tools and Debug

• Break down silos by moving to an agile team environment

- Analyst
- Project Manager
- Operations
- Developer
- Tester
- Release Engineer

• Deploy what is ready, virtualize the rest

- Test Environments
- Simultaneously test in production-like environment
- Push button deployments to test or production
- Continuously test in production-like environment
- z/OS application testing on emulated z System hardware
- Deploy what is ready, virtualize the rest

• Modern Tools allow the transition to DevOps

- Using RTC and Urban Code ...
- - Facilitates the use of ID&T for additional dev environments
- - Supports deploying to dynamically provisioned test environments using ID&T
- - Facilitates the use of ID&T to test new middleware and compiler updates
- - Enables a modern DevOps pipeline for z/OS development

• Bluemix Garage Method

Combining industry best practices for Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile Development, DevOps and Cloud to build and deliver innovative solutions and culture change.

To learn more visit: https://www.ibm.com/devops/method

• DevOps accelerates digital transformation with standardization and automation

- Innovate faster by accelerating software delivery across hybrid environments
- Improve customer engagement by shortening feedback loop
- Create a culture of continuous improvement and trust
- Eliminate error-prone manual steps and speed up the release process

• Summary:

- ADDI helps clients quickly and safely unlock the value of existing assets for digital transformation
- ADDI accelerates clients' transformation to a digital enterprise by unlocking core business logic & apps
- ADDI's application discovery enables understanding business-critical assets to hybrid cloud-enable them
- ADDI complements IBM's API Solutions connecting mainframe assets to systems of engagement leveraging hybrid cloud architecture
- ADDI further extends IBM's leadership in Enterprise DevOps helping modernize and innovate core " business process at the speed of business
An end-to-end solution to speed digital transformation

• Unlock: Rapidly analyze and visualize the secrets of complex applications

- Analyze and visualize relationships between application components, data and jobs
- Reduce development change effort by up to 30%*
- Reduce project management by up to 50%*

• Application Health – ADDI: Delivery Intelligence

- Correlate code analysis with operational and test data to provide comprehensive, real-time view of application health and to optimize development and test
- Easy-to-use web-based graphic interface providing accurate, unified view of entire application landscape
- Correlates project metrics from the ADDI repository with availability and performance information and code coverage data for targeted insights into application health
- Optimize development and test by combining static and operational analysis to accelerate delivery and improve quality

• Superior user experience:

- ADFz and Explorer for z/OS
- Strategic integration platform and trouble free install and maintenance
- Integration across dev and ops
- Comprehensive and convenient packaging
- Drinking our own champagne

• Rational Team Concert V6

- Life Cycle Management at scale
- RTC synchronizes enterprise teams by ...
- - Automating full traceability
- - Managing with dashboards and reports
- - Demonstrating compliance
- - Orchestrating multi-speed IT
- - Supporting multiple platform / processes / languages
- - Scaling actions to the enterprise (multi-threaded builds, integrated deployment, multi-project queries)
- Modern Development Environment
- RTC provides modern development ...
- - SCM full modern development capability
- - Supports parallel development
- - Supports all platforms and artifact types in one SCM
- - Promotion for z/OS artifacts
- - Dependency Build for z/OS artifacts
- - UCD integration for end to end integrated deployment
- - Jenkins Integration for full CI/CD integration

• Facilitate deployment to hybrid cloud environments:

- Urban Code Deploy (UCD)
- Ability to design and reuse deployment processes for z/OS applications that capture corporate security standards
- Support for z/OS packages in UCD code station, allowing a secure and consistent way to download to any deploy nodes
- Ability to design and execute a deploy process by using impersonation with authorization managed by the native z/OS security framework
- New RTC integration, allowing to seamlessly push builds and packages to UCD
- New z/OS Management Facility plug-in feature allowing the execution of workflows in z/OSMF
- New topology viewer to track down potential problems whether with the Deploy infrastructure, or with a specific deployment

• Add mainframe dev & test capacity, without increasing your MIPS

- Develop and test z/OS applications anywhere, anytime
- Free up mainframe development MIPS for production workload
- Eliminate costly delays by reducing burden on existing IT operations staff
- Reduce time to value and minimize ongoing administration and capital expense with RD&T Cloud Managed DevOps
- Expanded DevOps scenario coverage with UCD z/OS Agent 6.1.1.6
- Exploit the z13 hardware capability, including z13 Crypto Express 5S
- Improve development coverage with newer z/OS 2.1 software stack, including MQ 8, COBOL 5.2, and RTC

Learn More: https://www.techvalidate.com/tvid/C99-3E2-1ED

• z Systems Development and Test Environment V10

- More flexible licensing with an updated z/OS software distribution:
- - Cloud friendly software-based licensing for enterprise customers
- - Hardware-based software licensing for personal and portable use cases
- - Adopt newer levels of z/OS software-with z/OS 2.2, z/OS Connect, CICS 5.3, IMS 14.1, RDz 9.5.1, z/OS Explorer 3, RTC 6.0.1, and UCD 6.2

• IBM DevOps for Enterprise Systems

- Cognitive DevOps – get rid of the guesswork:
- - Application Delivery Intelligence (ADI)
- - Drive DevOps improvement with analysis, insight, and optimization
- - Analysis: Rapidly identify areas of concern in your application portfolio, then assess the impact, scope, risk and actions required
- - Insight: Improve the accuracy of your planning and estimating with insights gained from data collected from DevOps activities
- - Optimization: Cut waste and work smarter by executing the optimum actions required to build, test and deploy your applications
- Version 1.0 Intelligent Testing helps you...
- - Run the right tests
- - Run fewer tests
- - Track trends and flag issues

• IBM DevOps for Enterprise Systems

- Serve your mobile apps even faster: COBOL for z/OS V6.1
- - Expanded capacity to compile and optimize very large COBOL programs
- - Fully supports z13 and z13s hardware
- Deliver release-to-release performance improvements
- - Well-structured, compute intensive batch applications running on z13 compiled with COBOL 6.1 have shown CPU time reduction of up to 5% over the same applications compiled with the GA release of COBOL V5.2; up to 40% over the same applications compiled with COBOL V4.2 1
- New capability to generate JSON documents directly from COBOL
- - Extend business critical COBOL applications to support mobile application where preference is JSON/REST
- New COBOL 2002 language features
- Improved migration from COBOL compilers prior to Enterprise COBOL V5
- Trial version available for 90 days at zero cost

• DevOps Innovation Workshop

- Review the current state

- - 1. Business goals, IT goals, current initiatives
- - 2. DevOps
- - 3. Requirements
- - 4. Environments
- - 5. Repositories
- - 6. Roles / Organization
- - 7. Metrics
- - 8. Security
- - 9. Other
- Prioritize challenges to be resolved
- - Create a first pass at an improvement roadmap

• Mapping your Delivery Pipeline - Sample Items To Map

- Line of Business
- Customers
- PMO
- Requirements Analyst
- Release Management
- Deployment Engineer
- Customer or Idea/Feature/Bug Fix/
- Deploy Production
- Customer Surrogate
- Enhancement
- Development Build QA SIT UAT Prod
- Tasks
- Artifacts
- Developer Build QA Team Integration Tester User/Tester
- Operations Engineer
- Infrastructure as Code/Cloud Pattern
- Code Repository
- Artifact Repository
- Get Feedback between each stage

• Summary: DevOps for Enterprise Systems – Key Takeaways

1. DevOps is about transforming application development and delivery in order to accelerate digital innovation. So DevOps is a topic for both business and IT roles in the organization.

2. You don't buy DevOps, you do DevOps. DevOps is an approach, a mindset – a combination of culture, process and technology (including infrastructure, tools and services).

3. DevOps is not only about the hand-off between Development and Operations. DevOps is about applying lean and agile principles across the application delivery lifecycle (biz-dev-test-deploy-operate) to achieve continuous delivery of digital innovation. Key concepts: automation, feedback loops.

• Resources: Continuing your "Understanding DevOps" journey

- For Dummies books:
https://ibm.biz/mmdevops
http://ibm.co/devopsfordummies
http://ibm.co/agilefordummies
http://ibm.co/ServiceVirtualizationForDummies
http://ibm.co/ARDfordummies

- IBM DevOps Page:
http://ibm.com/DevOps

- IBM DevOps for Enterprise Systems:
http://bit.ly/1PB02KS

- DevOps Lean Assessment (Beta):
http://bit.ly/IBMLeanAssess

• Appendix
- See full presentation at the SPARTA web page Items Of Interest at www.spartanc.org

• Contact Info:
Rosalind Radcliffe
Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps
EM Solution Architect
IBM Master Inventor
Member, NC TEC - an IBM Academy of Technology Affiliate
Member of the Leadership Team, IBM Academy of Technology
E-mail: rradclif@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @RosalindRad

• The February 2017 meeting ended about 9:25 PM.

Treasurer’s Report for February 2017

contributed by Pam Tant

The balance in the account is $289.12 as of February 28, 2017.

SPARTA Financial Report
3/01/2016 through 02/28/2017

INCOME
Opening Balance	97.47
Total Deposits
Loan (Chris Blackshire)	25.00
Loan (Randy Springs)	50.00
Loan (Pam Tant)	100.00
Other	29.55
Dues	860.00
TOTAL INCOME	$1162.02

EXPENSES
Loan repayment (CB)	25.00
Food	545.02
Web Site	0.00
Petty Cash	230.00
Bank Service Charge	0.00
TOTAL EXPENSE	$800.02

BANK BALANCE	286.59
PETTY CASH on hand	75.41
PETTY CASH missing	-72.88
TOTAL CASH	$289.12

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2017

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Mar. 7, 2017 - Subs

Apr. 4, 2017 - BarBQ

May 2, 2017 - Pizza

June 6, 2017 - Chicken

July 11, 2017 - Subs

Aug. 1, 2017 - BarBQ

Aug. 29, 2017 - Durham Bulls (buy your food at the game)

Oct. 3, 2017 - Pizza

Nov. 7, 2017 - Chicken

Dec. 5, 2017 - Subs

Arriving in HOLDDATA near you: z/OS V2.3 FIXCATs!

contributed by Ed Webb

With the Preview announcement of z/OS 2.3 (see next article), it should be no surprise that IBM has some compatibility and co-existence service coming soon to an SMPPTS near you. As Marna Walle of IBM points our in her recent SHARE blog entry, there are 2 FIXCATs for z/OS V2.3:

IBM.Coexistence.z/OS.V2R3 and

IBM.TargetSystem-RequiredService.z/OS.V2R3

Read this rest of her blog for details and a caution that TSO/E 8 character userid will require a lot of PTFs across many products.

IBM Provides a Preview of the Upcoming z/OS 2.3

contributed by Ed Webb

Subtitled the Engine for digital transformation, IBM provided its first official look in late February at the planned fall debut of z/OS 2.3, continuing its recent 2 year cycle for major z/OS refreshes.

IBM summarizes this new release as:

"Today's economy requires organizations to quickly consume, manipulate, and deliver vast amounts of information, extracting business insight while tapping into the capabilities of cloud services. The information must be securely managed, processed, and delivered across the globe. Such a fundamental shift away from traditional processing needs calls for a highly responsive and reliable platform that can support new workloads without impacting service levels of mission-critical work. The enhancements planned to be delivered in z/OS V2.3 provide the platform to smoothly transition businesses for this new IT environment. z/OS V2.3 is designed to deliver innovations to build the next-generation infrastructure."

Read here to learn more about only running on z12 and z13 EC and BC machines, about TSO/E 8 character userids, data set encryption, z/OSMF interfaces for Consoles and Cloud Provisioning, and z/OSMF changes to deploy non-SMP/E-managed products. Many of these new functions will be discussed in detail at SHARE in San Jose SHARE Agenda. Start with Gary Puchkoff's overview session What's New in z/OS: Silicon Valley Edition.

The Importance of Mainframe in a Disruptive IT Environment

contributed by Ed Webb

"The most powerful and effective enterprise technology environments rely on a mix of mainframe and distributed computing to power modern applications.

The mainframe’s strengths lie not only in processing power, but also in cost efficiency. ComputerWeekly cited IBM data that shows a single IBM System z10 enterprise mainframe has “the equivalent capacity of 1,500 x86 servers with an 85 percent smaller footprint and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.” There are also labor and operational benefits. To run a real-time, 24/7 high-availability distributed environment, you would need seven times the number of IT administrators than if you were to run the same application on a mainframe, said ComputerWeekly, citing WinterGreen Research data."