SPARTA News

August 2020

SPARTA President’s Corner

contributed by Randy Springs

As we move into the middle of the third quarter of 2020, we find ourselves involved in many distractions caused by the current pandemic. Most people continue to work from home, trying to handle needs of our families while staying safe by minimizing contacts with others. This situation has placed new opportunities for using technology to communicate and obtain and send necessary information digitally. We wonder how many office work sites will be converted to home offices permanently.

For our August meeting, we will have another “virtual" meeting on the Zoom platform. Frank Kyne of Watson and Walker will be speaking on how we can use sub-capacity CPCs to improve throughput and reduce overhead in our mainframe environments. Frank always delivers an informative and entertaining presentation, so plan to join us on August 11 (a week later than normal due to the virtual SHARE conference starting the first week of August).

Please plan to join your colleagues on Tuesday, August 11, at 7 p.m., via the internet. Watch for connection information coming your way soon.

Randy Springs
Truist

Future Speakers

(subject to change)

August 11, 2020 (Special Date) - Evaluating Sub_Capacity CPCs by Frank Kyne of Watson & Walker

Sept. 1, 2020 - SHARE 2020 Virtual Conference Report by Ed Webb of SPARTA

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.

2019-2020 SPARTA

Board of Directors

Randy Springs - President

Truist                  (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

Chris Blackshire - Secretary

Retired (Dell, Perot Systems, Nortel)  (919) nnn-nnnn

street

Durham, NC 27713

Randy Springs - (Acting) Treasurer

BB&T                  (919) 745-5241

see Randy

Springs earlier

Ed Webb -  Communications Director

Retired (SAS Institute Inc.)  (919) nnn-nnnn

street

Apex, NC 27523

Mike Lockey -  Web Master

Guilford Co. Information Services  336-641-6235

201 N. Eugene St.

Greensboro, NC 27401

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.

May 2020 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V499 (dated May 17, 2020) are available from www.cbttape.org.

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

Minutes of the July 7, 2020 Meeting

• The meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Randy Springs, the SPARTA President.

• This fifth virtual SPARTA meeting was held via the Zoom Software.

• Eleven (11) people were present.

• The presentation was given first, starting at 7:10 p.m., and followed by the business portion of the meeting.

• For the Roundtable, everyone introduced themselves, told where they worked, talked about working from home, and briefly described their job functions and what they've been doing at home.

OLD BUSINESS

• The minutes of the June 2, 2020 meeting as published in the July 2020 Newsletter were approved.

• The June 30, 2020 Treasurer's report (no April-June income or expenses) was approved as published in the July 2020 Newsletter. As of June 30, 2020, the current balance was $1,429.66.

• 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.

• 2020 meeting dates, 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.

• The next SPARTA monthly meeting will be held virtually on Tuesday, August 11, 2020.

• The 2020 membership fee are due ($30) starting in February 2020. Please pay Randy Springs.

• Thanks to Duane Reaugh for virtually hosting the meeting via Zoom.

• There are currently 96 people on the SPARTA-RTP e-mail 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.

• Randy Springs is looking for a new Treasurer volunteer. He projects about 2 hours per month is needed.
- The treasurer position duties are:
- - Collect dues and pay expenses at each monthly meeting.
- - Deposit income at the Truist bank monthly.
- - Make an updated monthly Excel income-expense list for the monthly newsletter.
- - Give a Treasurer report at each meeting.
- - One Time: Be added to the checking account authorization.
- Contact Randy Springs if you are interested.

• LabCorp Meeting Place Update: no update from Bill Johnson.

NEW BUSINESS

• None.

• The WebEx presentation ended about 8:10 PM. The Business portion of the meeting ended about 8:45 P.M.

• Presentation Topic: Intro to OCP on Z

by Filipe Miranda, Solution Architect Leader, IBM Hybrid Cloud Solutions on IBM Z & LinuxONE, located in North Dallas, TX

AGENDA Topics
• What problems are customers trying to solve?
• How containers can help?
• DIY Container Stack Challenges
• Red Hat Openshift 4
• Introduction to RHEL CoreOS (RHCOS)
• Over the Air (OTA) Updates
• Developer Console: Create Applications
• Developer Console: Application Topology
• Developer Console: Application logs
• Developer Console: Application Scaling
• Developer Console: Application Deployment
• Why IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE when Using Containers?
• Architecture Overview – Network Option 1
• Architecture Overview – Network Option 2
• Architecture Overview – Disk Storage Options for Installation
• Sample operational Openshift on z/VM Layout
• Adoption Patterns for Openshift on IBM Z and LinuxONE
• z/OS Cloud Broker
• z/OS Connect EE

• Presentation Access - See Below for a full outline of the presentation. See the SPARTA webpage for the complete presentation.

• Contact Info:
Filipe Miranda
Solution Architect Leader
IBM Hybrid Cloud Solutions on IBM Z & LinuxONE
Red Hat Synergy
Worldwide IBM Z
Phone: (949) 572-3463
Email: fmiranda@ibm.com

• The July 7, 2020 monthly meeting ended about 8:45 P.M.

Treasurer’s Report for July 2020

contributed by Randy Springs

The balance in the account is $1429.66 as of July 31, 2020. There's been no change since March 31.

SPARTA Financial Report
07/01/2019 through 07/31/2020

Items of Interest

SPARTA Schedule and Menu for 2020

contributed by Chris Blackshire

Aug 11, 2020 - BarBQ (date changed to avoid SHARE 135, Aug 4-6, 12, 18-20, 2020 online)

Sept 1, 2020 - Pizza

Oct 6, 2020 - Chicken

Nov 3, 2020 - Subs

Dec 1, 2020 - BarBQ

Digital Certificates 101

contributed By Ed Webb

"Digital certificates are equivalent to a website’s identification card, or driver’s license, ensuring that a website is real and not a scam website attempting to steal users’ personal information, such as credit card numbers." "Certificates are digital documents that provide a person, company, or any other entity a trusted method of sharing their identity."

"At SHARE Fort Worth, Broadcom software engineers Seamus Hayes and Jamieson Walker explained that digital certificates also contain a cryptographic key that can be used to send encrypted messages to the server, allowing for private, secure communication. They shared, “In the last 10 years, technologies such as transport layer security have greatly reduced the risk of shopping, banking, and existing on the World Wide Web.""

Read more about the Do's and Don'ts of digital certificates in this SHARE'd Intelligence blog entry.

IBM z15 Model T01 and Model T02 and z/OS Are Enhanced

Contributed by Ed Webb

"The IBM z/OS® Authorized Code Scanner, a new, optional, priced feature, helps support clients in their efforts to strengthen the security posture of their z/OS dev/test pipeline. ....

Enhanced System Recovery Boost capabilities enable clients to leverage a new class of boost that can be applied to a range of sysplex recovery processes, including sysplex partitioning, CF structure recovery, CF data sharing member recovery, and IBM HyperSwap® recovery.

The new IBM Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort, standard on the z15, can help reduce CPU usage and improve elapsed time for eligible sort workloads. "

Read this IBM announcement ENUS120-050 for details and more changes that improve z15 and z/OS capabilities.

Introducing CICS TS 5.6 - a Release for Developers

Contributed by Ed Webb

"....Now CICS is providing a platform to make those services available over a variety of mixed languages (COBOL, Java, Node.js and more) in a variety of cloud configurations like hybrid, public, private, to offer the best possible value for clients, consumers and partners.

CICS Transaction Server has recently announced their latest and greatest release, version 5.6. The theme for this release is very much around empowering developers, a role which in today's digital transformation revolution has become integral for businesses to compete in the marketplace. Enterprises are looking to modernize their applications but keep a lid on the costs, and empowering developers to innovate, provide and create new solutions, to improve processes has proven to be a core part of this strategy. CICS TS V5.6 provides Spring Boot, Maven and Gradle support, giving developers more choice on their build tooling than ever before. But to all those traditionalists, panic not! We have not forgotten the core of CICS, and we still provide capability to improve its foundation. With well over 500 "Request For Enhancements" (RFEs) satisfied in version 5, the foundation of CICS is core to the platform, with focus on resilience in this release, primarily in the areas of security and policies."

Read Nick Garrod's well-done article about CICS TS 5.6 from the Enterprise Executive 2020: Issue 3.

Humor

Wit and Wisdom continued

contributed by Ed Webb

• The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
• If we didn't have enemies how would we know who our friends are?
• Life is like a dog sled team: if you aren't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

• How long a minute is depends on what side of the bathroom door you're on.
• Happiness isn't having what you want, it's wanting what you have.
• If you get to thinking that you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.

Membership Information

Don’t Forget the Next SPARTA Meeting

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

7 p.m.

Location: Online

Information about access to our online meeting will be sent to our e-mail list by Tuesday, August 11.

Free Food before meeting: Your Food at Your Home

Program:

Evaluating Sub-Capacity CPCs

Speaker: Frank Kyne of Watson & Walker

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors:

July 2020 Presentation outline

• Presentation Topic: Intro to OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Z

by Filipe Miranda, Solution Architect Leader, IBM Hybrid Cloud Solutions on IBM Z & LinuxONE, located in North Dallas, TX

AGENDA Topics
• What problems are customers trying to solve?
• How containers can help?
• DIY Container Stack Challenges
• Red Hat Openshift 4
• Introduction to RHEL CoreOS (RHCOS)
• Over the Air (OTA) Updates
• Developer Console: Create Applications
• Developer Console: Application Topology
• Developer Console: Application logs
• Developer Console: Application Scaling
• Developer Console: Application Deployment
• Why IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE when Using Containers?
• Architecture Overview – Network Option 1
• Architecture Overview – Network Option 2
• Architecture Overview – Disk Storage Options for Installation
• Sample operational Openshift on z/VM Layout
• Adoption Patterns for Openshift on IBM Z and LinuxONE
• z/OS Cloud Broker
• z/OS Connect EE

• What problems are customers trying to solve?
- Customer Expectations Continue to Rise
- - The empowered customer is increasingly savvy and expects a highly personalized experience, one that is consistent across channels. The cause of this rising expectations is fairly clear and Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix are the disruptors of their industries. “Each time a consumer is exposed to an improved digital experience, their expectations are immediately reset to a new higher level.”
- SPEED is More Important than Ever
- - "It's no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow." Indeed the challenge for many legacy brands is that they struggle to move as rapidly towards the future that digital disruptors have already staked out.
- Digital Transformation Means Business Transformation
- - Enterprises need to recognize that evolving to a true digital value proposition isn't just about digital, but requires in many cases a reinvention of major portions of the business including core technology systems, operating processes and business models. "Digital transformation is a fundamental shift in how a firm delivers value and drives revenue."

• How containers can help ?
- Infrastructure Efficiency
- -Containers significantly reduce the overhead on compute resources — particularly memory. This enables far more workloads per physical server since each share a single host OS, meaning only one copy of the kernel and system libraries is running per system.
- Greater Scalability
- - Greater scalability is garnered through the use of container orchestration systems like Kubernetes that can automatically place workloads on the least-used node in a container cluster and dynamically scale the number of container instances up and down in response to changing application usage
- Greater Agility in Application Delivery
- - This increase is a result of the low resource overhead of containers that allows new instances to be deployed in seconds.
- DevOps Organizations Creation
- - Containers facilitate the integration of developers and IT operations into DevOps organizations that can accelerate application testing and delivery.
- New Application Creation
- - Containers combine deployment agility, process automation, and application scalability, allowing developers to rapidly explore and prototype new ideas while encouraging them to design differently. A different approach helps developers take advantage of distributed container systems, along with their dynamic scalability and frictionless startup and shutdown processes.

• DIY Container Stack Challenges (diagrams not copied)

• Red Hat Openshift 4 (diagrams not copied)

• Introduction to RHEL CoreOS (RHCOS)
- Immutable container host based on RHEL 8
- - CoreOS is tested and shipped in conjunction with the OpenShift platform
- - Immutable and tightly integrated with OpenShift
- - Self-managing, over-the-air updates
- - Host isolation is enforced via Containers and Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux)
- CoreOS is operated as part of the cluster with config for components managed by operators.

• Over the Air (OTA) Updates
- OpenShift retrieves the list of available updates
- Admin selects the target version
- OpenShift is updated over the air
- Auto-update support

• Developer Console: Create Applications
- Key Features
- - Import source from Git
- - View existing container image
- - Edit YAML definition
- - Build from Dockerfile
- - Explore services catalog
- - Deploy database from catalog

• Developer Console: Application Topology
- Key Features
- - View structure and status of app components
- - Drill into specific workloads
- - Quickly navigate to pod logs
- - Manually scale
- - Pod donut!
- - Access route/URL
- - Linked build and source

• Developer Console: Application Logs
- Key Features
- - View structure and status of app components
- - Drill into specific workloads
- - Quickly navigate to pod logs
- - Manually scale
- - Pod donut!
- - Access route/URL
- - Linked build and source

• Developer Console: Application Scaling
- Key Features
- - View structure and status of app components
- - Drill into specific workloads
- - Quickly navigate to pod logs
- - Manually scale
- - Pod donut!
- - Access route/URL
- - Linked build and source

• Developer Console: Application Deployment
- Key Features
- - View structure and status of app components
- - Drill into specific workloads
- - Quickly navigate to pod logs
- - Manually scale
- - Pod donut! - - Access route/URL
- - Linked build and source

• Why IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE when Using Containers?
- Ultra Low Latency and Large Volume Data Serving and Transaction processing
- - Scale-out to 2.4 million containers on a single system
- Enterprise class infrastructure – Elastic, Scalable, Available and Resilient
- - Workload scaling that involves an increase in the capacity for resources within the same server either by redirecting resources, increasing priority, unlocking resources etc. without increasing the number of resources.
- Highest levels of Security, Compliance and Platform uptime
- - 99.999% uptime for hardware and even higher guarantees for memory/network. There have been zero memory failures in field in the past 4 decades and zero unplanned downtime

• Architecture Overview – Network Option 1 (diagrams not copied)

• Architecture Overview – Network Option 2 (diagrams not copied)

• Architecture Overview – Disk Storage Options for Installation (diagrams not copied)

• Sample operational Openshift on z/VM Layout (diagrams not copied)

• Adoption Patterns for Openshift on IBM Z and LinuxONE
- Enterprise scale Private Cloud-in-a-Box
- - Instant capacity on-demand with scale-up/out in a single footprint for space and power constrained data-centers
- Digital Transformation and Modernization for z/OS
- Extreme consolidation and scalable Data Serving
- Data Gravity
- - Apps connect via ultra-low-latency, ultra-secure and highly resilient network into legacy system-of-record (eg. Service Broker to zOS instances)
- Consistency Across DevOps Experience
- Workload Modernization and Hybrid Cloud

• z/OS Cloud Broker
- Integrate z/OS into the hybrid cloud
- - Connects z/OS services running on an IBM Z backend to a frontend private cloud platform providing self-service access and consumption of these services to developers
- Challenge
- - Business critical applications running on z/OS are isolated, and installation of any Cloud platform will not integrate my z/ OS subsystem within same control planes.
- Client Value
- - Provides self-service access to managed IBM Z resources to all flavors of application developers
- - Centralization and automation of IBM Z operations to provide Z resources to agencies or clients in their hybrid cloud
- - Improve time to value through efficiencies in development and deployment

• z/OS Connect EE
- Truly RESTful APIs to and from the Cloud for IBM Z Services
- - IBM® z/OS® Connect Enterprise Edition enables you to empower a wide community of developers with a simple and intuitive way to consume data and services hosted on IBM Z®. It provides a single, common way to unleash your existing market-differentiating assets on IBM with RESTful APIs
- Client Value
- - Speed application development
- - - Empower app developers with critical data and services through RESTful APIs designed to be easily consumable.
- - Harness new opportunities
- - - Expose IBM Z assets as APIs without changing your backend applications. Use these APIs to leverage the API economy, creating new opportunities with developers and cultivate new customers.
- - Secure and control
- - - Host APIs on one of the world's most trusted platforms with enhanced security through pervasive encryption on IBM z14/15®.

The WebEx presentation ended about 8:10 PM followed by the business portion of the meeting.