SPARTA News

May 2025 (The Final Issue)

SPARTA President’s Corner

contributed by Randy Springs

We will not be hosting a monthly meeting for SPARTA on Tuesday, May 6.

Over the past few decades, our SPARTA organization has provided a networking and education experience for many IT professionals, mostly in the mainframe systems area, to support the IT community with monthly local meetings until 2020, and Zoom meetings since then. Over this timeframe, we have seen many changes in the way that software vendors and professionals assist in updating us through webinars and online presentations, as well as the continuation of conferences such as SHARE and CMG.

In recent months, your SPARTA board has found it more difficult to obtain vendors and professionals to speak on our Zoom platform, and we have also seen our attendance levels diminish considerably, despite our change in time to a workday afternoon.

After consideration of all these factors, the SPARTA board has decided to discontinue our meetings and dissolve our SPARTA group. In accordance with our by-laws, our remaining bank funds will be donated to charity. The http://www.spartanc.org web site will be discontinued sometime this year and will be archived.

We are thankful to all the IT professionals who have participated over the years and we hope that you will continue to use available resources to network and stay informed. The mainframe is still alive and well!

Randy Springs, President
Ron Pimblett, Vice-President
Chris Blackshire, Secretary
Ed Webb, Communications Director
Mike Lockey, Webmaster

Future Speakers

May 6, 2025 - No more meetings!

2024-2025 SPARTA

Board of Directors

Randy Springs - President

Retired (Truist)                  (919) nnn-nnnn

street

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

Retired (Truist)                  (919) nnn-nnnn

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

December 2024 “CBT Tape” Shareware Online

The directory and files from the latest CBT tape V508 (dated December 19, 2024) 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 April 1, 2025 Meeting

• The April 1, 2025 meeting was called to order at 3:05 PM by Randy Springs, the SPARTA President.

• The April 1, 2025 meeting was cancelled because of speaker availability issues.

• This Forty-eighth (April 2020 to April 2025) virtual SPARTA meeting was held via the Zoom Software.

• Eleven (11) people were present at the virtual meeting.

• The business portion of the meeting followed the presentation.

• The meeting started at 3 PM to accommodate the speaker's availability.

OLD BUSINESS

• The minutes of the March 4, 2025 meeting as published in the April 2025 Newsletter were approved.

• The minutes of the March 4, 2025 meeting as published were approved.

• The March 31, 2025 Treasurer's report as published in the April 2025 Newsletter was approved. As of March 31, 2025, the current balance is $805.46.

• 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 want to share with the membership.

• The SPARTA Web page is available at 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.

• 2025 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, May 6, 2025.

• The annual dues have been suspended (motion passed in the March 2021 monthly meeting).

• Thanks to Randy Springs for hosting the April meeting online via Zoom.

• There are currently about 100 people on the SPARTA e-mail distribution list.

• Send any e-mail address changes to Chris Blackshire so he can update the SPARTA distribution List. The SPARTA meeting notices are being sent via a simple distribution list maintained by Chris.

• Randy Springs is looking for a new Treasurer volunteer. He projects about 2 hours per month is needed.
- Contact Randy if you are interested.

• Randy Springs has setup a SPARTA group on LinkedIn. Please join.

NEW BUSINESS

• Need 2025 Elections: Randy will be contacting new people for the 2025 officer nominations.

• The Presentation started at 3:10 PM after attendee introductions.

• Presentation Topic: What a z/OS Guy Learned About AWS [Amazon Web Services] in 10 Years

by Scott Chapman of Enterprise Performance Strategies Inc.

• Agenda
• Brief intro to myself, EPS, and Pivotor
• What is “the cloud”?
• A few AWS services and terms
• AWS Strengths and Challenges
• Mainframe Strengths and Challenges
• Conclusions

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

See the SPARTA webpage for all recent presentations including this April one.

• Contact Info:
Speaker: Scott Chapman, CIO
Enterprise Performance Strategies Inc., Creators of Pivotor®
Cell: 614-571-0674
Email: scott.chapman@epstrategies.com

• The presentation and questions/answers ended about 4:30 P.M.
• The April 1, 2025 monthly meeting ended about 4:45 P.M. after a short business meeting.

Treasurer’s Report for April 2025

contributed by Randy Springs

The balance in the account is $805.46 as of April 30, 2025.

SPARTA Financial Report
04/01/2025 through 04/30/2025

Items of Interest

Time to Register for SHARE Cleveland August 17-21, 2025

Contributed by Ed Webb

"What To Expect in Cleveland

There’s lots in store for SHARE Cleveland including:

A full slate of technical and professional development sessions
Insightful presentations from SHARE partners
Opportunities tailored to early-career professionals
Networking events, including dedicated time in the expo hall”

So dash over to SHARE to register now.

New Hardware and Software Announced during IBM Z Day: Special Edition on April 8

contributed By Ed Webb

"The newest addition to the IBM Z family, the IBM z17™, brings enhanced capabilities and value to tackle challenges inherent to AI and hybrid cloud deployments. Featuring the IBM Telum II processor and numerous innovative technologies, the IBM z17 delivers targeted solutions:

Efficient handling of massive data volumes and transactional throughput
Protection of sensitive information against present and emerging threats, ensuring regulatory compliance
Leveraging AI to drive innovation, enhance predictive abilities, and ensure secure data utilization
Minimizing the environmental impact of IT infrastructure without sacrificing performance
Automating IT operations for faster market response, efficient modernization, and risk reduction"

For more details about the IBM z17, check out this IBM News site.

And review these IBM Redbooks about the z17.

Preview: IBM z/OS 3.2 plans to unlock the value of IBM z17

"IBM intends to deliver IBM z/OS 3.2, the next release of its flagship operating system for IBM Z. z/OS 3.2 is designed for hybrid cloud and AI, including support for IBM z17, new AI-infused capabilities, and enhancements to simplify IT management. With IBM z17, the next release of z/OS is intended to fuel innovation and growth, secure clients' most important data, and automate and improve operational efficiency.

z/OS 3.2 is also planned to provide support for the hardware-accelerated AI capabilities delivered with IBM z17’s full stack optimization across the Telum II Data Processing Unit (DPU), IBM Z Integrated Accelerator for AI (AIU), and IBM Spyre AI Accelerator* . The next release of z/OS is designed to support, at scale, popular and familiar AI frameworks and tools that are certified for security and optimized to use IBM z17 acceleration capabilities. IBM z17 with z/OS 3.2 opens additional opportunities for integrating the latest AI capabilities with core business applications, driven by an optimized and integrated ecosystem of AI software, compilers, and open-source capabilities.""

Read the whole z/OS 3.2 Preview announcement.

How to Remove Your Personal Information From Google Search

Contributed by Chris Blackshire

"Want more privacy? Here's how to remove your phone number, email, physical address, and other data from Google's search results.

Every bad actor wants personally identifiable information (PII). If they get their hands on your PII, they can use it to swindle, impersonate, or even endanger you on the internet—and in the real world. One of the prime places to find PII is on Google, and while Google can't stop that info from appearing on other websites, you can try to remove PII from the search giant's results. We'll show you how.

Learn When Personal Info Appears in a Google Search

This first step is important since you can't tell Google to delete your info if the site isn't even finding and displaying it. Google has an option to notify you when that happens.

The spot to visit is called the Results About You activity page, and you have to be logged into Google for it to work. Follow the prompts on the screen as Google asks you for your physical addresses, emails, and phone numbers. Tell Google how you want to be notified (email or push notification via the Google app). Then wait.

After a few hours, you should get a report from Google on what's turning up that's yours PII-wise. You can also return to the Results About You page to check. There, you can tick off the boxes next to any result you want to make sure is removed from search. The status of your request will also be displayed (eventually)."

See the additional steps about "Remove Search Results", "Remove Outdated Content", "Watch for illegal stuff", "Other browsers" and "Your never invisible" in this PC magazine article".

Humor

Wit and Wisdom continued

contributed by Ed Webb

Experience is the name people give their mistakes.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you a failure if you earn no money.

Puns One More Time

contributed by Ed Webb

I just can’t handle automatic doors. 

I heard the word "icy" is easy to spell. Looking at it now I see why. 

A few puns make me numb, but math puns make me number.

My friend was explaining electricity and I was like watt?!?

Without freedom of Speech, We would not know who the Idiots are. 

Membership Information

No More SPARTA Meetings

Thanks for 46 Wonderful Years!

SPARTA Corporate Sponsors:

April 2025 Presentation outline

• Presentation Topic: What a z/OS Guy Learned About AWS [Amazon Web Services] in 10 Years

by Scott Chapman of Enterprise Performance Strategies Inc.

• Agenda
• Brief intro to myself, EPS, and Pivotor
• What is “the cloud”?
• A few AWS services and terms
• AWS Strengths and Challenges
• Mainframe Strengths and Challenges
• Conclusions

• EPS: We do z/OS performance…
- Pivotor - Reporting and analysis software and services
- - Not just reporting, but analysis-based reporting based on our expertise
- Education and instruction
- - We have taught our z/OS performance workshops all over the world
- Consulting
- - Performance war rooms: concentrated, highly productive group discussions and analysis
- Information
- - We present around the world and participate in online forums"

• Like what you hear today?
- Free z/OS Performance Educational webinars!
- - Have been on hiatus for a couple of months but should be coming back soon
- - Let us know if you want to be on our mailing list for these webinars
- - - Email: contact@epstrategies.com
- If you want a free cursory review of your environment, let us know!
- - We’re always happy to process a day’s worth of data and show you the results
- - See also: http://pivotor.com/cursoryReview.html"

• z/OS Performance workshops available
- During these workshops you will be analyzing your own data!
- - WLM Performance and Re-evaluating Goals
- - - May 12 – May 16, 2025 (4 days)
- - Parallel Sysplex and z/OS Performance Tuning
- - - July 15-16, 2025 (2 days)
- - Essential z/OS Performance Tuning
- - - September 22-26, 2025 (4 days)
- - Also… please make sure you are signed up for our free monthly z/OS educational webinars!
- - - email: contact@epstrategies.com

• Pivotor: z/OS Performance in the Cloud
- Pivotor is our data reporting tool & service designed specifically for z/OS performance reporting

• Scott Chapman: Why can I talk about this?
- Spent over 20 year doing z/OS system and application performance and capacity at one of the largest power companies in the US
- In 2014, joined Peter at EPS to help more customers with z/OS performance

• Why this presentation
- We hear about Mainframe sites having a mandate to “move to the cloud”
- Many mainframers have limited practical experience with “the cloud”
- The cloud people often have limited mainframe experience
- Both groups have a lot of assumptions
- This presentation is meant to be a brief introduction to AWS to give mainframers some talking points when discussing a cloud mandate

What is “the cloud”?

• Cloud Computing Definitions
- “Someone else’s computer” – not inaccurate
- Basically Outsourcing: pay someone else to run/manage part of your IT
- - Someone else’s datacenter = Colocation
- - Someone else’s server hardware = Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- - Someone else’s OS, DB, app architecture = Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- - Someone else’s software = Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Primary advantage is “pay as you go” model without having to invest in the necessary components (including people) to manage each level
- Critical point: if you’re paying somebody else to manage something for you, they have to make a profit too
- Does their scale let them do it cheaper than you could? (And do they pass the savings on?)

• Cloud migration strategies
- Server > EC2 Instance > Db2 > AWS RDS > AWS Auroro > Storage Media
- “More Cloudy” can mean:
- - More savings (popular, but questionable, theory)
- - More vendor lock-in
- - Less control
- - More potential for hidden/unexpected dependencies

• Cloud Controversies
- Cloud repatriation is a hot topic
- Should you be multi-cloud?

AWS Services and Terms

• AWS Services
- There are >200 AWS services so these are just some highlights
- EC2 = Elastic Cloud Compute = virtual server instances
- EBS = Elastic Block Store = virtual disk volumes (connect to EC2 instances)
- S3 = Simple Storage Service = “object” storage
- VPC = Virtual Private Cloud = virtual network
- SNS = Simple Notification Service = send email/text/etc. notifications
- - Related: SES = Simple Email Service
- CloudWatch = Cloud monitoring
- CloudTrail = Cloud logging
- Lambda = “Serverless” code execution environment

• AWS Terms
- Account = generally AWS “things” can’t be shared between accounts
- Organization = group of accounts bundled together for billing and control
- Instance = server
- AMI = Amazon Machine Image = Image of a server
- vCPU = Virtual CPU, usually just a thread on a core
- - 2 vCPU server usually means 1 core with HyperThreading (SMT)
- Bucket = Globally unique name grouping S3 objects
- Availability Zone = Group of datacenters in close proximity of each other
- Region = Group of 2 or more AZs separated by several kms, but within 100 km of each other

• Logical to Physical AZ mappings differ
- Account A’s us-east-1a may be in a different physical AZ than Account B’s!

AWS Strengths (With some caveats)

• Starts at $0
- AWS services are typically priced in pennies per hour / GB / something
- Generally (not always) only pay for what you “use”
- - “In the cloud, you only pay for what you forgot to turn off”
- Many services have a free tier that allows for easy startup
- Some services free tier is limited time (e.g. x months after starting)
- But…
- - Pennies can add up quickly!
- - Services sometimes have multiple pricing dimensions
- - Services sometimes have requirements for other services

• Dynamic capacity
- Standing up new server or new storage can be very fast and easy
- Can be very easy and cost-effective to test things
- But…
- How fast you can stand up new servers depends in part on the work you’ve done ahead of time
- Don’t forget to turn off test environments when you’re done!
- Clouds are not infinite

AWS Challenges

• Server scaling not granular
- AWS has lots of EC2 instance size options, but generally…
- - Cannot independently select vCPUs and memory
- - Three ratios of GB RAM to vCPU: 2 to 1, 4 to 1, 8 to 1
- - Within an instance family, next size up is initially 2x, then 50% larger at larger sizes
- - Price scales with capacity
- Changing instance type requires shutting down the instance
- Expectation of scale-out not scale-up

• Pricing is complicated
- AWS saw IBM’s software pricing models and said “Hold my beer”
- Many services have multiple options and dimensions
- - S3 request pricing is a 22x5 matrix with 5 footnotes/caveats
- Some pricing dimensions can’t be known until you try
- - How many I/Os is your database going to do?
- - How many requests will be made to your S3 bucket?
- - Some services require other services
- Our monthly detailed invoice (all charges, all hours) is >400,000 lines
- Use Savings Plans and/or Reserved Instances to reduce instance costs
- Prices vary by region
- - This makes sense, but beware and choose wisely considering location & cost
- Data transfer costs can be significant and are convoluted too…

• Batteries not included
- What about backup?
- - In most services, that’s extra
- - In some cases, the backups can cost more than the storage on a per GiB basis
- Isn’t the cloud highly available by default?
- Did you want support with that?
- Do you want an account manager?

• Performance can be variable
- Things listing “burst” performance especially prone to variability
- EBS volumes are also network-attached storage
- May take hours on larger volumes before you can issue another change
- CPU performance fairly stable if you’re not using a burstable instance
- Other services also have a “pay for more performance” model

• Mainframe Strengths:
- Things I wish I had from z/OS
- Some of these are due to Linux limitations more so than AWS limitations
- JES(!)
- - Most of what we do is batch-oriented and z/OS excels at batch management
- - There are (now) some AWS services that can help with batch management
- - We use the open source Rundeck as our scheduler to run jobs on servers
- - None of the above have the decades of experience JES does
- Db2
- - Best database in the world: Db2 on Parallel Sysplex!
- - A lot of the large “scalable” database solutions usually have compromises:
- WLM
- - Workload Manager is an awesome piece of technology
- Vertical Scalability
- - Mainframe practice of Run “everything” in one system does simplify things!
- - AWS does have very large instances, but due to OS limitations will probably only be able to run one type of work there
- - Shifting work with Parallel Sysplex makes maintenance easier
- Data replication
- - Mainframe data replication technologies are exceptional!
- - Yes, they can be complicated and expensive, but for the most part they work without getting in the way
- - You can build somewhat similar capabilities on some file systems in Linux
- - Building out a full DR solution was way more complicated in AWS
- Enqueues
- - The idea that the OS should only allow one process to update a data set at a time is an under-rated capability of z/OS
- - - “We’ll never have two processes updating that file at the exact same time” will eventually be wrong
- - You can build a locking mechanism, but watch out for the sharp edges!
- SMF
- - There are a lot of metrics available in Linux and AWS, but … not as broad and detailed as we have in SMF
- - - Nor as easy to record in a centralized fashion
- - Why was this system busy at this time is a lot easier to understand from the z/OS metrics
- - - In effect, we can get from Linux data similar to some of the data in:
- - - SMF 70, 74, 100, 113, 119, 120
- - I wish I could get data similar to:
- - -SMF 30, 42, 72, 98, 99, 101
- - Some of this can be mitigated by analyzing application logs, but you have to build processes for that

• What are the mainframe’s challenges? Relative to “the cloud”
- Does not start at $0 (and goes too high)
- High initial costs makes it hard to attract small organizations to use z/OS
- Existing customers can struggle with the software costs
- Ultimately, the mainframe can be cost competitive for large workloads
- Scalability is less dynamic
- - The mainframe does have some scalability advantages
- - - I.E. you can add more CPs to z/OS without an IPL as long as you defined reserved CPs
- - But ultimately your scalability is limited to the hardware on the floor
- - - Bringing in additional hardware is time consuming
- - - Capacity Planning is much more important than in the cloud!
- - Ability to spin up a server and TBs of disk space to test something out for a day at the total cost of a few dollars is nice!
- - - Just don’t forget to turn it off!

• That’s it for the Mainframe’s challenges
- What about lack of people? The experience isn’t that much different:
- - It’s just a (really great) technology to learn, like AWS or GCP or Linux or K8s or …
- - z/OSMF provides a web interface for an increasing amount of admin work
- - You can SSH into the mainframe just like any Linux server
- - More and more open source tools being ported to the mainframe like Opentools.org
- - Pay people and they will come (but admittedly maybe not in droves like Java programmers)
- Isn’t the hardware expensive?
- - Yes, but it also has a quality of service that may justify at least some of that cost
- - But our application is written in COBOL and nobody can understand it!

In conclusion…

• If you want to learn / play with AWS
- Playing can be pretty cheap, but it can also balloon if you’re not careful
- If you’re playing with an EC2 server, stop it when not playing
- Is the cloud the end of the mainframe?
- - No: Client-server every other “threat” wasn’t the end of the mainframe
- - No: Moving to the cloud means abandoning several mainframe strengths
- - Yes: Starting at $0 captures all new / startup businesses

The presentation and questions ended about 4:30 PM and the meeting ended at 4:45 PM after a short business meeting.