Seminar News

 

z/OS Availability Issues

 

A one-day, free seminar in London on Tuesday, 12th April 2005

in Ireland House, 150-151 New Bond St., London W1S 2TX

 

Glennon Bagsby, NewEra Software, U.S.A. (9.45 a.m. - 11.15 a.m.)

"Closing in on 100% Sysplex Availability by Monitoring IPL Integrity"

Glennon has over 30 years experience with the IBM Mainframe platform. He has worked in both the public and private sectors. He joined NewEra Software, Inc. at its inception in 1989 and now serves the vital role of technical liaison between the user community and NewEra’s development team. Having just given this new presentation in the Share conference in Anaheim, CA (March 2005), Glennon will also share the experiences and discussions from those sessions.

With a goal of 100% Sysplex Availability, the time needed to perform system or Sysplex changes with an IPL of an Image must be kept to a minimum and be error free. The very complexity of the definitions and processes that control an Image and a Sysplex make this a very difficult task. Add to that the ability to make changes to the Sysplex and Images dynamically, with no verification that static definitions are being kept synchronised, can lead to extended outages at IPL time and lost opportunity to perform upgrades. Glennon will discuss the IPL and startup of a Sysplex, Images and sub-systems (e.g. VTAM & TCP/IP), the analysis of datasets and resources required, and how to pre-test the definitions and the availability of resources needed for a successful IPL.

 

Nalini Elkins, Inside Products Inc. (11.30 a.m. - 1.00 p.m.)

"What you need to know about Response Time Monitoring!"

Nalini is an internationally recognised expert in the field of network performance. She has published numerous articles in publications such as zJournal, Technical Support and Xephon's TCP/IP Update. She is a regular speaker at SHARE, CMG, and a variety of international conferences and courses, including courses offered via IBM. Nalini was the chief developer of the product IBM now markets as NetView Performance Monitor for TCP/IP (from Applied Expert Systems). Inside Products, Inc., was set up by Nalini in 2001 and specialises in the design & development of network management software. Their flagship product is the Inside the Stack TCP/IP Monitor.

This session tells you how to really get end-to-end response time for your TCP applications -- nicely broken down into CPU vs. network time! Nalini will go through examples of various TCP applications: TN3270, CICS, FTP, web server and others. She will discuss exactly how to calculate response time for each situation. She'll also take on how to estimate response time for a connectionless protocol like UDP. To conclude, she'll highlight considerations on how best to do statistics to use such response time information for example, summarise by local port, separate into buckets, and use for service level agreements.

* Lunch 1.00 to 1.45 p.m. A complimentary light lunch will be served.

 

Roland Hartmann-Haase, UBS-Hainer, Germany (1.45 p.m. - 2.45 p.m.)

"Avoiding conflicts when using mirrored volumes (BCVs)"

Roland has worked in IT for over 15 years in Germany as a specialist in Mainframe & Mid-range Operating System software enhancements. In more recent times this has included Storage Management projects requiring multiple systems having access to copies of huge online databases and DR projects accessing mirrored systems across different sysplex. There are some standard approaches that needed major improvements to permit continued 24x7.

Roland will be taking us through how using any hardware vendor's mirroring solutions in a z/OS environment creates volume, dataset name, and catalog conflicts. This commands special attention to make such a mirrored copy usable to other systems (e.g. data warehouse, test data-bed, …) or indeed as definition/template of another image. He will detail how even more consuming work is required to get such a duplicated sub-system (e.g. DB2, IMS, ..) up and running, with all references to the original names changed to the new target's names.

 

Linda McGrath, Fitz Software & Co. (2.45 p.m. - 3.15 p.m.)

"Review of what's new at Fitz Software"

Linda joined Fitz Software in 1998 and is currently a Senior Account Manager. Previously she worked for eight years with a major national wholesale company in sales and procurement. Linda will do a quick introduction on the new solutions that are available from Fitz Software, including the new products that are coming to market in May 2005 that will improve the availability of the batch window!

 

* Open-Session: 3.15 - 4.00 p.m. Any questions to any of the speakers and to Fitz personnel.

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To register contact Fiona Dunne at Fitz Software & Co:

  Tel. +353-21-4832131 or +44-20-73320222

  Email seminars@fitzsoftware.com