#mainframedebate, twitter, mainframe blog and Enterprise Virtualization with z/VM

Some three years ago I had my little say about Twitter over here and back then (ages ago) I referred to an article on 'The four stages of the average Twitter user' and I think the article is still relevant. The four stages are : Confusion and Indignation, The first "Aha!" Moment, Remembering to Tweet and Thinking in 140 characters. Three years ago I was definitely a stage one person. But things - and people - evolve. I've discovered that lots of information and links to interesting blogs comes a lot faster via Twitter. So, I'm tweeting a reference to my blog posts myself, I'm checking the tweets of people I follow at least twice a day, I'm re-tweeting interesting stuff and this all mostly via Tweetdeck. Am I hooked to it, not really : I'm only using it for professional purposes and I haven't gone mobile ... yet.

And so my post starts with the hashtag #mainframedebate. For those not familiar with the term, a hashtag is a kind of search argument you can add to a tweet. If people search on it, they get all tweets around this topic. And, if all people start using that hashtag at the same moment, you can start a debate. Well, yesterday I received an invite from Steven Dickens (@StevenDickens3) which went like this :

@mwambeke planning to join us? #mainframedebate 5th Dec | 4pm GMT | 11am EST

So tomorrow at 4pm GMT you can join this debate on twitter posing as many questions as you like about the mainframe. You need a twitter account to participate but you can follow the discussion over here as well.
If you want some more information, you can have a look at the Mainframe and Hybrid Computing blog from Steven who also organized the first debate and wrote about it in a couple of posts last September.

It's free association today, so this topic also brings me to Stevens blog. I didn't know it before but Steven writes quite some interesting stuff on mainframe and cloud computing. His latest post is about Cloud Computing and the Cult of x86. He refers to a white paper 'Comparing Virtualization Alternatives - What's best for your business?' which you can find via this link. "The purpose of this analysis was to examine the real-world  impact on businesses that deploy IBM’s z/VM virtualization product, compared to those using UNIX or x86 products". If you want to make a stand for z/VM as virtualization platform this is a very useful document with lots of arguments and graphs illustrating every aspect of the comparison.

And . . . don't forget to join the #mainframedebate tomorrow !

Recent z/VSE presentations

If you're interested in z/VSE and you want to stay tuned about new presentations, announcements or other interesting items, you might want to follow z/VSE on Twitter. That's how I came across these presentations. As it's very hard to follow everything you're interested in, you might as well carefully choose some sources that will give you this information. That's what I do with Tweetdeck and FeedDemon, two desktop applications. The first one gathers all the tweets (or a selection of tweets) I'm following, the other one collects all feeds of blogs I'm following. No more looking around at several places, it's all there without even having to start up your browser. But of course you all know that by know, or else, you should.

But back to our Topic. In October there was a Technical University in Boston and all z/VSE presentations are gathered at the Technical Conference page of the z/VSE documentation pages.

Some of the presentations :

	z/VSE Trends and Directions - incl. Software Pricing and zEnterprise System (1.8MB) - Klaus Goebel, IBM
	z/VSE Performance Update (1.2MB) Ingo Franzki, IBM
	z/VSE Tools Overview and Update (3.6MB) Ingo Franzki, IBM
	10 Years for the most successful partnership: z/VSE and Linux on System z (8.7MB) - Wilhelm Mild, IBM
	Linux on System z - the Enterprise hub (6.3MB) Wilhelm Mild, IBM
	z/VSE Applications accessing DB2 on Linux on System z (4.8MB) Wilhelm Mild, IBM
	Disaster Scenarios and Backup procedures for z/VSE, z/VM and Linux on System z (3.7MB) - Wilhelm Mild, IBM
	WebSphere MQ for z/VSE (2.8MB) Wilhelm Mild, IBM
	Workshop: Rational Developer for System z for z/VSE Development (1.6MB) Ingo Franzki,IBM and Wilhelm Mild, IBM

And if you page down a bit, there's also some presentations from an earlier Technical University at Berlin in May 2010.

As I always say : do check them out !

Reblogging on DB2, zIIP and XIV GUI

I thought I had come up with a new word, when I thought of reblogging. People who are familiar with Twitter, know you can retweet a tweet (message) some one else put on Twitter. I'm just trying not to be too obscure for non-twitter-ers. In fact, you just repeat a message by some one else because you think it might be interesting for your own followers. And if there's some space left, you can even add some comments.

So today I came across a couple of tweets referring to blog posts. As I really liked the blog posts, I retweeted those tweets, but then I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could also reblog the blog posts, referring to the original poster and adding some comments. I'm hoping this doesn't look to much like speech therapy or a poetic alliteration effort for people not familiar with these terms, but do read on, there's following some more familiar content.

So, it turns out that reblogging already exists and you can e.g. use it in between wordpress blogs. It's not supported between several types of blogs. So, here I go, the oldfashioned way.

The first blog post I want to mention is by Willie Favero : 'Improved zIIP redirect'. Willie tells about an APAR on DB2. It should allow you to improve the redirection of DRDA workload over TCP/IP to the zIIP from some 45%-50% to about 60%. If that ain't worth a reblog ?! Just go over there to read all the details. By the way, Willie will also be presenting at the Total Solutions Event in September at the IBM Forum in Brussels.

The second blog post is from Anthony Vandewerdt who works for IBM Australia as a Storage Solutions Specialist and who has a blog on System Storage. His post is about XIV : 'Even more praise for the XIV GUI'. It just gives you another illustration of how easy and how intuitive the User Interface for XIV is. And of how easily you can obtain status information from about any component in the machine, up to the fans. You'll also see that you can download the GUI, even if you don't have an XIV ... yet. So, just give it a try, you'll like it !

By the way, I won't be posting again before the end of next week. The children are doing their last exam today and tomorrow we're off to the city of angels and demons visiting my brother for an extended weekend.

Short Takes or Twitter

You know my short takes by now : some short messages on publications, events, teleconferences . . . I've been wondering for some time if Twitter wouldn't be the right place for this kind of stuff. I see people (whose blogs I read) being very enthusiastic about it (e.g. Willie Favero, Martin Packer). I've read about it, I visited it quite some times, I signed up for my own account already a year ago now (My account : mwambeke) but don't expect to find much over there right now.

Twitter should be one of the Web 2.0 tools having a great professional value, but it just escapes me. Still, if you want some reasons, here are your '11 reasons to use Twitter for business'. I just read this article today about 'The four stages of the average Twitter user' and I must admit I'm definitely still in the first phase (Confusion and Indignation). I'll give you one example (and no personal offence to M. Packer himself) but I attended the System z Conference last week in Brussels. And so did Martin Packer. So I read on his blog he would be reporting on Twitter about the Conference. Well, I'm still looking for the business value of these 'tweets' (Is this the right term ?). I'm not really interested to read he's in Marne Walle's session or in Bob Rogers' session chatting with Jeff Berger. I'm glad to read he didn't have too much delays on his way home, but if I really think about it, I got more business value from attending his presentations and reading his blog posts. And I'm convinced that the really interesting scraps and bits on Twitter will get published elsewhere too.

For the moment, I'm waiting for the second stage of Enlightenment "where (people) find something really interesting or timely on Twitter that wasn’t available from news, RSS feeds, or word of mouth from their friends".

I'll keep you informed on my Twitter adventures - if they aren't going the same way as my SecondLife adventures. Although many people are also strongly convinced of the business value of SecondLife. But for the moment my next Short Takes will be on my blog.