Growing Academic Initiative

I just came across this chart and couldn't resist putting it up before leaving on holiday so I can end on a positive note. As you see, the Academic initiative is really doing great :
If you want to find out more, you can go to the IBM Academic Initiative System z Program page.

And for the occasional young people coming across this blog, there's an interesting interactive module on Careers in Mainframe in the Learn Section. Ok, the module is a few years old, stating the z990 as one of the newest machines around, but the message still comes across.

And rest assured, you can definitely build a career in mainframe. Look e.g. at the zNextGen initiative. I already mentioned Kristin Harper's blog which has now changed into Kristin Neely's Newbie blog (by the way, congratulations Kristin) and maybe by now Kristin should consider leaving out the 'newbie' in the blog title. But I see also the deputy Project Manager of zNextGen, Reg Harbeck, has his own blog. Here's a piece of his writing :

"Tron" - remember that? If you do, you're definitely old enough to be a mainframer.
Then again, pretty soon, the average mainframer may be so young they won't even remember Y2K.
And that's OK. As the first generations of mainframers pass the torch to the next generation, the important thing is that the new generation inherits something that works.
That's the beauty of the mainframe (...)

As you see, I'm just putting up a teaser. For the rest, you'll have to go over there and check it out yourselves.

And by the way : have a nice holiday !

New TS1130 Tape Drive

Today, IBM announces the third generation of its 3592 technology, the new TS1130 Tape Drive, jumping ahead of the competition again. Or as the press release states : 'IBM Introduces the Industry's Fastest One Terabyte Storage Tape Drive'. For some odd reason I can't seem to read the European announcements (ZG08-0543 and ZG08-0544) yet. I'll give you an update on them as soon as they're available. For the moment I can refer to the US announcements 108-493 and 108-494.



The Highlights :

• Native data rate of 160 MB/s as opposed to 104MB/s for the TS1120 and up to 350 MB/s at 3:1 compression.
  
• It stores 1TB of uncompressed data on one cartridge.
• It supports backward compatibility for existing 3592 cartridges : read for Gen1 and read&write for Gen2.
• There's a MES upgrade available for the TS1120 drive.
• It supports data encryption and key management.
• GA : September 5, 2008.
  

Well, this is probable my last post before I go on holiday.
I'll be posting again from somewhere around August 18, 2008.

Here's the update on the European Announcements

• ZG08-0543 : IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive Models E06 and other features enhance performance and capacity
• ZG08-0544 : IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive supports controllers and subsystems

The Operation Was a Success, But the Patient Died

OK, I deliberately left out the first part of the title. It actually goes : 'IBM vs PSI : The Operation Was a Success, But the Patient Died'. The title is from an article of the IT-Jungle newsletter from July 08, 2008. By the way, you can subscribe to the newsletter over here. Yes, IBM just took over PSI last week and both companies dropped all charges against each other and both companies came out victorious, or something like that. There have been lots of comments on this acquisition and not every one seems to be as happy with this. I quote from an article on the CCIA site :

“This is a Black Hole acquisition,” said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. “It sucks the life out of the market and destroys the matter. Transforming a market with latent potential for competition and innovation into a sector with little prospects for anything but complete domination by IBM.”

CCIA is an international, nonprofit association of computer and communications industry firms, representing a broad cross section of the industry.

Back to the article : I won't repeat its content but it gives a good overview of what happened over the last months to PSI but it also comments on FLEX-ES, Hercules and T3. So : a revised overview on mainframe emulation I already wrote about earlier.

As I always say : just check it out !

CICS Transaction Server in your SOA

Here's an interesting publication from Andrew Bates (IBM) : 'CICS Transaction Server in your SOA, subtitled 'links to more information on the CICS ecosystem'. in fact it's set up as a presentation with links to all kinds of CICS TS related information like "Redbook publications, Whitepapers, Webcasts, Teleconferences, or other articles pertaining to the topic. Issue 3 became available in May of 2008. Updates are flagged so you can identify them easily". Here's the summary of the pages and their topics :

• CICS Transaction Server
• Families that support CICS
• Enterprise Modernization and CICS
• Tivoli® support for CICS
• CICS Service Flow Feature
• CICS and service oriented architecture (SOA)
• CICS and WebSphere® Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) infrastructure
• CICS and Business Process Management (BPM)
• CICS and Web Services
• CICS Transaction Gateway
• CICS and WebSphere MQ
• CICS and Java™
• Channels and Containers
• Threadsafe and open transaction environment (OTE)
• CICSPlex® Systems Manager (SM)
• CICS Tools
• Problem Determination Tools
• Rational® support for CICS
• COBOL and CICS

If you want to be kept up to date and receive following issues, just send a mail to Andrew Bates.