Short takes

Catching up again with some short messages on the New Mainframe Executive Magazine, a definition of Cloud computing, an article on z/OS deduplication, CA May Mainframe madness and SELCOPY/i.

• The New Mainframe Executive Magazine for March/April is out. A couple of articles I liked : The consolidation experiences to Linux on System z by the Italian Gruppo Api, an interview with Reed Mullen with a more high-level approach on Linux on System z plus the various Solutions IBM is offering for it and 'Tape a collapsing star' by Randy Chalfant stating : "(...) tape will die because it can't follow or match current market conditions and requirements (...) users will simply stop writing data to tape; they'll opt for disk instead'. Want to find out more : you can download the .pdf over here.

• This is why I like reading James Governor's Monkchips. The definition of Cloud Computing is actually quite simple : "The next time someone tries to take you through 30 slides explaining the cloud you can just nod sagely, and say… “ohhhh. you mean servers, middleware and apps. Yeah I get it.” A true adherent of cloud computing !

• I wrote a little article on Protectier deduplication in our System z Newsletter and put it also on this blog. If you want to get a little more in-depth insights on z/OS Deduplication and on deduplication workload characterization, the you might want to take a look at this paper in the published papers section of the Performance Associates site : 'z/OS Data De-de-de-de-duplication' by Dr. Pat Artis.

• Perhaps a bit early to already call it a tradition but here's CA May Mainframe Madness 2010. You can register over here.

• It's not my habit to talk about third party products, but this one brought back some nice memories for me. I remember a time when there was ISPF for Windows. Perhaps it still exists and there are still people using it, I wouldn't know. But now I had a mail about a "windows style desktop on the mainframe". So, not familiarizing people with Windows by using ISPF; no, more like familiarizing people with z/OS by using Windows. I'm talking about Selcopy/i. So I took a look at their site and found an overview video. It reminded me of my time as a COBOL programmer in the early nineties. I was working for Dolmen at AnHyp at the time and one of my colleages over there, Frank van Aert, had developed or taken over some kind of self-written ISPF application which was called YP or YPN. The basic principle, though, looked pretty much the same, you edited a file and could start all kinds of operations from there on like editing files, doing listcats, jumping to ISPF 3.4 using wildcards, listing often used files, putting your cursor on it and providing all kinds of actions on it depending on the PFkey you were pressing etc. etc. It definitely saved you lots of time, so I eagerly assisted in further developing it. So far for the memories, Selcopy/i goes further than this of course, presenting it all in some windows like environment young people might like and definitely offering much more functionalities than our little application did. If you're interested, just check it out.
  Oops, not such a short take, this one. Perhaps I should try and contact Frank again, it's been a while . . .