IBM Systems magazine Mainframe - May/June 2011

Last week there was the May/June issue of the IBM Systems Magazine with some very good content. You can find it over here. I would advise you to subscribe to the magazine. That way you also get a link to the .pdf.

I would like to draw your attention to some articles I really enjoyed reading. There's e.g. 'Beyond Restart and Concurrency' by Carl Feinberg about minimizing "the impact of failures with restartable batch applications" using a systemwide restart facility. Trust me, an interesting read for companies who see an ever decreasing batch window or who no longer draw the line between online and batch executions.

Tami Deedrick writes a good article on ProtecTIER, more specific on the TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z. If the technical arguments don't convince you there's also a financial argument : "Acquisition can be 50 to 80 percent lower than standard virtual tape library solutions, which may help lower total cost of ownership".

Wait, there's more. There's the customer story of our own Brussels based P&V Assurances company that reduces technology costs via VPN-free access. It tells the story how the technology for connecting their agents in the front office evolved from a tightly coupled system to a "platform-agnostic access to back-end systems".

And last but not least, there's a special report with the results of a readers' survey about business challenges, mainframe staffing, adopting new technologies like e.g. cloud computing and their view on hybrid environments.

As I always say, just check it out !