Hot Topics Newsletter - Issue 28

The good part : there's a new Hot Topics newsletter and it's stuffed with good articles. The bad part : it's clear now that there will be only one release per year. Be tempted, good people of the newsletter, to give us a February release again as well ! You can download the new issue over here and although I see Facebook more as a medium for private matters, Hot Topics thinks otherwise and you can keep up to date with them on Facebook as well.

As I said, it's stuffed with good articles. The focus is on z/OS 2.1 and on the role of the mainframe in the world of CAMS(S) : Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security. Let me pick out just a few, but by all means, do read the rest as well.
There's a good summary about 'System z in a mobile world' with particulary also a closer look on the role of CICS and DB2.
z/OSMF seems like it's here to stay : we learn about some APIs like e.g. the z/OSMF Jobs Interface (aka SubmitAPI) and there's a good introduction to 'z/OSMF Resource Monitoring-Reloaded'.
'Not all quiet on the consoles front' tells us about the possibility "to allow consoles to be dynamically added and deleted".
There's an intriguing (to me at least) article on z/OS Fixed Block Architecture services with z/OS Distributed Data Backup (ZDDB). Let me give you a little quote

z/OS Distributed Data Backup (zDDB) is a no-charge licensed feature. When you install zDDB on DS8000 devices, distributed host systems that are attached through Fibre Channel connection (FICON®) interfaces can access logical unit number (LUN) devices containing fixed block data. Typically, FBA LUN devices are connected to Linux®, Windows®, and UNIX® operating systems.
With zDDB, two views of the disk devices are presented, one for z/OS and one for the distributed system, as shown in Figure 2.

Here's this Figure 2

There's also a great deal of attention to the new z/OS 2.1, its migration and to recent innovations like zAWARE, zEDC, the RoCE card and so on.

So, as I always say, just check it out !