Drilling deeper into VSAM RLS – focus on performance tuning

Drilling deeper into VSAM RLS with focus on performance

As discussed earlier, VSAM RLS that enables simultaneous access of VSAM files across multiple CICS region and batch (to a limited extent) is quite relevant today. To get good performance of VSAM RLS, it is necessary to understand better how it works and also the parameters that can be used for tuning. Continued »

Understanding VSAM RLS that provides limited sharing between CICS and batch

Understanding VSAM RLS that provides limited sharing between CICS and batch

CICS applications are estimated to handle more than 30 billion transactions per day and process more than $1 trillion worth of business every week. VSAM is where the data is for a large percentage of these CICS application. It is also confirmed by the 2010 z/Journal CICS survey where 74% of the respondents found that CICS applications and batch having concurrent access to VSAM data as very important.

VSAM Record-level sharing (RLS) enables VSAM data to be shared, with full update capability, between many applications running in many CICS regions. Before RLS, sharing VSAM data between CICS regions typically meant allocating the VSAM to one CICS file-owning region (FOR) and function ship file requests from other CICS regions to the file-owning region using MRO or APPC connections. Continued »

Understanding VERDE that powers IBM Virtual Desktop

Understanding VERDE that powers IBM Virtual Desktop

IBM Virtual Desktop involves an open architecture providing flexibility and supports virtual Windows as well as Linux desktops (including Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell platforms); and a variety of storage, directories, peripherals and remote display protocols. IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business incorporates the VERDE product – a leading, purpose-built desktop management and provisioning solution from Virtual Bridges – integrated with the IBM Foundation for Smart Business.

Virtual Bridges is named a “Cool Vendor” in the Cool Vendors in Personal Computing, 2011 report by Gartner. According to Virtual Bridges, VDI Gen2 and VERDE are just about the coolest technologies on the market today. VERDE is an end-to-end desktop management solution combining virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), offline VDI for disconnected and mobile use and remote branch desktop virtualization capabilities. Continued »

NEON requests customers to remove and destroy their copies of zPrime

NEON loses lawsuit against IBM and withdraws zPrime

On May 31, 2011, NEON announced that it has settled its legal dispute with IBM and will immediately withdraw zPrime from the market. NEON will no longer market, sell, license (including any renewal or extension of any existing license), install, distribute, export, import, offer to sell, offer to license, offer to install, offer to distribute, offer to export or offer to import zPrime.

Refer to http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-IT-tech-trends/understanding-srb-the-possible-key-of-zprime-neon-vs-ibm-lawsuits/ for details on the contention between IBM and NEON. Continued »

iCloud enables “Every doc, every edit, everywhere”

Apple’s iCloud has “Every doc, every edit, everywhere” as the Mantra

Apple unveiled its next generation software – Lion, the 8^th major release of Mac OS X, version 5 of iOS that powers iPad, iPhone and iPod touch and the much touted new cloud service offering iCloud.  iCloud brings the cloud service to consumers and all of its features are aimed at making it “convenient and completely effortless’ for the users.

When you sign-up for iCloud, Apple provides 5 GB of cloud storage for free for user files. The purchased music, application, books and photos do not count against this free storage and so for individuals it is almost like having unlimited storage. With iCloud, the music you purchase in iTunes would appear automatically on all your devices (of course, from Apple!) – and no more sync required.  Even for your past purchases from iTunes, you can access your purchase history and download the ones you already bought to any of your devices. Continued »

DB2 version 10 – Extended Indicator Variables allows insert and update of subset of columns

DB2 version 10 enables insert and update of subset of data enhancing reusability of DB2 functions

With the increase in the Web 2.0 applications, there are frequent situations where the application needs to insert or update data only for a subset of columns for a given table. And it becomes all the more difficult when it is not known which columns are being inserted to or updated until application execution time. For example, the customer address change request could mean changing the entire address or just the apartment number or any combination of columns (street name, city, zip code, apartment number and others).

Prior to DB2 version 10, the options for handling different combination of insert and updates included:

• Using a dynamic SQL statement constructed at execution time for each request. Obviously this has overhead and impacts performance.
• Coding SQL statements for all expected combinations of columns – and if we assume that every single combination is possible, the number of SQL statements to be coded grows exponentially. This indeed is a tedious process and has negative impact on application maintenance.
• Have one SQL statement that included all the expected columns. While the customer request comes with data corresponding to only a subset of columns, it becomes the application’s responsibility to figure out the correct values for the other columns – say the old values in case of update, default values in case of insert and NULL values for nullable columns etc. Again, this makes application program complex – and testing difficult.

DB2 10 for z/OS addresses this difficulty of supporting changes to only a subset of columns in a table by introducing the extended indicator variable support. Preparing separate INSERT or UPDATE statements for every combination of columns that are being inserted is no longer required. Continued »

DB2 version 10 improvements aimed at making DB2 more appropriate in a SOA environment

DB2 version 10 – Improvements related to Application Integration

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that facilitates code reuse, interoperability, service management and system integrity is becoming a norm in today’s IT development. In latest version of DB2 (version 10), IBM has introduced quite a Application Integration features in DB2 version 10 aimed at further simplifying and improving the usage of distributed function of DB2 through SOA. Continued »

IBM Smarter Commerce Initiative exploiting Coremetrics

IBM Smarter Commerce Initiative exploiting Coremetrics

In August 2010, IBM acquired Coremetrics, a leader in Web analytics software, and the move was expected to expand IBM’s business analytics capabilities by enabling organizations to use cloud computing services to develop faster, more targeted marketing campaigns.

IBM has now announced its new Smarter Commerce initiative – primarily exploiting Coremetrics products along with WebSphere suite – that transforms how companies manage and swiftly adapt to customer and industry trends across marketing, selling and service processes that that span the entire commerce cycle, putting the customer at the center of their decisions and actions.

IBM estimates that Smarter Commerce would be a new market that will grow to $20 billion in software alone by 2015. Continued »

Websense Data Leak Prevention expected to gain more traction in Enterprises

Websense Data Leak Prevention expected to gain more traction in Enterprises

According to security experts, it costs organizations several million dollars per incident of data loss or theft. Even if the incident per se is innocent – like employee sending customer data to their personal emails so that they can work from home, the repercussions could be significant. In addition to direct loss in terms of money, any data leakage or loss results in negative publicity and putting the organization’s reputation at stake.

As reported by the Ponemon Institute, the average per-person expense for a data breach in 2010 was $214, with the average organizational cost at $7.2 million. The cost factors include detection, escalation, notification, response, and lost business feature. It is expected that this cost will continue to rise and especially so with the new regulations in almost all domains.

Content-aware data loss prevention (DLP) solutions enable organizations to enforce effective business practices for storing and transmitting sensitive data and avoid data loss / leakage. Continued »

Autonomy hailed as Market Leader in Message Archiving

Autonomy Consolidated Archive hailed as Market Leader

Human-friendly information in the forms of documents, web pages, presentations, videos, emails, phone conversations and IMs now form around 80% of the information available and their volume doubles almost every month (Gartner). Autonomy – founded in 1996 – is the market leader in the provision of software that automates the analysis of unstructured data, whether in the form of text, audio, images or video.  Autonomy aims at capturning and processing interaction and extract pertinent information for compliance and risk management, customer service operations and customer intelligence etc.

Autonomy has been expanding its functionality by acquisitions including Zantaz message archiving and CA’s information governance assets. Autonomy technologies are horizontal and it offers products across a wide range of domains. Continued »