z/VSE 5.1 has been available for order since late November 2011. The key building blocks for user exploitation of z/VSE 5.1—third-party vendor system and application software—are ready and available.

A quick survey of products reveals that most Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have either a new release or a recommended maintenance level for their current release that supports z/VSE Version 5.1.

A Web search for VSE 5.1 will produce numerous references to product support matrixes with the information you need. Also available is an IBM Web page with references to all the ISVs and…

It’s been very hard to write this column. What do you say when one of your closest friends has a near-death experience, and the only thing you can do is sit by his or her side and hope for the best? It’s also been a very quiet period in the Linux on System z world. There isn’t much to talk about from the usual suspects, but I’ve done some digging to find several things that merit discussing in the column.

Probably the first (and most important to the business…

In my March/April column, I mentioned the high-profile research from Vanson Bourne, reporting CIOs’ concerns about the impending mainframe skills shortage. While I think these fears are often overstated, mainframe education and consultancy will likely become significant revenue streams for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in the months and years ahead.

ISVs have been particularly hard hit during the recession, as IBM and the larger vendors have successfully persuaded many users to consolidate their tools and focus on a smaller number of suppliers to save money and resources without migrating away from the mainframe. Some ISVs…

Storage Attached Network (SAN) is an efficient solution for many storage needs, especially where hundreds of gigabytes or even many terabytes are required. Linux running on z/VM can use SAN nicely, and System z provides Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) adapters to connect to the SAN fabric. But is it that easy? Connect it and it’s done? Not even close. From a z/VM perspective, if you have more than a handful of servers using SAN, things can get daunting quickly. This article describes some of the pain points associated with managing direct-attached SAN (not EDEVs, otherwise…

In late 2011, IBM's premier virtualization product for System z debuted a new feature, z/VM Single System Image (SSI), which dramatically improves the horizontal scalability of z/VM workloads. Available in z/VM Release 6.2, SSI opens the door to easier, more flexible horizontal growth of large-scale virtual server environments by clustering up to four z/VM systems—each capable of running hundreds of virtual servers—in a rich, robust, shared-resource environment. Coordination of access to shared devices and network connections between members, as well as a common repository of virtual server definitions, allows workload to be…

Years ago, when a million CICS transactions a day was a lot, the data went on tape because it was so “huge.” Today, 500 million DB2 transactions may be considered small and, in many installations, the jobs that post-process System Management Facility (SMF) data have become among the largest applications. With the rising cost of software to support the ever-burgeoning volume of data, it’s important to decide what to keep and process daily. The tests run and examples provided here were all conducted with MXG, but the same techniques could be applied to other software performing…