On 3/26/18, 3:24 PM, "IBM Mainframe Discussion List on behalf of John Eells" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 13:33:23 -0500, Edward Gould wrote: >>> "IBM plans to discontinue delivery of z/OS platform products and service on >>> magnetic tape on July 1, 2018. ..." >> Congratulations to IBM. This sounds the death nell for z/OS at this install. >> What will you do instead? > In addition to that, you can take a laptop outside your firewall, > download stuff*, bring the laptop back in, connect to your internal > network, and upload it to z/OS to be processed. A connection from z/OS > to the internet is not required for this, either, and it's probably > faster than waiting for a DVD to arrive. I don't have actual numbers > handy, but the data volume for most orders is probably less than you > need to download for a Netflix movie in SD. If you are ordering the > gorilla in the room (z/OS itself), it's about what you need for a few > Netflix HD movies. That's not the problem at hand. If security and stability is your worry, then this is a pretty big hole in your chain of custody for a really critical system -- and it's demonstrated fact that Internet routing can be trivially manipulated in a way to pass entire countries traffic through unusual paths at the change of a single router announcement of BGP policy topology. It doesn't have to be any device in the data path either; just someone you listen to, or one of their neighbors, or one of their neighbors, etc. FWIW, I've had employers where we had to show records of everyone who came into contact with anything coming into a facility, and nothing ever left a facility, *ever*. They still have microcode update tapes for their first 360/44 from the 1960s; seriously doubt they are still readable (or anyone still has a 7-track drive that could read them), but they have ironclad documents that traced that tape from the factory in POK all the way to us. I'm sure others have the same kind of experience. I would agree with you that this is really no different than a new kind of tape format -- IBM has certainly done that multiple times, and we've managed to cope with that well enough. I think the bigger issue is that IBM no longer makes a device that can directly read the DVD media from the mainframe without involving any other system. It wouldn't be all that big of a deal -- you've done it before, so the basic design exists; just needs a bit of modernization -- but until you do, I think it's a bit premature to discontinue service tapes. Given what these systems tend to get used for -- things where businesses and people die if they don't 100% work every time, no excuses -- conservative would be the smart thing to do. Otherwise, why stick with IBM? VMS is still available from HP, has comparable capabilities and availability, and doesn't require weird contortions to get service from the manufacturer. DCL isn't any more horrible than JCL (and already has a lot of the stuff people argue about here like proper use of symbols, etc), there's a decent COBOL and C, and there are automated translators -- even JCL, CICS and DB/2 emulators. Cheaper hardware, too, and the promise of being able to use even cheaper commodity hardware that's the same as the stuff you need for your Intel systems in the near future. > Then, if you are willing to buy hardware as David Boyes outlined, you > can perhaps do it that way. I have no knowledge about these products, > and we have not tested that approach, so I do not know whether or not it > works. If someone has tried it, I'd be (academically, I'll admit) > interesting in knowing about the outcome. Find someone with a zPDT if you'd like to try it. The zPDT "faketape" support is pretty much equivalent to the functionality of a OMA/2 -- and it uses the same AWSTAPE files (the AWSTAPE format was defined for use on OMA/2s). It's a well-tested setup, and it's not hard to make physical tape volumes from the DVDs if you need physical tape media (and it might convince the zPDT folks that a emulated 3494 library manager device would be worth supporting). If IBM would commit to using AWSTAPE format files for everything, then getting a desktop SCSI 3590 and attaching it to a PC and using it to create the tapes locally would be a fairly reasonable compromise (you can easily also support Internet delivery with the same tools, so it wouldn't be any more packaging work). You probably could argue that the workstation development tool (whatever it's called this week) would also be the logical way to handle this -- read the DVD on a emulated mini-test system, then once you have the service envelopes on disk, then you can move them anywhere you like however you like and apply from local disk. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
