On Tuesday, 05/26/2009 at 02:26 EDT, "David L. Craig" <[email protected]> wrote:
> We have never used ICCF, only CMS for Applications > Development and Production Control. I'm sure you > can understand why. Management has had us stuck > in the 20th Century and now seems to be ready to > accept the migration from the mainframe has taken > so much longer than expected they have to upgrade. > Only CMS compilers are gone. CMS VSAM is gone. > > Please give us a Staement of Direction regarding > CMS itself--don't keep us in an office pool about > its EoS. Is that too much to ask? While it isn't an Official Statement of Direction, let me try to erase any confusion: CMS is integral to the existence of z/VM. While CMS could be replaced by something else, why do so? Sure, it's just a virtual machine. But it's the operating system that runs the installation, service, security, performance management, automation, I/O configuration, and other subsystems. That's 40 years of sunk costs, and those 100s of millions of dollars are not to be thrown away lightly. You will notice that your systems all have "z/CMS" on them; an experimental version of CMS that is enabled for z/Architecture (not 64-bit addressing). We need CMS to be viable into the forseeable future. (As to the unforseeable future, my magic 8-ball just says "?".) You mention that compilers are gone. Which one? Current languages include assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, C/C++, PL/I, APL2, REXX, and Pascal. No Java. Assembler, REXX, and C/C++ are modern. The others are, uh, less so. Do NOT expect to find programming meta-APIs found in other operating systems. That is, if it's Way Cool, then CMS won't have it. If you want to do Way Cool application development, it needs to be elsewhere. Occassionally one may find it's way into CMS, but don't look at it as a trend or a breaking of a log jam. Sometimes the presence or lack of an API is technical and sometimes (gasp!) political. Shocking, I know! :-) > If so, we need to plan to move those functions off > CMS as part of the upgrade. Management may very > well decide to continue limping along while they > beef up the migration effort. Frankly, I wouldn't > blame them, as VSE has never been really profitable > either, has it? Our goal for many years has been "what you have, you keep". Where possible, we will protect your application investment, meaning that we won't break something "just because." The whole CMS/VSAM thing was regrettable, but neither z/VSE nor z/VM could afford to keep it up to date and in sync (it has MVS API semantics, btw), as the growing parts of our respective businesses needed our undivided attention. Not unexpectedly, this has meant the loss of some long-standing applications on CMS, but that was counterbalanced by new installations of System z for Linux and the connection of those Linux images to z/VSE via its "Connectors." I hope this helps you understand CMS' place in the IBM Universe better. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott
