The next meeting of the NY Metro NaSPA Chapter will be on Tuesday, 19 March, 2013, in room 1219 at the IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue, New York City, from 10:00 AM until 4:30 PM. We are following the same registration process as we followed for our October 2012 meeting. Please see below for the details. Sessions for the day include:
"What System z can do that Intel based Systems can’t", David Rhoderick, Manager of the IBM Software Group System z Competitive Project Office Many people think that today's x86 computers can do more or less the same as a mainframe -- after all they have a similar speed and amount of memory, so why not? Well there's a lot more to it than just specifications and benchmarks. This session will overview the many different theoretical and practical differences between Enterprise System z servers and PC-based servers. When IBM engineers design a modern mainframe they make many thoughtful tradeoffs in order to create a balanced optimized system for the most rigorous and varied workload requirements. We will show you the reasons why System z still runs rings around Intel-based servers for both traditional and many modern workloads, and why rehosting to Intel is unlikely to be cost-effective. About the speaker: David Rhoderick is Manager of the IBM Software Group System z Competitive Project Office. Mr. Rhoderick has extensive expertise in application deployment and the financial aspects of mainframe operation. In his 30+ years at IBM, both in the U.S. and the U.K., he has worked in many different fields including software pricing, marketing, ISV recruitment, consulting, sales, systems engineering, development and systems programming. His previous experience at IBM includes the development of the OS/2 operating system for PCs and porting a large DEC-VAX application to the AIX environment for a media company. Mr. Rhoderick holds a Masters in Computer and Natural Sciences from Cambridge University (Clare College) and is currently pursuing both a Masters in Musicology at the UK’s Open University and also Fellowship of the Royal Schools of Music. He received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for System z Competitive Analysis of Mainframe Total Cost of Ownership. "The What and Why of System z Millicode", Bob Rogers Millicode as an advancement over microcode is arguably one of the best recent ideas in mainframe computer design. While microcode requires a distinct microcode processor to be designed and built, millicode shares the same processor that runs regular software, allowing it to take advantage of all the technology investment in that processor. In IBM mainframe processors, millicode is used to implement complex instructions, to implement other elements of the architecture and to provide system initialization, error recovery and other control functions. This presentation takes a look at z/Architecture millicode from a number of perspectives. About the speaker: Bob Rogers worked on mainframe system software for 43 years at IBM before retiring as a Distinguished Engineer last year. He started with IBM as a computer operator in 1969. After receiving a B.A. in mathematics from Marist College two years later, he became a computer programmer at the IBM Poughkeepsie Programming Center, where he worked on the OS/360 operating system. Bob continued to work on mainframe operating system development for his entire career at IBM. He contributed to the transitions to XA-370 and ESA/370, and was lead software designer for the transition to the 64-bit z/Architecture. More recently, he implemented the support for single z/OS images with more than 16 CPUs and was a lead designer of the z/OS support for the zAAP and zIIP specialty engines. Today's z/OS implements dozens of his design ideas. His last assignment at IBM was to foster greater synergy between System z hardware and software. Bob has been a popular and constant speaker at SHARE and IBM conferences for many years "zEnterprise EC12 Overview", Kevin Shum, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM The presentation will provide an overview on IBM's newly announced zEnterprise EC12 systems. Details will be discussed on key innovations, including the processor and system enhancements (that provide for increased computing power and capacity), zAware analytics (that provides tailored information for managing the system), and Flash Express (that improves on availability). About the speaker: Kevin Shum is a Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM's System and Technology Group. He received his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University at New York. After graduated from college, he joined IBM at the Poughkeepsie lab in New York, where he had worked on the development of multiple generations of mainframe microprocessors. Kevin was the chief processor core architect and design lead for the System z10 processor. He then led the design of the zEC12 microprocessor. Kevin received an IBM Corporate award in 2009, and has recently received the 2012 Asian American Engineer Of the Year award from the Chinese Institute of Engineers USA. "Parallel Sysplex Resiliency", Nicole Fagen, Senior Software Engineer, IBM A properly configured parallel sysplex can deliver near continuous availability. Often "properly configured" is equated with redundancy. Yes, redundancy is certainly a critical factor for enabling a sysplex to deliver on its promise of availability. But it is not sufficient. What one really needs is for the sysplex to be resilient. That is, the sysplex needs to be able to quickly resume normal operation after experiencing illness (such as sympathy sickness), change (such as reconfiguring of hardware or software), or misfortune (such as failures). In this presentation, we take redundancy as a given and explore ways to improve the resiliency of the sysplex. The topics were selected based on real world customer experiences. In particular we look at things like Sysplex Failure Management (SFM) parameters, the use of BCPii to detect failed systems, procedures for upgrading Coupling Facilities, Health Checks, and more. About the speaker: Nicole Fagen is the z/OS Parallel Sysplex Support Lead. She has 13 years of experience debugging problems in the sysplex arena. Nicole began her career debugging and helping customers in system logger, RRS, consoles and health checker. She moved to the heart of the sysplex components XES, XCF and GRS 7 years ago. In addition to debugging, Nicole is an advocate for high availability configurations and resiliency. Registration: Registration is required . Please RSVP to mar...@us.ibm.com as soon as is possible if you are thinking of attending, but no later than Noon ET on Monday, 18 March. The meeting is open to non-NaSPA members and is free. Please pass this invitation on to your colleagues! Thanks!!! - Mark Mark Nelson, CISSP®, CSSLP® z/OS Security Server (RACF) Design and Development IBM Corporation 2455 South Road MS/P388 Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 (845) 435-7758, tie line 8+295-7758, fax (845) 432-9589 mar...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
