Unintended Emissions
June 2, 2017
Natural gas is considered by many to be a cleaner energy source. The downside to natural gas is the methane that is a primary component. If it leaks into the air—estimates suggest approximately 1-2 percent leakage is common at production sites—it absorbs the sun’s heat and warms the Earth’s atmosphere. Methane is estimated to be […]
ArticlesIBM Lab Services Helps Clients Stay Vigilant Against Data Hackers
June 1, 2017
In July 2015, an operator noticed some heavy UNIX* System Service (USS) activity that seemed highly suspicious. Some scripts were sending spam messages all over the world from the client’s mainframe. The client called IBM Systems Lab Services for z Systems* and LinuxONE*, and the Lab Services team sprang into action. The team of highly […]
ArticlesCICS TS Performance and Tuning: A Rich Tradition
June 1, 2017
It may sound geeky, but one of my favorite discussion topics—usually limited to a client’s system programmers and sometimes manager—is CICS Transaction Server (TS) performance and tuning. Sysprog is a group I’m very comfortable with, because there aren’t a lot of times I can share an acronym-laden conversation with a bunch of enthusiastic groupies passionate […]
ArticlesWhy AIX Fits Well With Hybrid Cloud Strategies
June 1, 2017
In the last two years, we have seen a dramatic upswing in the number of IBM clients that are investing in full-scale projects to modernize their critical IT infrastructure. Some are looking to optimize their software licenses by consolidating workloads onto smaller footprints and moving nonessential capacity to offsite clouds. Others are developing new applications […]
ArticlesModernize Environment and Applications to Stay Competitive
June 1, 2017
It’s official: The online customer experience is driving revenue significantly in both directions. Businesses and consumers are becoming merciless as they demand clear, clean, seamless transactions in real time. This trend is measurable. A leading search engine calculates average loading time for a mobile site at 19 seconds—and says reducing that time to five seconds […]
From Military to Mainframe
June 1, 2017
Working as a z/OS* systems programmer on an infrastructure team is not quite the role Torrie McLaughlin once envisioned for her career. But both the job and the journey that led her to it are rewarding. “I get a big kick out of knowing that the system I work on every day is the backbone […]
ArticlesIBM i Strategy: The Cooperative Game
May 30, 2017
In cooperative strategy, players communicate about the actions they will each take. Consequently, we IBMers in the IBM i community have been increasingly talking with, and listening to, our community.
ArticlesEvolving Ideas in IT
May 29, 2017
Last week, I wrote about David M. Kroenke’s list of components in a business computer system—computer equipment or hardware, programs, data, procedures and personnel. It’s a simple but enduring model, and you can use it in various situations to help discover useful information about new systems or applications. This week, I’ll discuss some constructs and […]
ArticlesA Tale of Two Web Servers
May 23, 2017
Many people know that IBM i already had the Apache web server. Now, Njinx is available too.
ArticlesGraph History—Stacked Charts
May 22, 2017
With the 7.3 release, IBM introduced historical performance data collection and the ability to view your historical data graphically with Graph History.