A huge thank you to Logicalis and in particular Martin Boakes for organising and hosting the meeting.

A special mention for the lunch as it was one of the best ever!

Apologies: None

Minutes of previous meeting and matters arising.
No matters arising.

GUIDE Business
Vacant Posts:  None at this time

The annual conference was discussed in some detail and Mark Wilson introduced the provisional Agenda. Any comments on the suitability of the Agenda please let Mark know ASAP.

LSWG Meetings:
Next Meeting:

• Next LSG Meeting:
• January 2008 to be hosted by CA at Ditton Park. The actual date will be confirmed ASAP.
• Annual Conference:
• 30th – 31st October 2007 – Chesford Grange Hotel, Kenilworth
• http://www.gse.org.uk/tyc/

Announcements
None

Presentations

Green IT – Myth or Mandatory – Chris Gabriel - Logicalis

Is Green IT anything more than best practice efficiency, and can being Green be good for the bottom line irrespective of saving the planet?

Select the link to download the presentation.

What does it mean to be a sysprog in 2007? – Paul Arnerich - TSD

Paul gave his own personal view on what the job entails in 2007

Select the link to download the presentation.

Compliance: What does IT really mean? - Nigel Kilpatrick - Iconium

The session will focus on bringing the understanding of compliance pressures of the business and the impact on infrastructure closer together

Select the link to download the presentation.

IBM Updates – Roger Fowler - IBM

Roger gave his usual pot pourri of IBM updates

RACF 1.8 Update & 1.9 Announcements – Mark Wilson

Mark gave a technical update for all of the recent Security Server/RACF changes with 1.8 and an overview of the changes previewed in zOS 1.9

Select the link to download the presentation.

IBM Hardware & Security an Update – Roger Fowler - IBM

Roger will give an overview of all the latest security related hardware features available with System z

Select the link to download the presentation.

Hints and Tips

The initial debate was focused on what are the barriers to growing System z in our organisations and how, if at all possible how we as a group could help remove those barriers.

What inhibits mainframe growth???

Perception of cost... mainframe expensive in comparison to "throw away" unix/wintel servers.

Software costs are high by comparison to distributed platforms. One view from a technical member was that if a company has a high MIP utilization then the software costs will actually be higher! A small upgrade to the CPU power means SW costs go up by a big margin.

Decisions on which platform to use are quite often made by the CIO. Certainly the agreement to spend money has to be signed off by the CIO. And here's a major part to the problem... most CIOs have been educated or grown up with "distributed platforms". They simply don't understand the capabilities of today’s mainframe.

Staff costs? Misconception that it takes a lot of people to manage the mainframe

Lack of hardware vendors does not help, if you want a mainframe then its IBM or IBM.

Lack of skills - prompted the idea to find the youngest sysprog at the GSE event in October.

All of the new zSeries footprints are in new & emerging economies (India/China/Russia).

Is this because they are able to buy "best in breed from scratch? Or are they buying them for the zLinux capabilities?

Is it a surprise that the latest growth on the hardware in the UK is all on zLinux?

Where does that leave z/OS?

Does this matter to us? Well as z/OS system programmes yes it does!

Slow response to new workloads. The mainframe is perceived as not being dynamic.

We asked:

• Who knows their SLA with their business?
• Not many
• Who has completed an emergency IPL recently?
• Half the room.
• Of those IPLs how many lost production workloads?
• None

The mainframe only gets noticed when it goes wrong. Other than that it sits quietly in the corner.

Is that the problem? It just gets on with the job rather than shouting about it to the business!

Who has completed a true TCO? And who does "real" chargback to their business? 

HSBC have started to monitor the real TCO and the real power usage of their datacentres.

Sundeep Gupta – Royal Bank of Scotland

Question:
Who needs access to the RACF database and under what circumstances?

Answer:
This was discussed in detail and the opinion of the group the only two types of Userids are as follows:

• Systems Programmer Emergency Userid, only to be used in the event of database recovery or database housekeeping
• The batch Userid that is used to perform the RACF database backups using IRRUT200 or the database unload utility (IRRDBU00)

Sundeep Gupta – Royal Bank of Scotland

Question:
Who needs access to the RACF database and under what circumstances?

Answer:
This was discussed in detail and the opinion of the group the only two types of Userids are as follows:

• Systems Programmer Emergency Userid, only to be used in the event of database recovery or database housekeeping
• The batch Userid that is used to perform the RACF database backups using IRRUT200 or the database unload utility (IRRDBU00)

6. Feedback

None received so far