IBM CICS Transaction Server (TS) builds on z/OS and IBM System z facilities to provide transaction processing with high availability and scalability at a low cost per transaction and support large transaction volumes with a fast, consistent response time. Many organizations run proven but old CICS applications. New features in z/OS and CICS TS enable these existing applications to meet modern application requirements such as lack of redundancy, ease of scalability, and high availability. …

IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS V5.1 is the latest release of IBM's flagship monitoring product for CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS). This new release contains numerous enhancements designed to perform problem determination diagnostic tasks and facilitate corrective actions quickly and easily…

When it comes to making CICS programs and transactions available to other parts of the enterprise, there are several external interfaces available from within CICS itself. Some of these options will require changing the CICS programs you want to expose, or creating new programs to facilitate external interaction. By contrast, CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) lets you invoke CICS programs and transactions from heterogeneous client applications while leaving the programs or transactions intact. Usually, the only CICS changes required are more connection resource definitions. These and other characteristics make CICS TG a popular, flexible connector for CICS…

Global demands for continuous system uptime and availability are raising the bar for performance in corporate data centers. It’s also causing organizations to revisit their plans for system backup and Disaster Recovery (DR). Essentially, organizations are looking to improve three things:…

This series of articles is intended to help new CICS support people understand the basics of the product, and how it has evolved into the strong, robust software it is. It’s intended to help with basic concepts, underlying components that may not be intuitively obvious, and daily issues that may help everyone support the product. It targets an audience of people who come from distributed systems (UNIX, etc.), recent college graduates with no (or limited) z/OS experience, and applications developers moving into the systems arena…

Your CIO probably needs cheering up. Torn between investing in new technology and reducing spending on almost everything else, his or her job isn’t the easiest. Especially since the last months have demonstrated that four years of budget cuts really do have an impact on the reliability of IT. Add to that “provide better support for the business,” “Get us out of this crisis stronger, leaner, and more competitive” and “Why is it we’re the last ones with a tablet strategy?” and you get the point…

In a previous article, “ISPF Power Tools”, we introduced the Data Set List (DSLIST). Here we will examine some of the basic and advanced options available when using the DSLIST…

Years ago, when a million CICS transactions a day was a lot, the data went on tape because it was so “huge.” Today, 500 million DB2 transactions may be considered small and, in many installations, the jobs that post-process System Management Facility (SMF) data have become among the largest applications. With the rising cost of software to support the ever-burgeoning volume of data, it’s important to decide what to keep and process daily. The tests run and examples provided here were all conducted with MXG, but the same techniques could be applied to other software performing the same functions…

This series of articles is intended to help new CICS support people understand the basics of the product and how it has evolved into the robust software that it is. Besides the basics, these articles will examine underlying components that may not be obvious and daily issues that face those who support the product. This article targets anyone who works with distributed systems (UNIX, etc.), recent college graduates with no or limited z/OS experience, and applications developers moving into the systems arena…

Let's face it. You've been avoiding Java in CICS, haven't you? We can hear you mumbling about performance, scalability, the lack of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and the propensity of Java-based scripting languages to proliferate. You don't want all this airy-fairy stuff polluting your finely tuned CICS regions, hogging storage, and gobbling MIPS…