Corporate IT is growing its deployments of Linux and actively seeking out areas to virtualize it, but distributed Linux systems still have their place in enterprise architectures.

In some cases, systems and architectures are firmly entrenched and a distributed deployment of Linux seems to be the best option. In other cases, there are application- driven arguments for a true, distributed solution. For the majority of IT shops—and for vendors—enterprise IT architecture is sufficiently varied that everyone understands all these   platforms must work well together—and there’s no single…

The cost that results from downtime due to an unscheduled reorganization of an IMS database is very expensive. Since IMS powers many important applications requiring fast, highly available access to data, any outages cost companies dearly. For this reason, IMS DBAs have always spent significant amounts of time monitoring, analyzing, and circumventing space and performance issues that could cause an outage. In addition, planned database outages that use significant computing resources are scheduled on a periodic basis to permit reorganizations to be performed—whether they are needed or not—to prevent the possibility of an unscheduled outage.…

Rapid adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is altering the perception and role of the mainframe in modern business computing, making it much more capable of participation in loosely coupled, standards-based, cross-platform environments. To be more competitive and adaptable to change, organizations with enormous investments in legacy mainframe systems are turning to SOA to  provide more infrastructure flexibility with reduced development cycles and lower costs. However, there are right and wrong ways to go about mainframe SOA enablement.

In an ideal SOA implementation, leveraging assets is a bidirectional affair. That is, mainframe strengths—transactional processing and…

The Holy Grail for developers, particularly Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), has been to write an application once and have it run anywhere. Such has been the promise of Java where, theoretically, an application can be created on one platform and run on another without modification. The developer also is provided with libraries of methods that take care of presentation, database communication, application serving, etc. Java environments are available for numerous platforms, ranging from z/OS to WinTel to embedded devices.

Microsoft also saw the advantages of a fully managed environment with a rich library of functions and…

Regardless of industry or vertical, most organizations have the same objective—to understand their customers’ needs and adapt to changing market dynamics. An organization that can adapt quicker than its competitors can provide better and newer services to its customers and gain a competitive edge. The more rapidly new business processes can be implemented and supported by software services, the greater the advantage. That’s the appeal of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), an approach that promises to help a company become more agile and adaptive through faster development of new software oriented to business processes and…

DB2 9 for z/OS has plenty of great features; everyone is bound to find something they like in the latest version. This article explores:

• A feature that has generated considerable discussion—a new structure type called universal table space
• An enhancement that you may not hear all that much about—a new storage format referred to as reordered row format.

Both of these will significantly improve your DB2 experience by making a couple aspects of DB2 easier to manage.

You may not have heard a…

In DB2 9 for z/OS, IBM has improved DB2’s ability to store and manage Large Object (LOB) data. Previous versions of DB2 were limiting, but with DB2 9, IBM chips away at some of the more annoying LOB limitations. 

FETCHing LOBs  

Prior to DB2 9, there were two methods you could deploy in your programs to fetch LOB data: fetching data into a preallocated buffer or using a LOB locator to retrieve a handle on the data. Both methods could be troublesome. Fetching data into a pre-allocated buffer can cause virtual storage…