Featured sessions
OPM-1547 System z Meet the Experts
Learn how to make your company's most important asset even more strategic. Your System z technology questions answered by an all-star panel of IBM's best and brightest Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, and Master Inventors. You will have access to System z technical experts from IBM WebSphere, Rational, Information Management, and Tivoli. Hear why some companies are investing in System z.
Moderators: Phil Weintraub, IBM; Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM; Mike Baskey, IBM
OPM-1515 Analyst Insight: Importance of Service Management in integrating Mainframe into Cloud
Analyst John R. Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst from Forrester Research, discusses the critical importance of service management in a mixed mainframe/distributed cloud environment, and how it can help achieve the promise of value for cloud. This session will look at the types of workloads in private and hybrid clouds where System z can provide value, and what's new with SmartCloud on System z. John will address current customer challenges in a cloud environment and what workloads fit best on System z. Then Rich Edwards, Tivoli z Product Manager, will discuss what's new from Tivoli to help enterprise customers successfully implement a private/hybrid SmartCloud across both distributed and Systems z.
Speakers: John R. Rymer, Forrester Research; Rich Edwards, IBM
More featured sessions:
DSP-2184 zSecure Birds of a Feather - Compliance with PCI - DSS and OthersRepresentatives from Banco Itau will help provide an open discussion on zSecure and regulator compliance. As the biggest private Brazilian bank, Ita has critical business applications deployed in the z/OS environment and must be in compliance with regulations like SOX, PCI-DSS and other regulatory requirements. The goal of this birds of a feather open discussion is to show how IBM-zSecure supports the Security, Auditing and Compliance departments for risk management and compliance.
Speaker: Glinda Cummings, IBM- IAM-2147 Mainframes Get Smart with Enhanced Security IntelligenceRegulatory and industry requirements are increasing, making it difficult for enterprises to keep up without draining valuable resources. This customer panel discussion focuses on what it means to effectively manage compliance and audit with IBM Security zSecure portfolio in a world where the only constant, is constant change. Capabilities include best practices with designing, enforcing and monitoring security policies for users and their activities, information, systems and processes on the mainframe to automate auditing, customize reporting, optimize security intelligence and demonstrate compliance.
Speaker: Glinda Cummings, IBM
Automation sessions
- AOZ-1067 DevOps for the Mainframe: Leveraging Continuous Integration, the Cloud and Beyond to Deliver z/OS ApplicationsDevOps is an emerging trend encouraging collaboration between operations and development teams, in order to focus on increasing the amount of functionality delivered to the business. Getting all team members in sync and driving change on the mainframe is extremely complex, where change involves multiple parties -- from storage and system programmers to security personnel to DBAs to developers -- that are involved in even minor system changes to business critical systems. This presentation outlines the applicability of DevOps for mainframe application delivery, including tools and practices from both IBM Rational and IBM Tivoli.
Speakers: David Myers, IBM; Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM - AOZ-1112 Monitoring And Controlling Virtual Tape Units In A GDPS EnvironmentSince IBM DB2 9, we have had the ability to store XML natively in DB2 tables. GDPS is a disaster recovery tool that provides the user with functions to prevent data loss. This lessons gives examples how to coordinate the availability of tape units in an IBM VTS system according to GDPS' SITE availability.
Speaker: Dietmar Knodel, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, Client - AOZ-1251 Customer Migration Experience from BMC IMF to Omegamon for IMS and System Automation on zOSMain purpose of the presentation is to show that a replacement of BMC IMF by Omegamon IMS and System Automation for zOS is feasible . This presentation describes the main activities performed at the customer INPS during the migration project aimed at replacing BMC IMF with a solution based on Omegamon for IMS and System Automation for z/OS for IMS monitoring. The presentation is organized in two parts: 1.Part1 describes how the project has been organized highlighting the main things to be considered such as product versions, skills required, main risks to be take into account, etc?2.Part2 illustrates the project from a technical perspective describing how the Omegamon for IMS and SA functionalities have been implemented in order to replace the BMC IMF solution and providing a set of best practices to be reused in other similar activities.
Speaker: Francesco Marinucci, IBM - AOZ-1377 Trends in System Automation on z for the Smaller EnterpriseCome and learn about new capabilities for singleplex System z customers. You will get an exciting user experience for automating your System z environment. Whether you want to improve your system and application availability, manage a zEnterprise system or increase your automation degree in your system to maximize efficiency, you will get the right capabilities. This presentation gives you an overview on the next big thing out of Tivoli automation to optimize your workload management based on your automation and availability requirements.
Speakers: Uwe Gramm, IBM; Hans Geissler, IBM - AOZ-1431 Integrating Automation Between Batch and TransmissionsUsing System Automation and NetView, this presentation will show a method to coordinate arrival of FTP and Connect:Direct (NDM) transmissions with batch flows managed by job scheduling product Control-M. The audience will be walked through the design of the solution, as well as automation policy, REXX, NetView PIPE, NetView AT, and Assembler coding techniques used in the automation side of the solution. Lastly, the presentation will touch on what was needed in FTP and Control-M to complete the process.
Speaker: Paul Koniar, FIS, Client - AOZ-1470 Unlocking the power of System Automation 3.4Save Money and increase availability with System Automation for z/OS V3.4 Learn how new capabilities are helping customers increase productivity and simplify operations. This version of SA z/OS comes with a full bucket of new and improved functionality. Whether you want to manage zEnterprise systems, you'd like to automate messages only issued to a job log, or whether you are still in favor of SDF - this, and many other enhancements and new functions to facilitate the daily tasks of your operators will be presented in this session. This presentation addresses clients having SA z/OS knowledge.
Speakers: Richard Rothermel, IBM; Dietmar Knodel, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, Client - AOZ-1472 IBM zEnterprise Automation & AvailabilityWith the latest zEnterprise hardware, not only the classical mainframe hardware but also new blade infrastructure was introduced to the mainframe platform. Business applications can be spread across the different hardware components and virtualization layers. Therefore, the management of blades and virtual servers will have more and more relevance for business applications. This presentation explains new capabilities of the System Automation (SA) product family for the zEnterprise hardware and virtual server management, and describes how these capabilities can provide an integrated solution that manages the hybrid hardware as a single entity. SA z/OS Processor Operations monitors and controls processor hardware, zEnterprise BladeCenter Extensions hardware (zBX) and VM guest systems operations. SA Application Manager on the other side monitors and controls application availability end to end.
Speakers: Juergen Holtz, IBM; Thomas Quadflieg, Generali, Client - AOZ-1474 System and Batch Automation IntegrationSince many years SA for z/OS and TWS are working in concert letting each component doing what it does best. There are several interfaces between SA z/OS and TWS. This session gives an overview of these interfaces, its pros/cons and the benefits you gain in using them. It shows how the various interfaces can be used efficiently and what needs to be kept in mind when using the function.
Speaker: Richard Rothermel, IBM - AOZ-1477 Integrating Monitors and AutomationApplication availability cannot only be measured in terms of uptime but also in terms of how well the applications perform. Smarter operations can help to avoid degraded availability or limit the consequences of temporary unavailability. Integrating performance monitors and automation enables such smarter operations as IBM Tivoli System Automation for z/OS (SA z/OS) can reach out to IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON monitors for CICS, DB2, IMS, and z/OS for exceptional metrics and feed them into the automation for corrective action. Come to this session to learn what capabilities are offered by SA z/OS and how to accomplish an integration that matters to your business.
Speaker: Juergen Holtz, IBM - AOZ-1478 Automating your IMSplex with System Automation for z/OSIBM Tivoli System Automation for z/OS (SA z/OS) has greatly modernized its automation functions for IMS over the last releases. The IMS best practices policy gives you a jump start into state-of-the-art IMS automation including start and stop, recovery and monitoring activities all aiming to keep your middleware up and running at highest possible availability. In this session, you get an overview on how SA z/OS integrates the startup, shutdown, recovery, and monitoring of IMS applications into its base functionality and shows you how to customize the automation policy to your specific needs on monitoring and recovery of failures.
Speakers: Hans Geissler, IBM; Paul Koniar, FIS, Client - AOZ-1485 Customer Panel Discussion on the Value in System Automation for z/OSThis is a panel discussion with customers that will cover the value that they feel they achieved in working with Tivoli System Automation development for how they influenced System Automation, impacted development strategy and brought value to their companies by investing time and feedback to help modernize System z automation.
Speakers: Uwe Gramm, IBM; Dietmar Knodel, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, Client - AOZ-1486 The Power of AutomationThe IBM Tivoli System Automation suite plays an important role to improve system and application availability for planned and unplanned outages and for fast and robust operations in a continuously changing IT-environment. This presentation provides an overview of the existing automation capabilities in Tivoli as well as a strategic outlook on future IT trends and technologies, which can only be managed by smart and sustainable automation solutions.
Speakers: Heinz-Hubert Weusthof, IBM; Bina Hallman, IBM - AOZ-1518 The Magic of Tivoli System AutomationWhat makes Tivoli System Automation stand out is its unique policy based and goal driven automation. This session explains what it is, how it can help reducing implementation costs by avoiding scripts and related problems, how it can improve automation quality and how it can help avoiding operations errors and increase availability.Policy based and goal driven automation is brought to you by IBM Tivoli System Automation for z/OS, IBM Tivoli System Automation Application Manager, and IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms.
Speakers: Joachim Schmalzried, IBM; Paul Koniar, FIS, Client - AOZ-1775 How TCS integrated SA for z/OS Health Statuses into their Operations ConsoleTime Customer Service Inc wanted their operations console to reflect the true status of their applications and middleware, which SA for z/OS already has. But they did not want to force their operators to learn how to use SA's 3270 interface. They were able to accomplish this by simply leveraging SA's Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) built-in integration. Now operators can quickly see the health of key applications through a simplified intuitive customized dashboard.
Speakers: Terrence Joyce, Time Customer Service Inc:, Client; Ernie Gilman, IBM - AOZ-2164 Integrating Operational Tools Through NetView on z/OSA practical approach to reducing operational costs on z/OS. This session will discuss ways to trigger NetView automation based on OMEGAMON thresholds, then automate the response to those alerts, including automatically opening a TSRM trouble ticket. Notifications can be sent immediately to the appropriate destinations including OMNIbus, email, and paging, and the major impact on the end-to-end application can be seen in System Automation Application Manager.
Speakers: Scott Larry Green, IBM; Kirk Bean, IBM
Visibility sessions
- AOZ-1065 PARMGEN Configuration Method with OMEGAMON XE Migration from 4.2 to 5.1 User's ExperienceTrinity Health is the 10th largest health system in the nation and the fourth largest Catholic health care system in the country, by total number of hospitals and total bed count, respectively. This technical presentation will benefit IBM mainframe system programmers that are considering using the PARMGEN configuration method over the ICAT approach. The presentation will cover the benefits of using PARMGEN in a SYSPLEX environment as well as covering the recent enhancements to PARMGEN that allow for rapid deployment of OMEGAMON XE software upgrades and periodic maintenance.
Speaker: Rich Russ, Trinity Health, Client - AOZ-1094 Applications Modernization with Improved Visibility and Control Using TADz and CICS-IA: A Customer StoryCustomer decided, after many mergers & acquisitions, to review its mainframe applications and to modernize them for optimization and costs reduction. To decide the best strategy for modernizing applications, customer needed real-time data on application usage. The solution developed has a step-by-step approach: first target was to obtain an effective and complete view of the entire application portfolio to prioritize the modernization. The result was obtained joining data from change management system with TADz run time execution information. Second step was to optimize the stable applications identifying potential savings and utilizing with the maximum efficiency CICS applications. In this phase CICS IA product was used. Customer now has an accurate, up to date, effective inventory about application usage. This solution allows an easier application housekeeping and improved control about program execution in production environment.
Speakers: Meg Fabio Riva, IBM; Giovanni Fadabini, UBISS, Client - AOZ-1109 IBM & ISO Collaboration to Reduce TCO of Tivoli Suite of ProductsLooking to decrease your monitoring MIPs overhead? This session discusses how IBM, as part of the release upgrade from v 4.2 to v 5.1, partnered jointly with the Insurance Services Office (ISO) IT group to evaluate how using the new OMEGAMON V5.1 monitoring capabilities could be leveraged to save mainframe MIPs and decrease costs. This ability, to take advantage of the new releases of the OMEGAMON portfolio capabilities, can provide both decrease resource usage and improved system availability. ISO's pragmatic approach is to evaluate what reductions could be achieved to improve the ROI of the tools and bring down the overall usage of products. Learn how to make your IT environment more efficient and cost effective in this session.
Speakers: Robert Christian, Insurance Service Office, Inc., Client; Rocky McMahan, IBM - AOZ-1257 Customer Panel Discussion: Value in OMEGAMON v 5.1This is a panel discussion with customers that will cover the value that they feel they achieved in working with Tivoli OMEGAMON development for how they influenced OMEGAMON, impacted development strategy and brought value to their companies by investing time and feedback to help modernize z performance monitoring. Participating in this discussion are customers from Trinity Health, ISO, Zagreb Bank and Caremark CVS all with different value perspectives of working with development and the products themselves.
Speakers: Mike Goodman, IBM; Rich Russ, Trinity Health, Client - AOZ-1408 zBx Automation with System Automation Application ManagerThe IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBx) was introduced in Generali within a project in November 2011.In that project an automation solution for the whole zBx environment was realized with System Automation Application Manager. Virtual servers as well as applications are automated under this single point of control. Thereby the Control Center is now capable aside from the daily business to handle complex situations such as hardware maintenance and disaster recovery tests in an uncomplicated and efficient way. This presentation will give you an overview about the challenges and solutions during implementing this automation solution for the zBx environment.
Speaker: Thomas Quadflieg, Generali Deutschland Informatik Services GmbH, Client - AOZ-1650 What's New in GDPS V3.10Each year IBM delivers a new release of GDPS. This year is no exception. These items include synergy items with IBM Disk and Tape enhancements, extensions to the functions already provided for z/VM, Linux on z, and distributed clusters, additional zBX support, and items addressing specific client requirements, and a number of general RAS enhancements. Come along and find out what these new capabilities are and how they can be exploited. This session assumes that you are already familiar, at a high level, with the GDPS offerings..
Speaker: David Raften, IBM - AOZ-1700 Anatomy of a Disaster Averted: How Poland's Ministry of Justice Protected Its RegistriesPoland's Ministry of Justice is responsible for maintaining and providing access for citizens to several critical state registries, including the National Land and Court Registers. As the availability and quality of these services is vital to the functioning of a modern state, a decision was made to base them on the most stable and secure platform available: IBM System z with a DB2 database and Tivoli OMEGAMON tools for monitoring. The critical importance of the registries also necessitated the addition of Disaster Recovery to the solution, using Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) and Tivoli System Automation. No-one, of course, ever seeks a condition where DR needs to be used, but the ministry was glad it had taken adequate precautions in October 2012 when a disk array failed with a fatal error.... putting all the system components to their ultimate test.
Speakers: Krzysztof Turek, Polish Ministry of Justice, Client; Janusz Szczesny, Polish Ministry of Justice, Client - AOZ-1745 OMEGAMON XE - What's New with z MonitoringIBM has worked with customers to understand their top mainframe monitoring and management requirements. Based on those requirements, Tivoli has redesigned the OMEGAMON family to provide better monitoring, faster problem management, improved maintenance and decreased resource usage. This presentation will discuss what’s new in the redesigned OMEGAMON, and how you can more easily monitor and maintain your entire mainframe environment, with an Enhanced 3270 User Interface, Problem Solving Scenarios, Self-Describing Agents, and zEnterprise/zBX support. The redesigned OMEGAMON provides increased mainframe visibility, decreased costs and reduced risks.
Speaker: Mike Goodman, IBM - AOZ-1773 The OMEGAMON MashupFind out how an OMEGAMON mashup at CVS Caremark revolutionized how they solved complex problems. CVS Caremark was looking to more quickly find the cause for slow running jobs. Is it High CPU, long running DB2 Threads, DASD I/O response time, or TCP/IP connection issues? CVS Caremark was able to create an OMEGAMON mashup that figured it all out. One mouse click, done! You will hear how CVS Caremark was able to quickly configure OMEGAMON's TEP into a real time mashup in this joint session with Shawn Beardsley from CVS Caremark and Ernie Gilman from IBM.
Speakers: Shawn Beardsley, CVS Caremark , Client; Ernie Gilman, IBM - AOZ-2040 Building a Private Cloud on zEnterprise with TivoliCompanies are looking for ways to transform IT service delivery to address their escalating operational costs and to gain agility. Private cloud computing is a way to achieve this; but, when it comes to cloud computing, not all platforms are equal. Private clouds needs a well-managed and all-inclusive platform where systems are elastic, workloads can be heterogeneous, service levels are automatically met, and overall IT labor costs are dramatically reduced. IBM zEnterprise provides a multi-architecture, fully-virtualized platform for implementation of a private cloud. When coupled with service management software from IBM Tivoli, zEnterprise becomes a full-fledged private cloud environment with unique support for virtualization management, automation, and standardization. In this session, well discuss how a private cloud computing environment built on zEnterprise and Tivoli provides flexible IT service delivery at the lowest cost per workload.
Speakers: Emily Farmer, IBM; Mary Davis, IBM - AOZ-2165 Integrated z/OS Storage Management - Providing a More Efficient SolutionWhat do you have to do to perform your storage management functions on a day to day basis? This session will show you how integrated solutions and techniques can save time and money for managing your I/O subsystem, HSM, Catalogs, allocations and even expand to other platforms. Storage is a common denominator and is an essential component of your Online systems that are critical to your business, see how you can have more storage visibility and expanded management capability.
Speaker: Kevin Hosozawa, IBM - AOZ-2168 Approaches to Enterprise-Wide Monitoring and Problem Solving on zUnleash the power of OMEGAMON across all z systems with enterprise wide displays, tools, and alerts. Focus will be on one-stop dashboards that can be easily tailored to the business, find commands that make it easy to locate a specific entry (like a TCPIP address), using built in problem solving scenarios, and automating responses to problems through OMEGAMON situations. Demo on building an enterprise wide view will use data from multiple sources (OMEGAMON for Mainframe Networks and NetView) to show the importance of product integration.
Speaker: Ernie Gilman, IBM
Hands-on labs
- E01 IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for z/OS - Version 5.1 Enhanced 3270 User Interface OverviewYou explore the Enhanced 3270 user interface that was introduced with OMEGAMON XE on z/OS 5.1 and OMEGAMON XE for CICS 5.1. You practice on a z/OS 1.13 system with OMEGAMON XE on z/OS 5.1 and OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS 5.1.
Skill level: intermediate - E02 OMEGAMON ParmGen - Installing and Configuing OMEGAMON Gaster with the PARMGEN MethodUsing the new OMEGAMON configuration method called PARMGEN, you configure environments, add products, and change parameters. This method is an alternative to using the current tool, ICAT. You configure new run time environments (RTE) using PARMGEN or convert from ICAT to PARMGEN and upgrade an existing environment to retain your current customized RTE.
Skill level: Advanced - E03 IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE Version 5.1 - Problem Solving ScenariosYou examine problem solving scenarios using the OMEGAMON XE 5.1 product portfolio. The scenarios include z/OS, CICS, IMS, messaging, storage, and mainframe networks. You use the Enhanced 3270 user interface during the lab exercise. You practice on a z/OS 1.13 system with OMEGAMON XE 5.1.
Skill level: Advanced - E07 IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - Introduction to SchedulingYou discover the functions performed by a job scheduler. You implement those features in Tivoli Workload Scheduler 8.6, using the web-based Dynamic Scheduling Console.
Skill level: Introductory - E08 IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - Scheduling SQL and File Transer JobsYou can define these job types without having specific skills on the applications where the job runs. You schedule and run job types with advanced options, including file transfer and SQL jobs.
Skill level: Introductory - E09 IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - Cross-Platform Scheduling with Tivoli Workload Scheduler and Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z/OSYou use the new Tivoli Workload Scheduler 8.6 cross-dependency feature to synchronize activities between different scheduling environments. With cross-dependencies, you can define dependencies on batch activities that another scheduling environment manages.
Skill level: Introductory - E10 IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler - Scheduling in Dynamic EnvironmentsYou use scheduling capabilities in Tivoli Workload Scheduler 8.6 to schedule jobs in dynamic environments.
Skill level: Intermediate - E11 IBM Tivoli System Automation Application Manager - AUuomating a Composite Application Using End-to-End Automation and ITM AgentsYou create an automation policy for Tivoli Monitoring managed resources. You define an automation policy for a WebSphere application server and an Apache web server. You create a policy that defines start and stop commands and maps the different monitoring attributes of Tivoli Monitoring to the Tivoli System Automation Application Manager (SA AM) online and offline values.
Skill level: Intermediate - E12 IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms - DB2 High Avilability and Disaster RecoveryFind out how an OMEGAMON mashup at To learn how the IBM DB2 High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) feature works with automatic failover, you make DB2 highly available using IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms. Included with this session are three virtualized Linux hosts preinstalled with the necessary software packages (DB2 production installation without instance, db2_install). However, no other configuration was applied so that you have a realistic setup experience from start to finish.
Skill level: Intermediate
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Register for the special z reception
Session spotlight
Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst John R. Rymer discusses the role of service management in achieving the promise of value for cloud in a mixed mainframe/distributed environment.
Special reception
Join the System z and AOTC community at Pulse for a Vegas lounge-style reception on Tuesday, March 5. Hosted by Phil Weintraub, Vice President, zEnterprise Software Sales North America.