Once a month (or so) we like to pick blog articles from other sources that we feel are interesting enough to talk about on the Planet Mainframe blog. Here are this month’s picks:
5 Quick Ways to Speed up Your z/OS Batch Without Application Changes
An interesting article on the techchannel.com website (https://techchannel.com/): 5 Quick Ways to Speed up Your z/OS Batch Without Application Changes by David Stephens at longpelaexpertise.com.au. The 5 ways include: Less Time Waiting for HSM, VIO, Less Waits or ENQs, Faster Dataset Copies, and Faster Tape. The are some of the (maybe not-so-obvious) basics available to speed up your batch applications. These techniques may not be immediately apparent to many, but this is from the experts. Definitely worth a read. See more here: techchannel.com.
Addressing the Top 5 Mainframe Network Security Vulnerabilities
An interesting look at network security vulnerabilities in mainframe datacenters by John Krautheim of Broadcom on SHARE’d Intelligence, the blog arm of the SHARE organization. Although it’s a promo piece, John does outline some important vulnerabilities that all mainframe shops should be aware of, and should also be actively addressing. Worth a look. See more here: blog.share.org.
Ransomware and the Db2 Database
An interesting series of articles (2) by Db2 expert James Cockayne at Triton Consulting about ransomware and Db2. While most folks are aware of ransomware in general, and the personal threat it means to individuals or small businesses, it can impact large organizations as well – through our favorite database. The first article covers some examples, while the second article talks about prevention. Definitely worth a look. See more here: Part1, Part 2.
Smart phones, global warming, suppliers and nations
An interesting article on the itcandor.com blog about the increase in sales of mobile phones, the political impact on sales, and even global warming. What’s that got to do with the mainframe? Well, indirectly, you can see the drop in sales of “basic phones” and the increase in sales of smartphones. The connection is that people don’t do much online shopping using “basic phones” – and that means that mobile sales are going to continue to impact your mainframe systems – more online purchases, and more online banking – more accesses to mainframe banking and retail transaction processing systems. Are you keeping up? See more at itcandor.com.
Where else to go
While the PlanetMainframe blog is the best place to learn about the latest in mainframe talk, there are several other places worth looking in at: