Michael Platt's WebLog : Mainframe

Events, Events Events!

Michael Platt — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:11:00 GMT

So looking through my calendar for the next couple of weeks I have a ton of presentations to give and events to attend. First of all tomorrow at 2pm BST I am giving my Integration and Interop presentation, latest version, as a webcast which should be interesting. I have given this presentation as a 2.5 hour session and a 30 min session and had too much both times so an hour webcast will be interesting.

Next on Wednesday we have an MVP day where I will be presenting the half hour version of the same thing and then on Thursday I will be going to the John Craddock AD day here at Reading which looks very interesting and will help to crisp up my thoughts around IdM and organizational mapping.

On Monday next week (the 11^th) I will be running a session on Architectural Failures at SPA 2005 in Bedfordshire. This is not a presentation but a tutorial / workshop format where I go through some examples and then the attendees add in their ideas. I have never done anything like this before so I am a bit nervous but I think I have some good examples so hopefully it will go well.

Then off on the airplane to Edinburgh (shame because I will miss some of SPA) for the first of the Technet Roadshows at the Corn Exchange on the 12^th and 13^th where I will be doing the Keynote on DSI and the one hour integration and interop talk on the 12^th followed by the keynote on Yukon on the 13^th.

Then on the 21st of April at Reading there is a half day session on Enterprise Library being run by one of the Patterns and Practices PM’s from Redmond. There will be both a customer session in the morning and a partner session in the afternoon. I haven’t been keeping up with what has been happening in the Patterns space recently and so this will be useful to get up to date with how the application blocks are getting pulled into a library.

Further out the next Architect Forum is on June 16^th in the Cavendish Center in London and will be on Connected Systems (Microsoft speak for SOA).

So it looks like an eventful (yuk!) couple of weeks!

HIS 2004 SP2 ships

Michael Platt — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 09:35:00 GMT

and is available from http://www.microsoft.com/hiserver/downloads/2000.asp . All the fixes rolled up into one!

Cant wait to see if some of the bugs that have been irritating me have been fixed.

Interop Technet event post mortem

Michael Platt — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:45:00 GMT

So last Thursday I did my first Technet evening interop event based on Simon Guests Interop slides. It was a small and select audience and went reasonably well (I hardly ever feel things go very well). As always I was worried about not enough material and as always there was far too much. In fact it became a bit like a long reference manual or list so I was glad to have a couple of stories and a demo to break it up.

I used HIS 2005 to demo most of the different levels of interop as there are examples of network, security, database and application interoperability in HIS. I also got the whole demo to work which I was very pleased by, I will blogcast the other sections that I have not got to work in the past when I find my Microphone!

A couple of thoughts about the evening; firstly how big the whole area is, the present talk is pretty daunting in the amount of things it covers but it is far from complete. A full talk would be huge.

Secondly is how nice it is to give these talks as the audience tends to be more mature and so it is fun in the intervals to reminisce. In this case it was a gentleman who was still running VME on a Fujitsu machine so we had a chat about George 3!

Now I have to prepare for a DSI talk I am giving at the Architecture forum on Operations and Management tomorrow. I have managed to get an early demo of Indy to give so it should be interesting.

Infrastructure layers

Michael Platt — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:11:00 GMT

Following onfrom my blog yesterday I have collated all the feedback I got (Thanks!) and came up with these major levels and elements in the levels:

Hardware

1. Hardware (routers, servers, client devices, wireless, storage (SANS / NAS))

Network

2. Networks (Protocols, DNS / Bind, Wireless, VPN, VOIP, dynamic routing)

3. Directory (LDAP, AD, iplanet, NDS, edirectory).

4. Security (Physical, Standards, Kerberos, Certificates, IDS, Virus detection, SSO, IRM, Identity, IM, WS-Sec, Federation)

5. Firewalls (Proxy’s, IDS and firewalls)

Base

6. Web Servers (Apache, IIS)

7. File and Print (Windows, NFS, Novell, LU0)

8. Clients (Apple, Unix, Novell, Win 98, 3270, 5250, Mobile, Office, Browser)

9. Platform (Virtual Servers, Windows, UNIX, LINUX, Zos, AS400, SUN OS)

10. Fault Tolerance (High availability, Clustering, Load Balancing, Backup, Geoclusters)

Packaged Solutions

11. Data (DB types, DB suppliers, Stored Procs, Data Access, Data Formats, Data Transform)

12. CRM (SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Great Plains, Reporting, BI, Commerce Server)

13. Messaging and Collaboration (IM, Lotus, Groupwise, Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, SPS, STS, Portals, Fax)

Custom Solutions

14. Applications (VB, Delphi, COM, J2EE, NET, Java / JSP, C++, Cobol, WS)

15. Transactions (ES, MTS, OSI/TP, Tuxedo, J2EE, CICS, IMS)

16. Process (MSMQ, MQSERIES, Tibco RV, Biztalk, Websphere)

Management and Operations Process

17. Deployment and Management (SNMP, WMI, MOM, SMS, Tivoli, CA, HP)

18. Design, Planning and Operational processes (MSF, ITIL, MOF, COBIT, PM)

19. Frameworks (Zachmann, FEA, RM-ODP, TOGAF, BAIT)

Now I can use these to frame my interop presentation and ensure that all the levels are covered. Interestingly if you map products across these levels they tend to be a stake or stovepipe right through the levels.

For example HIS 2004 (SNA Server) provides support at levels 2,4,7,8,10,11,14,15,17 and 18 for a specific technology (mainframes)

Technet Event on Interop

Michael Platt — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 21:23:00 GMT

On Thursday next week I am presenting at a Technet Evening on Interop and so am putting the talk together. I don’t particularly want to go into a huge amount of detail on each Microsoft Interop product but want to give a structure or architecture for thinking about interop, talk about the issues at each level and then use the products as exemplars.

So my thoughts about the agenda are:

Why interop

Approaches for interop (ESB, SOA etc)

An Architectural framework for interop

Infrastructure interop

Application interop

Management and process interop

The future of Interop

With a few demos thrown in. (if I can get them to work, my last HIS demo was not a great success!)

The MS products covered will be:

SFU

SFN

MIIS

.NET

SQL Server

MSMQ

HIS

Biztalk

MOM

SMS

So it won’t be a in depth drill down into each!

I hope to make the event interactive to find out what areas people are interested in so as to refine this talk. Let me know if you are going to be there or would like anything else covered.

As always, Simon Guest is the MS guru on interop

Mainframe Interop using SLI

Michael Platt — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:55:00 GMT

Simon has just published an article about mainframe interop using Screen logic Integration (SLI). In it he very clearly describes the various ways of interfacing to a mainframe before drilling down into SLI.

I am a big Business Logic Interface (BLI) fan and dislike SLI as an approach but it does have its uses (e.g. when the mainframe code is too tangled to do BLI). The reason I dislike SLI is that in my experience it can very heavily load the mainframe which is fine if you are trying to sell mainframes but not so good otherwise.

I have a number of theories about mainframe interop and performance that I must blog about.

Anyway Simon’s article is well worth reading although it could be made more readable with a Blogcast J.

Billg on Interop

Michael Platt — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:37:00 GMT

Last week Bill Gates wrote an email about interop which is interesting because emails from Bill indicate a strong interest by Microsoft J) His interop premise was threefold:

1. The need for interop will never go away.

2. The only way interop had worked in the past has been through interfacing software and hard work; not any of the IT snake oils that have been touted.

3. The way we will get interop to work in the future is via interfacing standards (XML and WS-*).

I agree with all he says although I think it will be a long and hard road. I also think that architecture, abstraction and modelling will play a big part in making it happen but then I guess if you are Bill you can leave the details to peons like me J.

Do go and read the email and have a look at the interop site (it is after all interop month). The best MS interop blog is Simon Guest’s.

Host Integration Server 2004 IP DLC Setup, dependant connection configuration and test

Michael Platt — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 19:52:00 GMT

Three weeks ago I did a demo of the Host Integration Server 2004 IP DLC setup and configuration at the UK IT Forum in Birmingham. I have now recorded the dependant (3270) connection as a two part 3 minute blogcast:

Part 1: Setting up the IP DLC Link.

Part 2: Configuring and testing a dependant connection on the IP DLC link.

Enjoy!

Interoprability and HIS webcasts

Michael Platt — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 08:50:00 GMT

So January is interop month at Microsoft:

https://www.interopmonth.com/home/

HIS 2005 are doing a number of webcasts as part of that:

TechNet Webcast: HIS Bi-directional Transaction and Data Inter-op Between Windows and IBM Mainframe Systems (Level 200)

Thursday, February 03, 2005 - 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM Pacific Time

Stan Murawski, Technical Mainframe Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

This webcast demonstrates the peer level inter-operation capabilities provided by Microsoft Host Integration Server (HIS) 2004, where a program on either system can use the other as a database or transaction server. Programs running on either side can call programs on the other, within the context of a transaction. Either system can be a database server to the other. Join this webcast to find out all about it.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39961

TechNet Webcast: Security Integration between Windows and IBM Mainframes (Level 200)

Thursday, February 10, 2005 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time

Stan Murawski, Technical Mainframe Evangelist, Microsoft

This webcast introduces the mainframe professional to security on the Windows Server System. Join this webcast to learn how to integrate security including end-user single sign-on between Windows and IBM OS/390 and zSeries Operating Systems.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39965

TechNet Webcast: HIS Bi-directional Transaction and Data Inter-op Between Windows and IBM Mainframe Systems (Level 200)

Thursday, February 03, 2005 - 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM Pacific Time

Stan Murawski, Technical Mainframe Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=39961

Mainframe at IT Forum

Michael Platt — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 04:18:00 GMT

I am giving the HIS talk at the UK IT Forum on Jan 13 in Birmingham and so am busy preparing. The product group have been incredibly helpful and the webcasts make a huge difference from the last time I did a HIS talk (COMTI Cedar Bank Demo). I am going to do some blogcasts as I get each piece going.