IBM Z and LinuxONE Community Blog

IBM Z and LinuxONE Community - All Blog Entries

Meet the IBM Champions! The clock is ticking, nominations close November 29

By Shari Chiara posted 10 hours ago
I could not be prouder to spend so much time with our incredible IBM Champions, especially those that carry the torch for IBM Z and LinuxONE. If you’ve ever been at an IBM TechXchange event, and wondered who the inspiring individuals in blue were? Meet the IBM Champions. This group is comprised of passionate clients and partners, educators, students, and open source leaders. They dedicate their free time to advocating for IBM technology, sharing wisdom and uplifting the community. In other words, making the mainframe community even better. I get goosebumps watching this video that captures the incredible energy and enthusiasm ...

Giving Thanks for Innovation: IBM Developer for z/OS 16.0.6 Serves Up Hot Updates

By Andrew Tram posted 11 hours ago
2024 — what a year, amirite? For those of us here in the States (and anyone else who joins in), the holiday season is about to kick off in full swing, starting with Thanksgiving. Personally, I’m all about the food and maybe several hot toddies to keep things cozy. But for others, it’s a time to be a little more reflective: recapping what we’re thankful for, looking forward to what’s ahead in 2025, and naturally, celebrating everything we love about IBM Developer for z/OS 🦃! Well, I’m here to make sure you’re the MVP of your holiday gathering (or at least your next team meeting) by dishing out what’s fresh and exciting in IDz 16.0.6! And for those who ...

Announcing IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS V6.1

By Mick Harris posted 17 hours ago
On November 22, 2024 IBM released IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS V6.1. This new release introduces Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to help clients to quickly identify transaction performance abnormalities. The release also delivers significantly greater capacity to monitor transactions together with features which make it easier to identify issues and manage features, all while reducing the General CPU consumption of the product. With the introduction of IBM Z OMEGAMON AI Insights V2.1 with IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS V6.1 Machine Learning capabilities are included with the product. It is now possible to alert on significant divergence of CPU and transaction ...

IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition for z/OS, version 21 is now available!

By James Tang posted 19 hours ago
IBM Semeru Runtime Certified Edition for z/OS, v ersion 21, is the latest Java SDK release on z/OS, delivering a high performance Java runtime and development kit that supports Java 21 Standard Edition specification. As clients embark on their hybrid cloud and AI journey on IBM z/OS, Java 21 enables clients to use the latest Java language features, improved performance, and enhanced security for their workloads on-premise and across cloud platforms. IBM Semeru provides a n SDK and Runtime Environment for building highly robust, scalable, and reliable modern enterprise applications, and enables Java developers and z/OS clients to use new ...

z/OS Connect 3.0.87 now supports additionalProperties and the PATCH method

By Kate Bittles posted 22 hours ago
z/OS Connect 3.0.8 7 is now available with additionalProperties and PATCH for API requester request and response schemas, support for z/OS Java 21 plus, upgrades to the z/OS Connect Gradle plug-ins and some more APAR fixes. For more information, see PH63792: z/OS Connect V3.0.87 . If you’re new to IBM z/OS Connect, find out more here. New with z/OS Connect 3.0.87 z/OS Connect API requester now supports calling OpenAPI described APIs using the PATCH method. Up until now, when updating a resource in an API we have used the PUT method to indicate an update and the body of the request supplied the complete entity to replace the one ...

The new IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for Storage 6.1 has been released

By Aleksandr Agoltsov posted 23 hours ago
Today, November 22 2024 we have released the new IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for Storage 6.1 which provides a storage management and corrective action capability to help prevent storage-related outages. Administrators can maintain a healthy, efficient z/OS storage environment with automated actions based on rich storage monitoring capabilities for z/OS I/O subsystem performance, space management, and storage availability to help ensure optimal performance. Version 6.1 provides the following: Integration with IBM Z OMEGAMON AI Insights: IBM Z OMEGAMON AI Insights allows users to leverage ML capabilities to build custom models on storage data streamed through OMEGAMON ...

KI für IBM Z: watsonx Workshop in Frankfurt, ein voller Erfolg!

By Maximilian Rautland posted 2 days ago
English version below: Am 12. & 13. November 2024 fand in unserer IBM Lokation im Tower One in Frankfurt unser erster watsonx-Workshop mit dem Titel " KI für IBM Z: Modernisierung & Automatisierung " statt. Über 35 Teilnehmer haben begeistert Erfahrungen mit den neuesten watsonx-Lösungen sammeln können. Der Fokus lag auf zwei KI-gestützten Produkten: IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z und IBM watsonx Assistant for Z , die neue Möglichkeiten in den Bereichen Modernisierung und Automatisierung von Mainframe-Anwendungen bieten. Tag 1: watsonx Code Assistant for Z Der erste Workshop-Tag widmete sich dem watsonx Code Assistant ...

Ethical AI: Balancing Innovation and Responsibility

By Philip D'Souza posted 2 days ago
With great power comes great responsibility, a statement that could easily be applied to the rapid evolution of AI in the last couple of years. Few would dispute that AI’s potential for either positive change or harm depends on its responsible use. We need to move quickly to ensure AI systems are developed, deployed, and operated safely and ethically while maximizing their positive impact. At the extreme, some fear that AI could ‘go rogue’ and act against the interests of humanity. OpenAI even created a Superalignment team dedicated to ensuring AI remains aligned with human values - preparing for a future in which it surpasses human intelligence. ...

Tekton builds for zOS workload

By Zoran Krleza posted 2 days ago
If you are slightly interested in DevOps, Tekton and/or IBM Mainframes, then this article with my rambling about these topics might be of interest to you. But first -a short paragraph with trashing on Jenkins 😀 I hear more and more complaints about Jenkins from our clients. Why? Well, to be honest, Jenkins "does the job". It's a time-proven solution, and before K8s and OpenShift it was definitely the best solution for your CI/CD pipelines. But even before Jenkins there were CI/CD tools that "did the job" (e.g. Ant) and those were substituted with younger, better, user friendlier tools. Now, the question is - is there a newer tool that better meets the ...

Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE Open Source Software Report: October 2024

By Elizabeth K. Joseph posted 2 days ago
Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE use the s390x hardware architecture, so for some applications a little work sometimes has to be done so they compile and run as expected. This work is often done as a collaboration between the open source projects themselves and a team at IBM that helps with validation that the software is working as expected. This effort is an on going collaboration with every release of the software needing to be validated. For the month of October 2024, the team worked to also validate recent versions of the following: Alfresco Ansible Apache Cassandra Apache Cloudstack Apache CouchDB Apache Kafka Apache Tomcat Bazel ...

z/Action! Podcast: Evolving the Payments Ecosystem with ACI Worldwide

By Natalie Carrillo posted 2 days ago
Each month, z/Action! meets some of the world's most innovative companies as they share how they're expanding horizons and driving success with IBM Z. This month we welcome ACI Worldwide, a leader in software for real-time electronic payments. Joining us is product director Ray Caradine. He’s here to talk about current trends in the payments landscape, and some of the experiences ACI’s clients have had processing payments on the IBM Z platform. Evolving the Payments Ecosystem with ACI Worldwide “Customers are demanding faster time-to-market, and faster responses. They want more flexibility in the way that they can process payments,” ...

Monitoring CICS and z/OS Connect workload: Deep Dive

By Aleksandr Charcikov posted 3 days ago
If you have a critical REST APIs for CICS applications using z/OS Connect and these mainframe applications might experience slowdowns and/or outages from time to time check out this deep dive video in how you can monitor your CICS and z/OS Connect workload and solve monitoring problems by using a combination of IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for JVM and IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS.

Now available! Tech Bytes - Virtual Technical Training Series. Learn and Earn Badges!

By Shalini Priyadarshini posted 3 days ago
Virtual Technical Training Series: Beginner to Advanced Presented by the IBM Z Washington Systems Center at IBM Did you miss TechBytes? Brought to you by the IBM Z Washington Systems Center, this series is created for you – whether you are a beginner or advanced. Broken up into one hour “tech bytes”, this series provides an opportunity for y ou to deepen your tech skills across IBM Z including z/OS Performance, Hybrid Cloud, AI on IBM Z, z/OS Communications Server, IBM Db2 for z/OS, IBM WebSphere and Liberty Server, IBM Z Hardware, and other core IBM Z subsystems. New for this series!! Attendees will be able to earn Tech Bytes digital badges ...

IBM awarded Technology Partner of the Year by Infosys Finacle: IBM LinuxONE aces next-gen banking

By Elisabeth Stahl posted 3 days ago
I had an English teacher back in school who was a super hard grader; if you got good feedback on a paper you knew it truly meant something. Recently I was walking my dog and wore a new fleece jacket - and a neighbor complimented the color. The last time I got a new haircut an acquaintance thought it was awesome. We all love validation, especially from a tough crowd. And that's exactly how I felt when I recently saw that IBM was awarded Technology Partner of the Year FY24 by Infosys Finacle. It's tough to get this type of prestigious recognition when there are so many great partners out there. In this case the winner ...

z/OS 3.1 4Q 2024 Enhancements

By Fiona King posted 3 days ago
IBM z/OS 3.1 was announced on August 8th, 2023 and made generally available September 29th, 2023. z/OS 3.1 intends to follow the traditional z/OS continuous delivery (CD) model by delivering new features and enhanced capabilities quarterly, which is intended to avoid the effort of a full release upgrade with no impact to stability, complexity or costs. The following enhancements have been delivered for z/OS 3.1 in 4Q 2024. Please note : These z/OS announcements will now be published on this z/OS Community page . To stay up to date, please ‘Join Community’ to ensure you don’t miss an announcement! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...

A Game Changing Series Table of Contents

By Alexis Ricci posted 3 days ago
A Game Changing Series - Cloud Data Access (CDA) Table of Contents: Part 1 Introduction to CDA Part 2 CDA Enhancements: New and Updated Keywords (OA65224) Part 3 CDA Enhancements: New and Updated Keywords Deep Dive Part 4 CDA Microsoft Azure Support (OA65925) Part 5 CDA Signed Payload Support (OA65989) Part 6 CDA Enhancements: Long Object Name, Text Conversions, Credential Management (OA65990) More content on the way!

IBM Champions Spotlight: Yasemin Ciftcisoy Sen

By Morgan McKeen posted 3 days ago
Yasemin Ciftcisoy Sen is a seasoned Z system programmer with over three decades of experience in the technology industry. She currently serves as the Z Cloud Middleware and Communication Technologies Manager at Garanti BBVA. If you were to ask about her favorite IBM product, she wouldn’t be able to pick just one. She’s a fan of IBM CICS TS, IBM MQ and IBM Omegamon , explaining that these products provide resilient environments for an online Z workload. As an IBM Champion for the past year, she has demonstrated her commitment to advocating for IBM products and the technology community through feedback, community involvement, and sharing her expertise. ...

Deploying AI models at scale on IBM Z with AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE

By Prashantha Subbarao posted 3 days ago
By Prashantha Subbarao , Andrew Sica , Pradipta Ghosh In November of last year we announced the AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE, which provides IBM Elite support for a key optimized set of open-source AI libraries and model servers. This offering is designed to enable enterprises to leverage these frameworks in production with confidence. Information about the offerings supported within the AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE can be found here . We are pleased to announce the addition of IBM Z Accelerated for PyTorch to the list of AI frameworks supported by the AI Toolkit. IBM Z Accelerated for PyTorch features the ability to exploit IBM Z ...

A Game Changing Series part 6 - Cloud Data Access (CDA)

By Andrew Wilt posted 3 days ago
A Game Changing Series part 6 - Cloud Data Access (CDA) CDA Cornucopia of Enhancements If you haven’t seen the rest of the Game Changing Series Blog posts you can check them out here to get a high-level explanation of CDA and the other enhancements! The CDA team has been hard at work, ignoring their Holiday preparations and instead, preparing a cornucopia of plentiful enhancements for you! 1 GDKUTIL Enhancements 1.1 Long Object Name One of the requests we’ve gotten is to allow continuation characters or some way to specify an object name longer than 72-80 characters long. Of course, you could ...

Nach der IDUG ist vor der IDUG

By Christian Lenke posted 3 days ago
IDUG ist nach wie vor einer der beliebtesten Treffpunkte, wenn es um Db2-Expertise geht. In diesem Jahr traf sich die Db2 Community abermals in großer Zahl, in Valencia. Es war begeisternd zu sehen, wie viele Teilnehmer wieder Lust auf einen Wissensaustausch zu Themen rund um Db2 hatten. Auch aus DACH (Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz) haben sich wieder viele Teilnehmer auf den Weg gemacht, um technische Neuigkeiten, Best Practices oder den neuesten Flurfunk aus erster Hand zu erfahren. Aber nicht nur als Teilnehmer, sondern auch mit eigenen Erfahrungsberichten und Präsentationen waren mehrere Kunden aus DACH aktiv beteiligt. Und schon mal ...

Macro 4: Our Open DevOps Journey (Part 3)

By Sarah Bowden posted 4 days ago
This blog post is by Michelle Harris, Senior Manager, Product Services and Development, Macro 4 Limited Macro 4: Our Open DevOps Journey (Part 3) This is the third and final article in the series in which I describe Macro 4's transition to a modern Open DevOps environment for the mainframe. In the second post, I explained how we initially adopted Eclipse and a variety of related tools and the challenges we had to tackle along the way. In this article, I'll explain how we have since switched to the VS Code IDE along with the likes of GitLab and Docker and to explain some of the advantages these solutions are delivering. I will also summarize our learnings ...

☁️ IBM Z & Hybrid Cloud: Powering Holiday Retail Success

By Jade Walker posted 4 days ago
During the bustling holiday season, IBM Z and Hybrid Cloud emerge as the backbone of retail success, ensuring seamless operations and customer satisfaction. Supporting Retail in the Holiday Season IBM Z's robust infrastructure and hybrid cloud capabilities have been instrumental in handling the increased retail demand during the holidays. From ensuring smooth transactions to managing vast data, IBM Z has been the unsung hero of this season's retail success. AI and Real-Time Integration The integration of AI and real-time data processing has transformed the retail experience, offering personalized customer service and efficient operations. IBM ...

Teaching JCL

By Paul Newton posted 6 days ago
The November Educator Hub lecture series included a discussion on teaching IBM z/OS JCL, Job Control Language. Download the presentation material using this hyperlink. Several points were stressed about teaching JCL: 1) JCL is NOT a language. 2) JCL enables location and loading of a program into memory for processing 3) JCL enables redirection of internal program 'file names' to z/OS managed resources 4) System utilities are NOT JCL 5) JCL just grew as customer needs appeared 6) JCL was a rather genius idea to allow for original mainframe architectural design concurrent with the design of many new peripheral I/O devices ...

IBM Z Backup Resiliency finishes the year strong with a major 2.1 release!

By Nicole Camara posted 7 days ago
We are so excited to announce the GA of IBM Z Backup Resiliency version 2.1! This has been a long-awaited release and includes key features that set the foundation for the future of resiliency within the IBM Z AIOps portfolio. IBM Z Backup Resiliency (IZBR) is an outstanding product that works to significantly enhance your organizations resiliency, while streamlining and automating key recovery processes. Looking at past and latest headlines, resiliency is a major buzzword we see all throughout the news. IZBR continues to eliminate resiliency barriers by offering a comprehensive view of your backup and recovery process, presented in a way that is easily understood, ...

Creating your first Python Container Image

By Steven Pitman posted 7 days ago
The IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python 3.13 is now available as a container image for z/OS Container Platform . With this, you can now run your Python workloads in a container. This blog will teach you how to run a sample Python script within a container. Prerequisites z/OS System with z/OS Container Platform installed An SMP/E license for the Open Enterprise SDK for Python and z/OSCP that come with their respective entitlement keys Entitlement keys should be found in the attached entitlement memos Obtaining the Python Container images To obtain the Python images, you can run the following commands: podman pull icr.io/zoscp/python:latest ...

Mainframes: Things you might not know about Informatica

By Philip Line posted 7 days ago
Digital data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. As organisations look to extract the full value of their digital data to help keep their businesses successful there is also the realisation of the spread of digital data; often making it difficult to identify or even extract. Digital data exists in pretty much every corner of every business – ranging from simple excel spreadsheets to mainframe-maintained data. Everybody knows that Informatica is a market leader in Data Management, as attested to by being leader in multiple Gartner™ “Magic Quadrants” for multiple years. However, did you ...

Fedora 41 released for IBM Z & LinuxONE

By Elizabeth K. Joseph posted 9 days ago
On October 29, 2024 the Fedora Linux community released Fedora 41, which includes support for IBM Z and LinuxONE. Congratulations to the Fedora community on release and the continued support for s390x, which has been included since mid-2011 with the release of Fedora 15. You can read the release announcement for Fedora 41 in Fedora Magazine here: Fedora Linux 41 is here! And visit Fedora Alternate Architectures for more on how to download the latest version for s390x, with more details outlined in the documentation under Supported Platforms: s390x . If you're interested in joining the Fedora Linux community for s390x, they have a mailing list ...

IBM Z AIOps Unite Beta Program

By Domenico D'ALTERIO posted 9 days ago
IBM Z AIOps Unite Beta Program is now open ! Mainframe operations teams are entrusted with ensuing complete business continuity, being asked to do more with less, all while the digital landscape produces more data, more events and more noise. Talking with our customers, we’ve identified their major challenges lie in quickly identifying the most critical alerts, validating the root cause of this disruption or sub-optimal performance, and having the right information or recommendations confidently take problem solving actions. Back in April (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ddalteri_ibmz-ibmz-zaiops-activity-7188874109420781568-PJeB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop), ...

New integrations help IBM Z work 'in concert' with cloud teams

By Andrew Bowker posted 9 days ago
A new path to resilient IT operations for mainframe and distributed teams? A familiar foe A Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report found that 89% of enterprises are using a multi-cloud strategy with technologies spanning across on-premises, cloud, and mainframe systems. This increasing complexity requires seamless collaboration across teams to avoid performance issues and security risks. But “seamless collaboration” is far from reality. It’s no secret silos between cloud and mainframe teams still exist for many IT organizations today. But why? If the problem were easy to solve through organizational structure, culture, and/or leadership ...