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Tag Archives: Surprise

GIVEN WHAT HE TOLD A MARINE…..IT WOULD NOT SURPRISE ME

January 27, 2021   Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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Feline Surprise At The Bottom of Cup

January 8, 2020   Humor

Hello.

tzEbfUD Feline Surprise At The Bottom of Cup
“I feel much pain every time I fill this cup.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/vakcm.

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Quipster

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9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You

June 29, 2018   Big Data
9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You 9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You
Christopher Tozzi avatar 1476151897 54x54 9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You

Christopher Tozzi

June 28, 2018

How important are mainframes today? One way of answering that question is to take a look at some statistics relating to how mainframes are currently used. Keep reading for data points about the state of the mainframe today that you may find surprising.

1. 71 Percent of Fortune 500 Companies Use Mainframes.

More specifically, they use IBM Z systems. (Source.)

2. Mainframes handle 87 percent of all credit card transactions.

Did you buy something with your Visa or Mastercard today? More likely than not, a mainframe made it possible. (Source.)

3. Mainframes handle 68 percent of the world’s production IT workloads, yet they account for only 6 percent of IT costs.

That’s according to IBM, which obviously has a horse in the mainframe game, and it is unclear exactly how these figures were calculated.

But if we assume that these numbers are anywhere close to accurate — and we should because IBM is a pretty reputable company — they are impressive, especially for what they reveal about the cost-efficiency of mainframes.  (Source.)

4. IBM’s z13 system can support up to 10 terabytes of memory.

That’s 10,000 gigabytes, for those of you keeping track at home. I’d have to clone my personal computer 625 times to match that much RAM. (Source.)

9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You banner 9 Mainframe Statistics That May Surprise You

5. A z13 mainframe can survive an earthquake having a magnitude of at least 8.0 on the Richter scale.

How do we know? Because someone ran a test, complete with a video to prove the results. (Source.)

6. Mainframes handle 30 billion business transactions each day.

That’s a lot of credit card payments, stock trades, and other business-critical transactions. (Source.)

7. Revenue from z System sales increased 64 percent in 2017, compared to the previous year.

Yes, IBM continues to make a lot of money from mainframe sales. (Source.)

8. As of 2017, 92 of the world’s top 100 banks continued to use mainframes.

Sure, the cloud is great and x86 servers are cheap. But when you’re a bank with millions of transactions to process each day, and ultra-tight security needs, nothing beats the mainframe. (Source.)

9. The median mainframe programmer salary is about $ 73,000, according to PayScale.

That’s about $ 13,000 higher than the median salary for computer programmers in general, according to the same site. (Source and source.)

Download our eBook, Data Encryption in the Mainframe World, for even more on mainframes!

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Spray Can Surprise

May 21, 2017   Humor

Marble collection in the making.

MbanQOF Spray Can Surprise

“The ball in spray paint cans is actually a marble, am I the only one who thought it was metal?”
Image courtesy of http://imgur.com/gallery/MbanQOF.

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What Can You Do with Marketing Automation: Surprise! Its more than you think.

March 27, 2017   CRM News and Info
What Can You Do with Marketing Automation Surprise Its more than you think 351x200 What Can You Do with Marketing Automation: Surprise! Its more than you think.

Brand Marketing

Brand Marketing tasks and responsibilities can include public, press, analyst, shareholder, and influencer relations; corporate communications; social media; advertising; events and sponsorships; and content marketing.

Branding relies on strategically communicating your brand’s voice and positioning. It’s the promise you make to customers, and it needs to infuse every stage in your company’s growth and your customer’s lifecycle. Marketing automation helps you get your messaging out and keep tabs on how the market, press, and analysts engage with your brand.

Try these tactics for using marketing automation to achieve your branding objectives:

– Influencer Relations: Score press, analysts, and bloggers so you can see who your most engaged and interested influencers are. Be aware of the pages they visit on your site, what they’re interested in, and the emails (pitches, press releases, events) they are engaging with. Use this intelligence to prioritize who you pitch and what your talk track is.

– Press Release Attribution & Corporate Communication: Create trackable URLs for press releases to tie PR activity back to the lead-to-revenue process. Look at multi-touch attribution and how press releases contribute to the sale.  Create and execute internal newsletters, emails, etc., and track employee engagement. Identify and nurture prospective employees.

– Brand Identity Management: Make sure your brand is consistent across all teams and all channels. Control the visuals ‒ including brand look and feel, logo usage, and header/footers ‒ with marketing automation. Create approved templates, then distribute them in your media library for other marketing and sales departments to use.

– Event Management: Events are a huge investment – make the most of them!  Know who to invite, and manage all communications, before and after, with more precision and less effort. Create an automated workflow (save the date, official invite, seats are limited, registration responder, and reminders) to make it easy, then re-use and refine the workflow for the next event.

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The Self-Managing Mainframe and How Tipping Points Surprise Us

October 6, 2016   Big Data

The concept of a “Tipping Point” was introduced by Malcom Gladwell in his book of the same name. Gladwell defines a tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”.  The idea is that enough little things happen to add up to an irreversible change after which things happen more quickly and more visibly. Similarly, the recent announcement from Compuware about their partnership with Syncsort is a small step that is part of a bigger trend. It takes us nearer to the tipping point and the result may surprise us all. Let me explain.

For years now IT has been talking about advanced automation using goal seeking behavior. We have tried, event based automation, state based automations, policy based systems and autonomic computing; all attempts to reach towards the goal of a self-managing mainframe. IBM has often led the charge in these areas, at least in talking about them!  Their current approach is labelled “Cognitive Computing” and has been birthed out of enthusiasm for the Watson technology that has had some success and could now be applied to IT management scenarios.

The goal is always to reduce the cost and risk of manual interventions.  Given that computers can fly planes it does seem reasonable that computers should be able to operate computers.  Seems reasonable, but has so far been out of reach to us in the mainframe world! Although we do see “lights out data centers”, these are usually controlled by humans remotely more than they are by self-correcting automation.

The 44th episode of Star Trek was called the “Trouble of Tribbles” and is apparently one of the most watched shows. While they were annoying in many ways, the root cause trouble with Tribbles was the rate at which they multiplied which is the exact opposite of the trouble the IT industry has with the skills needed to manage the mainframe base into the future.

The Boomer-based demographics of the mainframe workforce has been viewed as a problem for over a decade now, but we have yet to address it effectively. The big software companies all have their graduate training initiatives and most companies using mainframes have been cross-training younger staff too. But the root cause issue is that mainframes are complex systems that are not easily understood at the level needed to manage them when things start to go wrong. The problems can multiply faster than your ability to fix them, if you lack the required experience.

On to the scene comes Splunk, the market leader in machine learning from IT log data. This now seems to be the right answer both to how we automate complex, interconnected systems and how we can pass the experience and knowledge of the Boomers onto the Millennial IT generation.

In practice Machine Learning is very different from what we usually think of as Artificial Intelligence.  AI seeks to build computer models that can emulate the functions of human brains. We expect that an AI would perceive its environment and exhibit goal seeking — purposeful behavior that is understood by humans. Ideally it would interact with humans to both receive input and augment our decision making abilities. By contrast Machine Learning is a sub-area of AI that is focused on pattern recognition that allows the system to “learn” and predict based on history, but without their being a rational explanation for that response that a human could understand.  Machine Learning relies on the consumption of masses of granular data that can be processed with statistical analysis to make predictions and uncover “hidden insights” about relationships and trends.  But these “insights” are not necessarily causalities that have an explanation that humans could understand and replicate.

Using machine learning, Splunk apps can peer into the soul of a mainframe in a way that point management tools can’t. The correlation of data from a broad range of sources both on the mainframe and from other platforms can allow the user to see the full context and interaction of events around a problem. Eventually this can lead to the self-healing, automation we have dreamed of.

Self Managing Mainframe Blog 10 5 16 The Self Managing Mainframe and How Tipping Points Surprise Us

Syncsort has been helping people Splunk their mainframes for over two years now and we have learned a lot along the way. Our Ironstream product can access machine data from almost any known source on the mainframe and there is gobs of it!  The data is transformed to be ready for ingestion by Splunk and users can filter what they consume to keep their ingestion based costs under control.

The users of Splunk solutions in general are Enterprise IT teams using data from as many platforms as possible in the quest for an end-to-end view of activity. There are several generalized uses cases from Security and compliance to IT operations and capacity planning. But the power of the Splunk Enterprise platform is such that each customer can build the solution they need very easily

With the addition of mainframe log data the Enterprise teams truly have the landscape covered and can visualize the key business services (e.g. online banking) with end to end monitoring. MF IT is beginning to see the power of this too now that their data is going into the pot.

Compuware’s first toe in the water with Splunk involves the ingestion of SMF records cut by Abend-Aid when an application, or other z/OS program abnormally terminates. The data represents critical fault management information that can be integrated into the DevOps cycle of continual improvement. With this data in Splunk users will have a historical record of faults with failure codes, causes and details about the code that has failed including the last compile date.  Special information is added when a CICS transaction abends recording the transaction ID, and caller details.

Talking with CEO Chris O’Malley about Compuware’s strategy, I expect to see more Splunk based offerings coming from them and Syncsort is certainly committed to helping them with these plans.

DH Blog 1 The Self Managing Mainframe and How Tipping Points Surprise Us

For at least 10 years the incumbent tool providers have talked about modernizing mainframe management. IBM has tried with its Tivoli strategy and CA Technologies tried with its now abandoned Chorus strategy. Numerous vendors slapped browser-based UIs on old technology.

It’s easier with hindsight to see why these tools failed. The “old guard” mainframe boomers just prefer the 3270 screens they grew up with; they can work faster with their incredible experience and years of using finger picking shortcuts.  Those new to the mainframe could rarely do their whole job on the new UIs which also didn’t simplify the task much anyway. The platform was still hard to learn and the new UIs actually ensured they worked slower than their mentors.  Bizarrely the most successful next gen mainframe workers were those that embraced 3270 copying those training them.

The promise of analytics based management tools takes a giant leap ahead and bypasses these points of failure. The new UI that modern IT workers expect is there, but the real point is that the task is transformed.

As the first industry solutions emerge we see that analytics based solutions complement the existing point management solutions more than replacing them. By gathering broad data to provide rich contextualization they will be useful to Mainframe IT, both old guard and new workers alike.  Compuware’s new free app that will collect and visualize application fault data gathered from Abend-Aid is an example of this. Bundled with the Ironstream product, Syncsort offers many other free visualizations of data sources like SYSLOG and RACF access violations.

As these next gen tools mature, progressive IT departments will tend to unify the traditional mainframe/distributed split and the MF IT teams will start to request functions that replace the old tools. They won’t replace them screen for screen and function for function, rather they will make functions obsolete because analytics based automation will increasingly make manual observation and intervention unnecessary and probably counterproductive.

I see a parallel with self-driving cars. Today they seem a bit fantastic and hard to trust. But I suspect we will adopt slowly at first until a tipping point when everyone realizes the technology has matured to the point that it is safer to keep people away from the controls.  When the tipping point is reached for this next gen mainframe automation I suspect that the analytics will be moved back to run on the Z platform somewhere. For a system as dense and powerful as a mainframe you want critical automation on platform. But for now the early tools will be where the action is and that’s on distributed Linux or cloud.

Similar in some ways to a “Tipping Point” is a “Paradigm Shift” as described by the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn, although the latter was describing major transitions in scientific frameworks. As the paradigm shift gets under way there is always resistance to change by the “old guard” until they are eventually overcome and they align themselves to the new order.

I am optimistic that MF IT teams will undergo a natural evolution of acceptance as the value is demonstrated. I suspect that the real resistance might be from the incumbent tools vendors who have not prepared for the changes and find that it impacts their business models.  Under O’Malley’s leadership, Compuware is clearly not one of these, but rather is seeking to be on the front-end, leading the way in applying analytics to a concept of DevOps that bridges mainframe to mobile.

Similarly, Syncsort seeks to play its role in the Digital Transformation by helping customers and vendors undergo the difficult transitions of the data driven economy. If you have a mainframe, let us know when you are ready for the next steps you need to take. Or experiment on your own by downloading a copy of Ironstream that is free to use with Syslog and Abend-Aid data. Good to get started soon, the self-managing mainframe will be upon us sooner than you think.

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Surprise!

December 17, 2015   Humor

Posted by Krisgo

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About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon icon smile Surprise!

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