August 19, 2015

Minecraft on the Mainframe

LinuxCon video - Joran Siu

Joran Siu from the IBM Java team installed Minecraft Server on the mainframe. In this entertaining talk he shows the results and the optimizations used, some of them only available on zEC12 and z13.

August 18, 2015

Linux on System z - Financial Trading demo from LinuxCon


Donna Dillenberger is showing a pure open source demo on the mainframe combining all the new technologies like Spark, MongoDB, Postgres, MariaDB, Node.js, Docker, Chef etc.
It's using live analytics for streams from Twitter and S&P financial data, showing the power of realtime analysis on the mainframe.
She is also providing a look at the infrastrucure driving this and even shows a fail over from one site to another using Hyperswap.
Towards the end she is providing real performance data for some of the components used.
During this presentation your probably want to pause and playback to get all the information she packed into those 18 minutes. Here is a breakdown (minutes:seconds) for reference:
  • 0:00: demonstration
  • 7:48: a look at the infrastructure
  • 11:22: failover by killing one storage subsystem
  • 13:45: performance data
  • 17:00: agility & summary
(updated 8/19/2015)

August 17, 2015

LinuxCon announcements for Linux on z




Today IBM made some interesting announcements at LinuxCon. I'm going to cover more of the technical stuff in separate posts - this is for the overview.
(updated 2/12/2015)

August 14, 2015

Node.js 1.2 for Linux on z is available on developerworks

https://nodejs.org/


IBM has updated the Node.js environment for the mainframe (SDK) to the latest stable community release (version 0.12.7).  You can find it here on developerworks. Besides functional enhancements it also contains an important security update for openssl. The release notes and the updated documentation are also available.

The Linux on z Systems downloads are now also linked from the official download side at nodejs.org right at the bottom of the page.

August 12, 2015

International Oracle on z Systems SIG Conference 2015 - presentations available

The presentations and some demos from the recent conference are availble for download. Besides the general overview presentations, there have been a few more specialized ones this time:
You can also find the presentations from previous years on this site. 

August 11, 2015

Example for using Apache Spark on the mainframe


This YouTube video from Paul DiMarzio shows an interesting analytic example from the Hack Spark contest. Thanks Paul for creating this!

August 10, 2015

z/VM 6.3 achieves common criteria certification at EAL4+ level

Earlier this year z/VM 6.3 including SSI (single system image) has achieved the EAL4+ certification from the German BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik).
All z/VM certifications can be found at the "z/VM Security and Integrity Resources" site.

August 7, 2015

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 released

On July 22, 2015 Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 6.7. The kernel level is now kernel-2.6.32-573.el6, for the main bug fixes see the kernel update description.

As usual there are the release notes and the technical notes in two separate documents. The complete documentation can be reached from the Red Hat documentation page (you need to select "6" on the left bar).

For System z this has been a mainly a fix release. Only a few small enhancements have been added all described in the technical notes. Here are some of them:
The IBM documentation for RHEL 6.4 on developerworks still applies for this release.

August 6, 2015

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 (SLES 11 SP4 ) released

On July 16th 2015 SUSE has announced the availability of the latest service pack to their SLES11 distribution. This release is a maintenance release, keeping the major kernel version stable. Here is the usual collection of links: