z14

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS beta is available for z Systems

Canonical made the beta of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 distribution available. So feel free to download and try.

SHARE 2016 San Antonio

Last week I'be been at SHARE in San Antonio. There was a good turnout and lots of good discussions. Here is the complete agenda. I've already blogged about the best session. Here are a few more:

• Introduction and Positioning of KVM for IBM z Systems
• KVM Concepts and Components for z/VM Lovers
• What's New in the z/VM Hypervisor
• How Do You Spell SMT on z/VM?
• A Look at SMT Performance
• What's New in Linux on z Systems?
• Docker and z Systems
• Linux Performance Tools in 60 Minutes
• z13 Performance with Linux - A One Year Journey

Best session at Winter SHARE 2016: "I Just Bought an IBM z890 - Now What?"

Today at SHARE I had the remarkable experience to listen to a session Connor Krukosky. He's a 18 year old student that bought a z890 on eBay. Here is his story. The first operating system he got running was Linux. Some of the stumbling blocks (e.g. writing a IOCDS) he mentions reminded me from the time 17 years back, when I learned the same things the same way. SHARE has recorded the session. The video is now on YouTube:

(updated 3/29/2016)

How long is a mainframe in service?

One of the really nice things about Linux on z is the fact that the underlying hardware has a long life. This means that for complex software solutions that need extensive and expensive testing you can keep the system going over a long time period. The Linux distributions on the mainframe are supporting this model with their long term support contracts.

But how long can you get service? There is a now updated summary presentation out on TechDocs called "IBM Mainframe Life Cycle History" (PPT, PDF). It has a nice overview chart which gives the answer to this question: the average support cycle over the past 21 years has been 11.3 years!