Leverage
by Hesh Wiener

Archimedes was talking about leverage, one of his favorite topics. He said, 'Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.' The Sicilian from Syracuse probably knew more about mechanical leverage than anyone of his era, which was the third century BC, but he didn't know about financial leverage. Some people are still finding out about financial leverage, particularly on Wall Street, and doing it the hard way. What they cannot learn from Archimedes they might try to garner from IBM, which looks like it knows a little more about the topic than most companies. READ MORE >

Top Mainframe Stories from Around the Web

(eWeek) Patrick Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, was one of the featured speakers at the 2007 VMworld Conference even though he admitted to predicting 20 years ago that the end was near for the mainframe. Oh, well, it's always been easier to find speakers than it has been to find accurate prognosticators. Undaunted, Gelsinger climbed out on the limb again by saying that virtualization, multicore processors, and X66 servers will finally drive the nail in the mainframe's coffin. READ MORE >

(ONLAMP) OpenLDAP compiles and runs on IBM's z/OS, as well as all the major systems. Some--like the author of this article, for instance--would say OpenLDAP is the most internet standards-compliant directory server available. And, without even pausing to take a breath, proclaim it to be demonstrably the fastest, most reliable plus the simplest to administer, integrate, and extend. READ MORE >

(Digg) The "Master the Mainframe" contest is under way once again. This is IBM's fun and games way of introducing university students, who presumably are clueless when it comes to the mainframe, to the goliath of enterprise computing. READ MORE >

(DMReview) To automate the gathering and viewing of statistical data from a production IMS databases, this data base administrator took a test drive with the BMC MAXM Database Advisor for IMS. Here's a quick snapshot of his assessment. READ MORE >

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

See our full calendar of events at
http://www.itjungle.com/big/big-calendar.html

September 17-19 -- Las Vegas, Nevada - The Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit puts the focus on building, implementing, and managing portals; leveraging social networking for collaboration; and the challenges and pitfalls of enterprise content management projects. There will be 30 sessions within four separate tracks, peer networking, product demonstrations, and distinguished keynote speakers. LEARN MORE >

September 17-21 San Antonio, Texas - The IBM System z Conference and Expo presents sessions on topics such as virtualization, security, resiliency, workload management, and integration. More than 350 in-depth elective sessions will highlight IBM System z9 and zSeries and Systems Storage. The sessions are divided into the following focus areas: General Interest and Management, z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE and Linux. LEARN MORE >

September 19 - Webinar - A session titled "Unlocking Legacy Applications" and hosted by Attachmate will emphasize the reusing of legacy assets by service enabling CICS applications. Customer experiences will be used to answer questions about the invasiveness of CICS services on the mainframe, MIPS usage, difficulties in integration, and the IT skillsets needed for managing these mainframe services. The session is being presented at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. EDT. LEARN MORE >

October 8-11 -- Orlando, Florida - The IBM WebSphere Portal Technical Conference will feature the latest product upgrades and platform extensions for the popular middleware. Among the highlights will be an emphasis on faster deployment of composite applications, enhanced Web 2.0 support, simplified portal-based solutions, and increased integration with business processes. IBM product architects and developers, business partners, and customers will provide training, case studies, and best practices information. Certification testing will be available and a vendor expo will be included. LEARN MORE >

October 15-18 -- Dallas, Texas - More than 140 educational sessions, plus networking opportunities with IT managers, storage architects, and infrastructure professionals, and a vendor expo are combined at Storage Networking World, an event hosted by ComputerWorld. Guest speakers include Frank Abagnale, fraud and identity theft expert; James Onalfo, CIO of the New York City Police Department; Steve Fastook, Vice President of Technical and Commercial Operations at CNBC; Brian Cobb, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Systems Management at Fannie Mae, Parker Mabry, Senior Vice President and Manager of Network Systems Engineering at Morgan Keegan; and Joe Lacik, Senior Vice President, of Information Services at Aviall Services. LEARN MORE >

December 2-7 -- San Diego, California - The 33rd annual Computer Measurement Group conference, CMG2007, brings together data processing professionals interested in system evaluation to maximize performance measured in terms of response time, throughput, and through capacity management. Sessions are geared toward making enhancements to existing systems or designing new systems with the aim of providing adequate performance at a reasonable cost. The courses are divided into two groups. One group consists of platform agnostic sessions and provides attendees with basic knowledge that is independent of any specific hardware or operating system. The second group is platform specific specializing in operating systems such as z/OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux. LEARN MORE >