Selecting System z operating environments: Linux or z/OS? by Andrea Greggo
You may or may not find it surprising, but the mainframe today is an attractive option for many businesses. The current landscape is plagued with the growing costs and complexity of business computing. Client server architecture, which has been growing significantly for many decades, has become unsustainable in recent years and has impacted business strategy accordingly. This article offers an overview to help you determine where the mainframe might be the right platform for you, and whether you should deploy workloads to z/OS or Linux on System z. With an introduction to the multi-OS mainframe environment and a look at different customer scenarios based on various goals, you will understand how to select the strongest operating environment to meet your own goals. You will find that the actual answer might not be either z/OS or Linux on the mainframe, but a combination of both, since the strongest deployments are those where the strengths of the underlying operating environment are leveraged for the workload that needs it.
Read the article
Running and monitoring offline scripts in a Java EE environment using WebSphere Application Server by Tony Efremenko and Vikram Desai
Offline processing isn't strictly for mainframes. There are many cases, even in the Java world, where it makes sense to strategically schedule scripted processes to run at certain times or under certain conditions, rather than immediately as a direct result of user interaction. This article explains how to submit scripts from within a Java EE environment, and also looks at how security comes into play when running scripts on remote machines.
Taming the business and cultural challenges of a shared application infrastructure using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise by Nitin Gaur
An organization's move to shared resources can result in higher levels of value, service, and cost savings. It's also a cultural shift that aligns business objectives more effectively with IT operations -- and reduces the operational autonomy of individual development and deployment teams. This article looks at the business and operational impact of a shared infrastructure, and ways to approach the hurdles that can get in the way of achieving this environment.
Getting started with Lotus Forms in the WebSphere business process management suite by Dr. Johny Mathew and Billy Rowe
Traditionally, businesses use paper forms to convey information between people and other businesses. Paper forms organize data, have security features (in that they cannot be altered after signing), and are legally binding. The equivalent electronic form is known as an XFDL (Extensible Forms Description Language) form. The value of combining Lotus Forms (a Lotus Form is an XFDL form) and IBM business process management products is that you can automate your business process and provide user interfaces with electronic forms that are very similar to the paper forms your users are already familiar with. Lotus Forms can be digitally signed, move through a business process, and be stored to provide non-repudiation, enabling high-value, binding e-commerce transactions, without the drawbacks of physical paper forms. This article shows how Lotus Forms is integrated into the IBM business process management suite of products, describing four primary usage patterns. The pattern you choose depends on the artifacts that already exist and your preference for, or expertise with, a particular IBM BPM tool.
IBM SOA Foundation product integration:
Managing your WebSphere-based SOA solution by Rosalind Radcliffe and Andre Tost
As more companies are putting service oriented solutions (including a portfolio of services) into production, the role of managing of these solutions becomes increasingly important. This ranges from monitoring individual services with respect to their associated service level agreements and the discovery of "rogue" services that do not follow established protocols, all the way to the active management of an entire environment of applications, servers, and the networks that connect them. This part of our series on integrating products of the IBM SOA Foundation looks at how to manage a WebSphere-based SOA solution with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA.
