z/Journal & Mainframe Executive
IT-SENSE started as a column at z/Journal, then morphed into two columns when Thomas Communications launched a sister publication in the mainframe space, Mainframe Executive.
Here is a link list of almost all of the columns published to date in those books. We encourage readers of this blog to request their subscription to each of the publications, or at a minimum to add MainframeZone (the on-line presence for z/Journal and Mainframe Executive) to their favorites list.
For the latest issue, press HERE.
| Title | Excerpt | Author | Date |
| Enterprise Manager: Distributed Computing’s Last Stand | At CA World 2010 in Las Vegas in May, you would have needed to be both hearing and visually challenged to have missed the huge press around cloud technology that was being advanced by the firm’s management and evangelist types. CA, which is now re-branded as CA Technologies, is big… | Jon William Toigo |
08/11/10 |
| IT Sense: Great Symphonies Require Maestros and Virtuosos | When it comes to mainframe computing, business IT planners and practitioners alike confront a significant challenge that will require an industrywide effort to rectify. These planners have an affirmative view of the mainframe. They agree that it persists as a core platform for corporate computing. Its performance characteristics and cost… | Jon William Toigo |
06/21/10 |
| Enterprise Manager: The Sincerest Form of Flattery | Over the last couple of months, several announcements have hit the press from the big players in the distributed computing world. These announcements, in effect, establish proprietary technology stovepipes around specific application, hypervisor and operating system software—and branded server, network, and storage hardware—“stacks.” Some of these stacks have been built… | Jon William Toigo |
06/01/10 |
| Enterprise Manager: Old Dogs and New Tricks | Common wisdom in the industry holds that mainframe professionals comprise a demographic with an average age of 56. Ageism, therefore, probably plays a role in the perception of mainframers by senior managers, who increasingly make decisions about the future of corporate IT. As “isms” go, ageism is actually a neutral… | Jon William Toigo |
05/06/10 |
| May Mainframe Madness 2010 | I am involved in an upcoming virtual trade show event that I am very excited about. It’s called May Mainframe Madness 2010 and it is undoubtedly the largest virtual event yet for mainframers. Whether you’re an experienced mainframer, new to the field, or just curious about the technology there’s something… | Jon William Toigo |
04/26/10 |
| IT Sense: The Really Big File Server | According to some analysts, the quantity of file-based data produced by businesses exceeded the quantity of so-called “structured” data (industry speak for electronic information produced by databases) a year or two ago. The meaning of this change, they claim, is that files have become a bigger challenge for organizations from… | Jon William Toigo |
04/09/10 |
| Enterprise Manager: And Another Thing… | In 2009, there were quite a few “I told you so” bragging moments by many mainframe advocates. Contrary to analyst predictions, there was no millennium meltdown of Big Iron computing. There was, instead, a healthy recommitment to mainframes by many business and IT decision-makers who had long planned to decommission… | Jon William Toigo |
03/11/10 |
| IT Sense: Welcome to 2010 | The University of California at San Diego is the source of the latest installment of data points on the data burgeon. In December, they released the latest installment of the “How Much Information” study that has been refreshed several times since its inception in 1999. Back then, UC Berkeley started… | Jon William Toigo |
03/09/10 |
| IT Sense: Critical Convergence in 2010 | This has been an interesting year. In the business world in 2009, downsizing and rightsizing produced high “GDP per worker” numbers, suggesting that companies have shed all but the most productive people and are successfully running on much leaner operational models. As a corollary, mainframes have enjoyed a renaissance in… | Jon William Toigo |
01/19/10 |
| IT Sense: HIPAA, GLB, and SOX, Oh My! | Recently, at several client sites where my firm has been working, we noticed a cadre of IT folks—sometimes permanent staff; in other cases consultants and bodies for hire—have been pulled off other projects and assigned to find ways to put data right for regulatory compliance. Sarbanes- Oxley (SOX), Graham-Leach-Bliley (GLB),… | Jon William Toigo |
12/20/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: Are Vendor Ecosystems Dead? | The return of the mainframe to center stage is, in part, a reflection of just how far the distributed systems vendors have strayed from their original premise. Claiming that mainframe consumers were ill-served by single-vendor dominance in their computing infrastructure, the open systems advocates evangelized an ecosystem of component vendors… | Jon William Toigo |
10/08/09 |
| IT Sense: APP DEV/MAINT | To the unwashed, the cryptic title to this column is intentional: I deliberately used the popular abbreviations for application development and maintenance—APP DEV/MAINT—not to shorten the text to a Twitter-able size, but to immediately get to a point. We’re lacking comparative data to help illustrate something we intuitively already know,… | Jon William Toigo |
10/01/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: The Summer of IT | Call it the perfect storm. To the delight of the 24-hour news programs, there will be no shortage of big stories this summer. First on tap will be the debate over healthcare, razor-focused on spiking costs and the possibilities for new information technology to redress them. Next, we will begin… | Jon William Toigo |
08/20/09 |
| IT Sense: Power and Preparedness | Here in Florida, summer means two things: tropical heat and tropical storms. For three or four months, power and preparedness become front-of-mind issues. The power issue has three dimensions: cost, supply, and reliability. As in many other parts of the country, the price of electricity in Florida is accelerating.… | Jon William Toigo |
08/01/09 |
| IT Sense: Get Ready for the Regulators | You don’t need a political science degree or an MBA from Harvard to know that additional regulations, particularly in the financial industry but also for all publicly traded firms, will shortly pass the legislatures of most developed countries. Accountability and transparency are in; abstractions and derivatives are out. And, as… | Jon William Toigo |
06/23/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: Mainframe Wannabes | You can hardly pick up a trade press publication today without seeing a major technology vendor announcing a new computing platform aimed at improving resource allocation and utilization efficiency in distributed computing to “near mainframe levels.” In the past few weeks, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, EMC, and even IBM’s non-mainframe departments… | Jon William Toigo |
05/27/09 |
| IT Sense: Fun With Numbers | A couple of weeks ago, HP released a survey conducted by PSB Research that collected input from 490 business managers, CIOs, and IT managers around the world about their IT strategies. Here’s one of the findings emphasized in its accompanying press release: “[F]or one out of five technology executives in… | Jon William Toigo |
04/28/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: Think, Rethink | In early February, I spoke before a group of about 30 mainframers working for companies in the greater Los Angeles area. City government, healthcare, financial services, and many other vertical industries were represented in the group, which had convened to discuss mainframe storage management. The title of my presentation was… | Jon William Toigo |
04/02/09 |
| IT Sense: Re-Commitment ... to Common Sense | To hear IBM, CA, BMC and Compuware talk about it, 2009 is already shaping up to be a banner year for sales of mainframe wares. The favorite buzz phrase is “recommitment,” which is shorthand for a triad of corporate consumer trends that favor hockey-stick growth in the mainframe market. … | Jon William Toigo |
03/03/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: What Is Simplification? | This past November, CA joined the company of BMC and IBM with its own initiative aimed at simplifying mainframe operations and management. They called their strategy Mainframe 2.0 and, from every conversation I had with attendees at the recent CA World in Las Vegas, NV, the message resonated. Not to… | Jon William Toigo |
02/19/09 |
| Enterprise Manager: The Big Line Item | While in Boston last month, conducting a training seminar on business continuity planning, I was approached by a fellow from a large financial house who was delighted to hear my comments both on mainframes and on x86 server virtualization. He was concerned that the media hype around server virtualization, together… | Jon William Toigo |
12/11/08 |
| IT Sense: Innovative Mainframe Computing | When I was offered an opportunity a few weeks ago from CA to brief me on the latest release of its mainframe database product, IDMS—a database system that I knew in a former life as Cullinet—I took the meeting mainly out of a sense of nostalgia. I had much experience… | Jon William Toigo |
12/01/08 |
| IT Sense: Lost in Translation | With most of my six kids back in school, my role as homework consultant is again in full swing. The grade schoolers come to me with lists of vocabulary words to define, memorize, practice spelling, and use correctly in sentences. Meanwhile, my college-age kids call to discuss the finer points… | Jon William Toigo |
10/01/08 |
| Enterprise Manager: Addressing “Server in LPAR” Virtualization Issues | My May/June column discussed server virtualization using Logical Partitions (LPARs) on IBM z10 mainframes vs. VMware and other x86 virtualization products—a serious alternative strategy for very large shops interested in consolidating a lot of server sprawl. Overall, feedback was very positive. However, one email nagged at me. The writer, who… | Jon William Toigo |
09/17/08 |
| IT Sense: Don’t Be the Dupe | A short while back, IBM announced its acquisition of Diligent Technologies, a player in the data de-duplication space. De-duplication is a marketecture umbrella describing a range of technologies used to squeeze data so that more of it fits on a disk spindle—especially if that spindle is part of a Virtual… | Jon William Toigo |
08/01/08 |
| Enterprise Manager: People Count for More Than Budget | According to various analysts, the IT budget of a corporate organization hovers at between 3 and 6 percent of revenue—of which about 45 to 50 percent is labor cost. In today’s economy, that labor cost component stands out as a huge nail that every TCO analysis tool wants to hammer… | Jon William Toigo |
07/24/08 |
| IT Sense: Them Is Us | Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at a meeting of the Cleveland, OH-based IT user group, E-STORM. E-STORM is a pure grassroots effort that brings together IT professionals from every level of Ohio companies—from managers to storage administrators, and from mainframers to Web server jocks. The amazing thing… | Jon William Toigo |
07/01/08 |
| Enterprise Manager: Virtualize This! | Given the hype in the trade press, you would think that server virtualization is another “2.0” trend— like Web 2.0 or Infrastructure 2.0. Yet, the facts tell me a different story. At the high end of analyst estimates, only about 27 percent of companies are pursuing a server virtualization strategy—not… | Jon William Toigo |
06/04/08 |
| IT Sense: Context Needed to Drive z10 Choice | Like several thousand others, I made the trek to Orlando, FL, in February to attend the SHARE conference. In addition to the z10 mainframe announcement, which provided the overshadowing news, I observed some other things that stuck with me. First, the z10. The next evolution of mainframes in the… | Jon William Toigo |
05/06/08 |
| Enterprise Manager: Necessity Is the Mother of IT Innovation | Welcome to this inaugural issue. A few years ago, when the publisher decided to fill a void he perceived in the mainframe reporting space with z/Journal, many thought he was crazy. Analysts had been arguing the death of the mainframe for years, despite the fact that upward of 70 percent… | Jon William Toigo |
04/17/08 |
| IT Sense: Returning to Business Value Focus in Mainframe Computing | Mainframe computing is suddenly sexy again. Not in a hype-filled marketing sense, but in a very real and practical context. And it has been a long time in coming as time is measured in the Internet Era. To hear knowledgeable folks recount the story, the mainframe, with its homogeneous… | Jon William Toigo |
03/11/08 |
| IT Sense: Do Down Markets Drive Common Sense? | The financial news channels are filled with grim faces these days as hopes that “corrections” and “adjustments” are dashed by further evidence of a looming recession. The bears may be coming out of hibernation, but I, for one, am delighted. Here’s why. Profligate tech spending, throwing more capacity, bandwidth… | Jon William Toigo |
01/30/08 |
| IT Sense: Everything Old Is New Again | I thought of titling this column “The one and the many,” a reference to the time-honored problem in philosophy that was first explored, I believe, by Plato. Those of you with a background in liberal arts might recall the basic concept, summarized in the analogy of the cave: A… | Jon William Toigo |
10/10/07 |
| IT Sense: Green Rust | No fewer than five “Green IT” initiatives have been announced in the trade press over the past couple of months. Everyone who’s anyone in Silicon Valley, Denver’s Storage Suburbs, and the Boston-to-New-York tech corridor is signing up. Now, while I’d like to believe the technology vendors and large data… | Jon William Toigo |
09/01/07 |
| IT Sense: SOA: So What? | It seems everywhere I turn, there’s another story about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). What is SOA exactly? No one agrees. A definition put forth by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) offers that SOA is “a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be… | Jon William Toigo |
08/20/07 |
| IT Sense: Power Computing | Remember when we needed to carefully plan DASD utilization, lest we run out of floor space and need to build another building? Everything old is new again. This time around, the issue revolves less around space than around electricity. One thing that needs to be carefully considered as we… | Jon William Toigo |
05/01/07 |
| IT Sense: Order of the Day–-Encrypt Your Tapes | A quick consult with PrivacyRights.org is enough to give you a cold, sinking feeling in your gut about data protection. Leveraging public sources, the site operators maintain a log describing disclosure events involving private personal and financial data. As of mid-January, the total number of persons whose data has… | Jon William Toigo |
03/01/07 |
| IT Sense: Hurricane Season 2006 Ends | The 2006 hurricane season has drawn to an end. The failure of severe weather events to materialize (in the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts of the U.S, at least) has generated some disgruntlement among the talking heads in the media, who were all set with special graphic effects, theme music,… | Jon William Toigo |
01/01/07 |
| IT Sense: Whither the Mainframe | Last week, a friend, who was recently promoted within a leading software company to the role of product strategist, asked me, “When do you expect the mainframe to go away?” The scary thing is he asked it with a straight face. Even scarier were his job responsibilities, which include phasing… | Jon William Toigo |
10/01/06 |
| IT Sense: The Coming Crunch in IT Labor | A recent report from the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) in Oak Brook, IL, paints a bleak near-term picture about IT human resources. As baby boomers leave the workplace over the next six years, about 4 million of 21 million IT jobs in the U.S. will go unfilled. This prognosis… | Jon William Toigo |
09/01/06 |
| IT Sense: Fixing File Systems | It seems like a thousand years ago when file systems were first introduced as part of operating system software. Back then, designers made a few choices—predicated on the economics of storage at the time (primarily capacity and cost per KB)—that made sense then, but have come back to haunt us… | Jon William Toigo |
07/01/06 |
| IT Sense: On the Eve of Disaster | This issue of z/Journal will hit your mailbox well before June 1, a date that has significance in IT shops located in the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard regions of the U.S. because it signals the start of hurricane season. And from what the guys studying weather at NASA Goddard… | Jon William Toigo |
04/01/06 |
| IT Sense: Porous Software Is Key Security Threat | More and more analysts are reaching the conclusion that software exploits are the number-one security vulnerability confronting companies today. Most contemporary software is full of exploitable elements that can be used to defeat access controls and inject code that can corrupt or hijack data. The bad guys know it. The… | Jon William Toigo |
03/01/06 |
| IT Sense: Disaster Recovery Needs to Evolve | There have always been two camps in the business world relative to Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP): those who see the need to protect our most irreplaceable asset—data—and allocate time and resources to do something about it, and those who pay lip service to the need for DRP and make it… | Jon William Toigo |
12/27/05 |
| IT Sense: Words of Caution | A recent exchange with my father-in-law, Tony, who, before he retired, handled mergers and acquisitions (and sales and demolitions) of companies for a large Global 2000 conglomerate, provided the thesis for this month’s column. Tony gave me his two cents’ worth regarding one of my recent columns, which criticized a… | Jon William Toigo |
10/01/05 |
| IT Sense: Is Your Boss a Psychopath? | Recently, there have been a spate of articles in Time Magazine, Fast Company, and other popular publications discussing the same topic: the mental health of management. Time reported that one out of eight employees who exit their jobs in these challenging economic times are doing so because of the mistreatment… | Jon William Toigo |
08/01/05 |
| IT Sense: It Usually Works | Sometimes a road trip can give you a new perspective on things. Sitting in the office of the CIO for Argentina’s equivalent of the IRS and Social Security Administration (a combined entity called the Federal Administration of Public Receipts) a few weeks ago, it became clear to me that the… | Jon William Toigo |
06/01/05 |
| IT Sense: Software Rules | Recently, I was working with a hospital in Texas on its IT infrastructure strategy when one fellow complained that the vendor of his PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), which is used to manage healthcare medical imaging records, was limiting his choices regarding what server and storage products he could… | Jon William Toigo |
04/01/05 |
| IT Sense: Resolved—Build Sweat Equity Through IT Planning | Despite the fact that New Year’s Day is a rather arbitrary date on many business calendars, and many companies start their fiscal years in July or October, it’s still a time to reflect on what we have accomplished (or failed to get done) and to set objectives for the coming… | Jon William Toigo |
12/01/04 |
| IT Sense: Too Many Cooks | Just back from a consulting gig with a large Midwestern company, I got a first-hand look at a problem my mom used to refer to as “too many cooks.” I also saw what it takes to solve the problem: a true CIO. The company wanted to build availability and… | Jon William Toigo |
10/01/04 |
| IT Sense: IT Oversight Committees— Holding Our Feet to the Fire | Acursory scan of the headlines in IT trade press publications this month presents a pretty grim picture. In numerous state governments, CIOs have resigned or been fired amidst claims of rampant IT mismanagement, while the Government Accounting Office reports that more than $2 billion in IT funding has been wasted… | Jon William Toigo |
08/01/04 |
| IT Sense: Calculating ROI and Other Silliness | I have to confess that it peeves me when I receive an e-mail like the one that arrived in my inbox today. It came from a marketing person for a middle-tier IT vendor who was gloating over a just-released study that demonstrated how his company’s flagship product delivered “a whopping… | Jon William Toigo |
04/01/04 |
| IT Sense: Truth in Advertising | About every decade or so, there is a brief flirtation in this country with ideas like “open-door politics,” “government in the sunshine,” and “truth in advertising.” What happens, basically, is that an organization engaged in selling something—whether it be an idea, a political candidate, a product, or an image—discerns a… | Jon William Toigo |
01/01/04 |
| IT Sense: In Search of a Business Solution Integrator | Like most people, I’m a sucker for a compliment. So, when I received one via e-mail in response to my June/July column on “Ethical Computing,” I had no choice but to respond to the writer of those kind words. She wanted to know whether I had ever seen a job… | Jon William Toigo |
11/01/03 |
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