SYSB-II white papers

In this first CICS report in three years, see what the data from the recent Enterprise Tech Journal survey reveals about the state of CICS today – its importance, uses, and future, as respondents envision it. The report also analyzes the relationships between CICS and its crucial data sources to discover how those relationships are changing. See comparisons with previous surveys to detect trends and determine if past predictions came true. How does your organization compare?

When organizations with VSAM-reliant CICS applications want to move toward around-the-clock availability with minimal downtime, they sometimes evaluate VSAM RLS as a solution. Depending on the cause of the downtime, VSAM RLS might or might not be the answer. This series of briefings discusses when VSAM RLS can help with downtime, and when it can’t.

What are the alternatives for making VSAM data available to batch and CICS at the same time? This white paper provides an overview of the approaches such as SHAREOPTIONs, VSAM RLS, TVS, and one that allows CICS to have full access to VSAM files while batch runs.

Mainframe data still drives the world's information systems. Unlocking this data, keeping it available, and maintaining its integrity in a cost effective way is a pressing business challenge. One of the more common mainframe data scenarios involves CICS applications that require VSAM data.

While companies have to run batch in order to provide up-to-date information to online users, the traditional batch process still leaves those users without full access to VSAM data. Companies have reduced the batch window and forced batch updates to late-night windows when demand is low. But application downtime or limited access due to batch continues to affect users and other systems that rely on VSAM data.

In this white paper, you'll learn about some of the conventional approaches such as SHAREOPTIONs, VSAM RLS, and TVS, to solving the limitations of the batch window. This installment also discusses a solution that eliminates underlying batch conflict issues to deliver true data availability. VSAM files are shared inside of CICS, making batch jobs appear like any other online transaction, so CICS continues to have full READ/WRITE access even during batch. From the series Concurrent VSAM access for batch and CICS.

When CICS applications that rely on VSAM data are offline or relying on outdated VSAM data due to batch processes, productivity stalls, crucial information is unavailable, and decisions are delayed. This white paper explores issues relevant to batch and CICS file sharing and the Transactional VSAM (TVS, or DFSMStvs) solution.

You'll see how TVS works, the benefits, and the issues to consider. Read this guide if you are considering TVS or other solutions for concurrent sharing of VSAM files between CICS and batch processing. From the series Concurrent VSAM access for batch and CICS.

This white paper explores issues relevant to sharing VSAM files between CICS and batch using the VSAM record-level sharing (RLS) method.

VSAM RLS was designed to enable VSAM files to be shared with full update capability between many applications running in many CICS regions. Read this white paper for a more detailed look at this solution and the changes required to use files in VSAM RLS mode for batch and CICS processing. From the series Concurrent VSAM access for batch and CICS.

In this white paper, you'll review the concept of concurrent VSAM file-sharing, which creates a virtual processing window in CICS. By sharing VSAM files between CICS and batch from within CICS, you can rely on the strengths of CICS and avoid the pain that can come with other methods of sharing.

You will read about the concepts that underlie this type of solution and the issues to consider with any method of sharing VSAM files. These topics are architecture; performance, reliability, and scalability; recovery; and CICSplex and sysplex scalability. From the series Concurrent VSAM access for batch and CICS.

As processor speeds reach the physical limits of current technology, organizations will no longer be able to upgrade hardware to improve performance or accommodate growing workloads that need to be processed in the same amount of time. One way to improve performance is through parallelism. However, parallelism is not inherently compatible with the linear nature of batch, a problem that many datacenters worldwide will need to address.

This series of briefings discusses the basic concept of parallelism and how it can be applied to environments with batch and CICS to improve performance. See the native ways to improve batch, CICS-related methods, and how VSAM RLS can add another layer of performance enhancement.