What we do: Mainframe Services provides technical
support for UC Berkeley production applications, QA and testing.
Applications that run on the mainframe: Human
Resources (HRMS), Berkeley Financial Systems (BFS), UC Berkeley Payroll,
Student Information Systems (SIS), Student Financial Aid (FAO), Office
of the Registrar (REG), Accounts Receivable (CARS).
Who we are: Mainframe support personnel are
typically referred to as System Programmers or SYSPROGS. In the UNIX
environment we are analogous to system administrators or SYSADMINs. Our
team consists of:
How we can be contacted:
Some information about UC Berkeley’s Mainframe system:
- Model – IBM z9-Business Class 2096-U03
- Processing capacity – 770 Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS)
- Memory Capacity – 16 Gigabytes (GB)
- Chip speed – less than 1 nanosecond cycle time
- Disk Storage Capacity – 15 Terabytes (TB)
- Operating System – IBM proprietary (z/OS) Version 1 Release 4
Major Software:
- DB2 Version 8 – IBM flagship Database
- CICS Versions 1.3 and 3.1– IBM Customer Information Control System - User interface to DB2
- CONTROL-M – BMC Automated work scheduling
- ACF2 – Computer Associates Access Control Facility – Security
- DBS – OpenTech – Software for creating backups of vital system and application data as part of UC Berkeley’s Business Resumption Services (BRS) plan. BRS is also know as disaster recovery.
- VPS – Levy,Ray,Shoup – VTAM Printer Support – provides secure printing of all reports generated on the mainframe and routed to network printers. Also provides a web-based report browsing feature (Page Center).
- Syncsort – A highly efficient sort utility program from Syncsort Inc.
Scheduled Maintenance:
- Outages are scheduled for the third Sunday of each month between 6am and 12 noon.
- Outages usually, though not always, include an IPL or Initial Program Load. IPL is the procedure that causes the IBM proprietary z/OS operating system (analogous to unix, linux or possibly windows/dos) to be loaded from disk into hardware memory and begin operation.
- The operating system is software that controls the running of programs; in addition, an operating system may provide services such as resource allocation, scheduling, I/O control, and data management.
- Many functions of the IBM mainframe and the z/OS operating system that controls it are designed for dynamic updating. And with 30 plus years of design improvements to the hardware and operating system, reliability and availability ratings are the highest in the industry. As a result we are able to plan for most outages.
The remaining scheduled outage dates for 2008 are:
- No outage scheduled for June
- July 27
- August 17
- September 21
- October 19
- November 16
- December 21
The projected scheduled outage dates for 2009 are:
- January 11
- February 8
- March 15
- April 19
- May 17
- June 21
- July 19
- August 16
- September 20
- October 18
- November 22
- December 20
