Selling Hercules

gshedloc@...

Nov 9, 2001

Has anyone successfully sold to management the concept of using Hercules
and an underlying operating system (either VM, VSE or OS/390) for
development, simulated production or disaster recovery? I am sure that
many of us would be interested in the methods used and the results that
they achieved. I am about to undergo this very adventure and am sure that
I will get only one shot at it. All help will be greatly appreciated.

George Shedlock Jr
Senior Systems Programmer
CIIS - Global Infrastructure
407 355-6722
GShedloc@...

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

6:00 pm

Re: Selling Hercules

Bodo Meissner

Nov 9, 2001

On Fri, 09 Nov 2001 19:00:48 gshedloc@... wrote:
> Has anyone successfully sold to management the concept of using Hercules
> and an underlying operating system (either VM, VSE or OS/390) for
> development, simulated production or disaster recovery?
..
> I will get only one shot at it. All help will be greatly appreciated.

I don't know if this will help you much because we (currently) don't want
to use one of IBM's OSs on Hercules. We convinced management to use
Hercules for development on Linux/390. (And they provided the money to
buy a PC dedicated for this task.)

My company produces a software product which is available for different
operating systems and platforms, among others Linux/x86. This product
should be available for Linux/390 in the near future. We did our first
tests on a real S/390 machine in cooperation with SuSE. The SuSE people
first introduced hercules to us and helped us to install it for the first
time.

IBM provides limited access to a S/390 system for Linux developers, but
this was not a good solution for two reasons. 1st: We don't want to put
all of our source code on this machine because we don't know how it can
be protected against other users or system administrators. 2nd: The
connection to this machine was slow and unreliable, so we were not able
to transfer large amounts of data.

I think it would be too expensive to buy or hire a real S/390 machine.
Since our company had no success in getting access to such system in a way
which ensures protection of our intellectual property, we will use a fast
PC running Linux with hercules for development and testing on Linux/390. It
was no problem convincing the management to agree because no better
solution was available at current time.

Reasons for the Hercules solution in our case were price, short term
availability and data security. Since we (currently) don't want to use
IBM's OSs there are no licensing or support problems and the only criteria
were cost and efficiency.

Bodo

8:16 pm

Re: Selling Hercules

Rich Smrcina

Nov 9, 2001

Now that's a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one! Would it be to early
to ask what software product you are porting?

Rich Smrcina
Sytek Services, Inc.
Milwaukee, WI
rsmrcina@...
rsmrcina@...

Catch the WAVV! Stay for Requirements and the Free for All!
Update your S/390 skills in 4 days for a very reasonable price.
WAVV 2002 in Cincinnati (Fort Mitchell, KY).
April 12-16, 2002
For details see http://www.wavv.org

One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bodo Meissner <mei@...>
To: <hercules-390@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: [hercules-390] Selling Hercules

> On Fri, 09 Nov 2001 19:00:48 gshedloc@... wrote:
> > Has anyone successfully sold to management the concept of using Hercules
> > and an underlying operating system (either VM, VSE or OS/390) for
> > development, simulated production or disaster recovery?
> ..
> > I will get only one shot at it. All help will be greatly appreciated.
>
> I don't know if this will help you much because we (currently) don't want
> to use one of IBM's OSs on Hercules. We convinced management to use
> Hercules for development on Linux/390. (And they provided the money to
> buy a PC dedicated for this task.)
>
> My company produces a software product which is available for different
> operating systems and platforms, among others Linux/x86. This product
> should be available for Linux/390 in the near future. We did our first
> tests on a real S/390 machine in cooperation with SuSE. The SuSE people
> first introduced hercules to us and helped us to install it for the first
> time.
>
> IBM provides limited access to a S/390 system for Linux developers, but
> this was not a good solution for two reasons. 1st: We don't want to put
> all of our source code on this machine because we don't know how it can
> be protected against other users or system administrators. 2nd: The
> connection to this machine was slow and unreliable, so we were not able
> to transfer large amounts of data.
>
> I think it would be too expensive to buy or hire a real S/390 machine.
> Since our company had no success in getting access to such system in a way
> which ensures protection of our intellectual property, we will use a fast
> PC running Linux with hercules for development and testing on Linux/390.
It
> was no problem convincing the management to agree because no better
> solution was available at current time.
>
> Reasons for the Hercules solution in our case were price, short term
> availability and data security. Since we (currently) don't want to use
> IBM's OSs there are no licensing or support problems and the only criteria
> were cost and efficiency.
>
>
> Bodo
>
>
> Community email addresses:
> Post message: hercules-390@yahoogroups.com
> Subscribe: hercules-390-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
> Unsubscribe: hercules-390-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> List owner: hercules-390-owner@yahoogroups.com
>
> Files and archives at:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hercules-390
>
> Get the latest version of Hercules from:
> http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>

8:42 pm

Re: Selling Hercules

Bodo Meissner

Nov 12, 2001

On Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:42:06 Rich Smrcina wrote:
> Now that's a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one! Would it be to
> early to ask what software product you are porting?

It's a software management product for large heterogeneous networks. You
can get some official information at www.asdis.com.

For our product the main difference between Linux on x86 and S/390 is the
contents of the /proc filesystem and output format of some commands which
are used to get information about installed hardware.

Bodo

8:17 am