Important Academic Mainframe News

By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

OS/390 MVS Maintenance scheduled

An MVS batch system upgrade is scheduled for July 12-13, 2001 on the Academic Mainframe partition. If all goes well, the batch system might be available by July 13, however, batch job processing also might be unavailable for that entire time period, and plans should be made accordingly. This upgrade is necessary under a contractual agreement with IBM in order to pay an additional licensing fee for the MVS Operating System. There are no operational changes anticipated in this upgrade. The VM/CMS (login) system will be unaffected by this upgrade and will remain available during the upgrade.

VM/CMS continues in the Fall

It appears that funding will be available next year to continue operation of the VM/CMS system. You may recall that IBM discontinued its Higher Education Software Consortium program under which we were licensing the VM/CMS software. IBM finally announced a replacement program and it appears that the new discount for licensing the software will be sufficient to allow us to continue use of that operating system and most of its associated software. Work continues, however, on identifying a replacement Administrative data systems processing platform. Since it is unlikely that the new platform will be an IBM Mainframe, it is likely that Mainframe services will be discontinued sometime within the next 2-3 years. Please contact me if you have any questions in this regard.