Open Mainframe Project

John Mertic, Linux Foundation

Phil Tully, ADP *

Berthold Gunreben, SUSE *

Dale Hoffman, IBM *

Scott Fagen, CA *

Marcel Mitran, IBM

Larry Strickland, DataKinetics

Mark Wilson, RSM Partners

Harry Williams, Marist College

Glenn Everitt, Compuware

Len Santalucia, Vicom

Herbert Daly, University of Bedfordshire

(voting members denoted by asterisks)

Mr. Mertic opened the meeting at 1:05pm. Mr. Mertic presented the following agenda for the meeting:

- Update on OpenSUSE/LinuxOne usage for Open Mainframe Project

- Internship Review ( https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openmainframeproject/internprogram )

- TSC Projects review ( https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openmainframeproject/tsc/projectplanning )

Mr. Hoffman make it clear that we should try to vote on project to include today. Mr. Mertic indicated that this would be part of the ‘TSC Projects review’ agenda item.

Update on OpenSUSE/LinuxOne usage for Open Mainframe Project

Mr. Tully asked for an update from Mr. Gunreben on the ability for the Open Mainframe Project to leverage OpenSUSE and Mr. Williams if we could use the LinuxOne infrastructure. Mr. Gunreben had no updates with the holiday breaks, said he would define hardware requirements before the next TSC meeting and share it over the TSC email list.

Mr. Santalucia said Mr. Williams offered to provide hardware, and would work directly with Mr. Gunreben to get this going. Both Mr. Gunreben and Mr. Williams agreed to have an update before the next TSC meeting. Mr. Gunreben asked if other members could come forward with hardware and resources for the project to leverage.

Internship Review

Mr. Mertic presented the program from last time, and asked if there were any questions. Mr. Mertic also indicated that we need an internship program administrator, along with commitments from member companies to provide mentors.

Mr. Tully asked for someone from the academic community to step up to lead this effort. Mr. Daly stepped to lead the effort as the project administrator.

Upon a motion by Mr. Tully, and second by Mr. Gunreben, the TSC voting members unanimously approved the Internship program as presented by the draft at https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openmainframeproject/internprogram?rev=1452175826, and Herbert Daly to serve as the project administrator and as such a member of the TSC as long as the project remains managed by the TSC.

TSC Projects review

Mr. Mertic asked the group to re-review the project list (https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openmainframeproject/tsc/projectplanning?rev=1452175842 ) and determine which ones the TSC should charter to focus on in 2016. Mr. Tully said he would like to drive the group towards items that are fully open source, such as the OpenJDK and DockerHub content, which would require OpenSUSE environment to handle. Mr. Tully said that focusing on items without political challenges make the most sense.

Mr. Wilson left the call at 1:34pm ET.

Mr. Mitran said he was unbiased, and happy to see any of the projects included along with the group deciding which projects to include.

Mr. Santalucia agreed with focusing on those items that have minimal political challenges, and said focusing on microservice architectures also could be good in this context. Mr. Tully thanks Mr. Santalucia for this and said he would like to get more input from others on the call. Mr. Mitran said that microservices is a natural extension to the Docker item on the list. Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Santalucia said the monitoring tools are important ones as well, as not having the same ones what is on x86 ends up being a blocker for System Z adoption.

Mr. Hoffman said that he might have someone available through BountySource to handle the OpenJDK item, and said he would combine the Docker items into one and tackle. Would like to add Blockchain as well.

Mr. Mertic mentioned that the Linux Foundation just launched a Collaborative Project centered around Blockchain, and also manages projects around containers, both of which could provide opportunities to engage a larger community.

The group collective decided to focus on these large scale themes, and the individuals mentioned in parathesis volunteers to scope out the needs and effort more and come back to the TSC at the next meeting with a set of tasks for each area.

  1. Develop a JIT for OpenJDK - multiplicative effect of enabling a lot of other projects that depend on OpenJDK ( Dale Hoffman )

  2. Docker – ( Marcel Mitran / Dale Hoffman )

    a. Build up the docker-hub content for Linux on z (ClefOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu… )

    b. Enhance Docker to exploit LoZ capabilities/scale

    c. Develop a reference micro-service architecture on LoZ

  3. Assess and certify(?) popular Linux management tools for z Systems (e.g. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2683857/network-monitoring/article.html, https://blog.serverdensity.com/80-linux-monitoring-tools-know/) ( Scott Fagen )

  4. Blockchain performance (https://www.ethereum.org/) - ( Phil Tully / Len Santalucia )

The next meeting of the TSC was scheduled for January 21^st^, 2016 at 1:00pm Eastern Time.

Mr. Mertic closed the meeting at 2:08pm Eastern Time.