This is the first installment of an occasional series of posts in the run up to the launch of ChangeMan 8.1 later this year. As part of the routine pre-launch activities I’ll be chatting to the development team to learn about the cool features that have been added to this latest version.
ChangeMan ZMF is used by some of the largest mainframe development shops in the world. It is typical for these organizations to have hundreds of thousands of components managed and tens of thousands of components in motion. Keeping track of that requires the kind of sophistication and advanced capabilities that can only be found in ChangeMan ZMF.
Many of the largest customers in the world have the most complex and sophisticated release management problems and they make use of the Enterprise Release Option (ERO) of ChangeMan ZMF. Even though the mainframe has blisteringly fast performance, displaying a list of the 4,000 to 10,000 members of a release (typical for several ERO customers) could take a while.
In ChangeMan ZMF 8.1 the ERO process of selecting, searching and sorting lists has had a major overhaul. Where a list of a few thousand components might have taken several minutes in the past this has been reduced to mere seconds. This has been achieved through a number of thoughtful innovations in how we retrieve the information, how we cache it and how we present it. We have also optimized the access methods so only relevant items are retrieved in the first place.
New filtering capabilities also make it possible to really refine these lists to just what you need making the delivery times even faster. As Dave Banovetz, lead engineer on ERO said “the more defined your query the faster you get results.”
Due to several z/OS operating system constraints, it was common to maximize the storage utilization on these multi-thousand component lists. Again some very clever programming allows us to capture all the data and keep well short of these memory limitations.
To learn more about the new features and capabilities in ChangeMan ZMF version 8.1 please contact me.
