Press Release
 

Mr. Chuck Arney
Arney Computer Systems
P.O. Box 382511
Duncanville, TX 75138

Telephone: 214-296-6166
Fax: 214-296-5468

New Product Announcement

Dallas, Texas, December 30, 1994 -- Today Arney Computer Systems announces the availability of its CMSACCess/MVS and CMSACCess/VSE software products. The CMSACCess system runs with the IBM MVS and VSE mainframe operating systems and provides direct access to data files stored in the VM/CMS file system. The standard MVS and VSE operating system access methods do not support the reading of data which resides on VM minidisks that are managed by the CMS file system. The CMSACCess software provides this long needed support to computer installations which store data under CMS and need access to the data from MVS or VSE. The data files may consist of user data records, program source code, JCL or any other type of information maintained under CMS.

Typically, when a MVS or VSE user needs access to data that is stored under CMS, the data is "punched" from the CMS minidisk into the VM spooling system. It is then transferred into a reader of the receiving operating system or it is transmitted through a teleprocessing network to the receiving operating system. Once it arrives, the MVS or VSE system must place the data into its spooling system from which a user program reads the data. This process requires up to five times the necessary I/O operations. CMSACCess can deliver the same data to an application program with a single pass of the data.

The CMSACCess system consists of a batch utility program and an Application Programming Interface (API). The batch utility can be used from MVS or VSE to print a listing of the files contained on a CMS minidisk, print a file that resides on a CMS minidisk, copy a file or group of files into a sequential dataset, or copy a file, group of files or an entire minidisk into an MVS PDS dataset converting each CMS file into a PDS member. The utility program also provides the ability to read JCL from a CMS minidisk and submit the job to the operating system for execution. The CMSACCess API can be called by user written application programs to provide direct access to the data stored under CMS. For the ultimate performance advantage, the CMS data can be directly read and processed by a user application without first copying it into an MVS or VSE dataset.

Additional facilities of the product include support for reading packed CMS files, an "Include" file facility, support for placing minidisks into a Data Space, and an interface to external security managers.

By default, when a packed file is processed by the batch utility program or the API, it is returned in its unpacked format. API users can prevent the automatic unpacking if desired.

CMSACCess provides an Include facility which allows a control record (known as an include trigger) to be placed into a CMS file. The control record specifies the name of an additional CMS file that is to be inserted into the original file in place of the trigger record. This facility can greatly reduce the amount of duplicate data stored on a minidisk. Instead of entering the data each time it is needed, it is entered into a single file and that file included by other files when needed. CMSACCess automatically expands included files. The include file trigger string may be modified by the user if desired.

Users of MVS/ESA and VSE/ESA 1.3 and above, may have CMSACCess place the files of a minidisk into a Data Space. Thereafter, when a file residing on the disk is read, its data is taken from the Data Space instead of requiring a DASD I/O operation. This can provide CPU speed access to often used data.

CMSACCess understands the importance of security in today's computing environments. An interface is provided to external security managers such as IBM's RACF security product. Data Centers may implement any required security policy. Their installed security product can be used to verify data access before CMSACCess makes the data available to the requester.

CMSACCess also provides a facility that allows it to be interfaced with other software packages, such as job scheduling systems. The facility allows CMSACCess to operate as an exit from scheduling systems, or other software, so that JCL can be read from CMS minidisks and given to the job scheduler for submission to the operating system. Using this facility can provide an impressive boost in job submission performance when the JCL resides on a CMS minidisk or a minidisk which has been placed into a Data Space.